Over the years, I have spoken at many international coaching conferences and been struck by the number of coaches eagerly searching for new tools and methods from the panoply of workshops on offer, while ignoring the most important tool and resource they need for their work, namely their own self.

All leadership happens through relationship, and the same is even more true of coaching. “It takes two to tango” and “it takes two to coach.” Rather than think that as coaches we are coaching the client, it would be better to think of how we are doing the coaching in partnership between the coachee and coach, facing the challenges and lessons that life is providing for the client. This requires us to listen, not just with our ears and our neocortex, to understand cognitively what the client is relating to us, but also to listen with our whole body, to listen verbally and non-verbally, to the lyrics and the harmonics, to what is in the story and in the room and what is excluded, not in the room, but needs to be invited in. This may include the wider stakeholders of the client, needs from the future, or shadow aspects of the client. As coaches, we need to be resonating echo chambers that are finely tuned to the faintest of signals, both from the client as well as from their wider stakeholder ecosystem. This requires a lifetime of practice, supervision, and discipline, where we not only develop a depth of empathy and compassion with the individual client, but also “wide-angled empathy” for every individual, team, and system in their story (Hawkins, 2018).

It is with this in mind that I was delighted to receive and read Pam McLean’s latest book, in which she generously offers her long experience of coaching, supervising, and training coaches, to how we can use all of our self, in service of the work of coaching others. She offers not only powerful disciplines and practices we can use to regularly tune up our self as instrument, but also stories from her own life’s journey and vignettes of work with clients, illustrating how she has applied her deepening sensitivity. This weaving by Pam of the various strands illustrates how coaching is not something you can just learn in an initial training and then apply, but rather a lifelong action learning journey, where the challenges and learnings that are brought to you by your clients, if attended to with quality reflection, deepen and hone your practice, help you unlearn your previous models and assumptions, and deepen your self as instrument in service of others.

Pam McLean has been a beacon in the American coaching landscape, quietly showing how quality supervision is essential in this lifetime journey of deepening your self to deepen your coaching. For many cultural, political, legal, and historical reasons, the United States has been slower than many other parts of the world to adopt and develop the importance of lifelong learning and supervision for coaches (Hawkins & Smith, 2013; Hawkins & Turner, 2017). The Hudson Institute of Coaching in Santa Barbara, which Pam leads and where she teaches, has not just built supervision into all their training courses, but has also developed a supervision and lifelong learning ethic into their alumni community. In this book, in her own quiet and clear way, Pam provides a whole book showing the essential ingredients of our internal landscape, which details the qualities we need to constantly refine and deepen to be an effective coach. She shows that to develop these qualities requires more than self-reflection; the mirror, echo-resonance, support, and challenge of others and particularly trained supervisors who are further down the path than ourselves is an important component, as well.

I would recommend this book to all coaches, wherever they are on their coaching journeys, for even those of us who have been coaching for many decades need to have a beginner’s mind that is learning afresh with each client relationship and a practice of daily tuning of the instrument of our being to deeper and more subtle levels of receptivity and resonance.

Professor Peter Hawkins

Author of Leadership Team Coaching and many other coaching and leadership-related books

The Completely Revised Handbook of Coaching was written in 2012. This is where Self as Coach was first written about. Until then, we had regularly referred to the concept of going deeper and attending to what’s beneath the surface in order to create the conditions for real change to occur, but until 2012, it was an amorphous concept. In the intervening years, I have used Self as Coach in my work at the Hudson Institute, training coaches and coach supervisors. This has given me the opportunity to research and test the efficacy and value of the model. Through time, experience, and study, the model has evolved in some important ways: I have broadened and deepened the dimensions, acknowledged the interplays and overlaps, and emphasized the fluidity of the model from interaction to interaction.

Our findings provide ample evidence that there is real value in providing coaches and leaders with a simple path into exploring one’s internal landscape. This landscape accentuates the reality that our ability to use our “self” as the most important instrument in our work is paramount. As coaches and leaders, we need a roadmap that allows us to combine our horizontal and vertical development. We need a means to make the very best use of our self as our most important resource when working in this highly charged relationship domain.

Of course, it’s impossible to write a book exploring one’s internal landscape without paying attention to my own changing landscape. I have sought to use my reflections and experiences in a transparent way in this book in order to provide a personal voice that might breathe life into these concepts in ways that are useful to the reader.

My goal in writing this is simple: to help us, as coaches and leaders, make the leap from good enough to truly great—coaches and leaders who are able to understand our inner gifts and the challenges in the service of building breadth of capacity. We need this breadth to meet the broad spectrum of issues and challenges confronted by the leaders we coach. Well-honed skills, soaring IQs, and impressive credentials are insufficient for us to do our best work. The ability to create the conditions to explore what’s below the surface provides the possibility for deeper change to occur: change that transforms us as leaders and allows us to do our best work.

Writing a book is in the domain of deep work—a solitary, maddening, and joyful undertaking. Yet, it is never created in isolation. This book represents the work and influence of many people and the most important contributors are the hundreds and hundreds of leaders and coaches I have had the privilege of working with over the past 30 years. Everything I have learned from them is the impetus for this work and what makes it possible.

I am most appreciative to all those who read parts or all of the manuscript and provided feedback that both challenged and affirmed my thinking along the way: Toni McLean, Bev Kaye, Pat Adson, John Schuster, Steve Milovich, Tom Pollack, Ana Pliopas, Leslie Goldenberg, and Bill Lindberg.

To everyone at Wiley who helped make this possible—Jeanenne Ray and Vicki Adang—thank you for believing this subject is an important one! To my talented development editor, Nat Chen, who is masterful at her craft. I am grateful she was willing to travel with me on yet another book project. My work is simply better in every way because of her. To Amy Detrick, who created all of the illustrations, I owe you a special debt for making the book more meaningful and approachable.