CPD Programme — 20 ICF CCEUs
Being With:
Letting Go of Coaching
Phenomenology and the Art of Presence
“Coaching is an invitation to slow down, press pause, and uncover what wants to emerge.”
You came into coaching because you believed in the power of genuine human connection. You trained hard. You learned to listen deeply, to ask the questions that open things up, to hold space for people in ways that matter. To be supportive, empathetic, and hold unconditional positive regard for those you work with.
And somewhere along the way, you may have noticed something. A moment mid-session when the framework doesn’t quite reach what’s really happening. A client who ticks every goal-setting box but something essential remains untouched.
A nagging sense that your presence — who you’re being, not what you’re doing — matters more than any technique you’ve learned. But nobody’s really teaching that.
You’re not wrong about that sense.
The Question
What if the most profound thing you can offer a client isn’t a better question or a sharper framework — but a quality of presence they rarely encounter anywhere else?
Most development and professionalisation of coaching is organised around competency. Learn the skills. Demonstrate the behaviours. Collect the hours. And there’s real value in that — it produces capable coaches. However, a rigorous focus on competency brings standardisation. Standardisation is a pathway to commoditisation. This pathway then leads to capable and competent AI coaching platforms.
But this approach also carries an assumption so deeply embedded we rarely stop to examine it: that coaching is fundamentally about helping clients change. That the coach’s job is intervention — a skilled practitioner moving someone from where they are to somewhere better.
What if that assumption is exactly what’s getting in the way?
What if coaching, at its deepest, is less about technique and more about dwelling — genuinely being with another person, without agenda, in a way that creates conditions for something to emerge that neither of you could have planned?
This isn’t a new framework. It’s a fundamentally different way of understanding what coaching is. It’s grounded in phenomenology — the philosophical tradition that asks not what should we do but what is actually happening here, right now?
The Programme
Being With is a 20-hour CPD programme for practising coaches — experiential, philosophically grounded, and unlike anything in mainstream coaching development.
It won’t give you new tools to apply. It won’t add another model to your toolkit. What it will do — if you stay genuinely open to it — is invite you into a different way of being with clients.
And from that shift in presence, something different becomes possible in your coaching. Not because you’re doing anything differently. Because you’re being differently.
Each session follows a consistent rhythm: experience first, philosophy as illumination, discussion as integration. You won’t be lectured at. You’ll be invited in.
SESSION 01
The Ground We Stand On
The assumptions shaping how we coach before we make a single intervention — made visible, without rejection.
Descartes · Husserl · The natural attitude
SESSION 02
The Body Knows First
We are not minds managing bodies. What becomes available when a coach takes embodied knowing seriously?
Merleau-Ponty · Embodied presence
SESSION 03
The Between
There is a field between coach and client that carries meaning neither creates alone. This session learns to attend to it.
Schutz · Intersubjectivity · The we-relationship
SESSION 04
The Stories We Live In
Clients perform their past into the present through language, closing off futures through the very act of speaking.
Schutz · Austin · Speech acts · Biography
SESSION 05
Dwelling as a Way of Being
Not a conclusion — a threshold. Everything that’s emerged settles and points forward into ongoing practice.
Heidegger · Meditative thinking · Dwelling
What’s Involved
A journey, not a course. Five sessions across several weeks, with spacious time between.
Phenomenological awareness doesn’t develop through intensive workshops. It sediments slowly, through repeated encounters with what’s present, over time. The programme is designed to honour that.
Between each session, you’ll be invited into reflective practices — listening to music, attending to your body in everyday encounters, noticing language in your coaching. Nothing prescriptive. Simply an invitation to keep noticing.
Live sessions
2.5 hours each, delivered online via Zoom. Small cohort — this is relational work and group size matters.
Between-session practice
Spacious, experiential invitations to carry the work into everyday life and coaching — not homework, but dwelling.
A companion workbook
Sparse and uncluttered — designed for dwelling rather than note-taking. Yours to keep.
20 ICF CCEUs
Approximately 17.5 CC hours and 2.5 RD hours, awarded on completion of the full programme and subject to ICF approval.
Is This For You?
This programme is for you if
You sense that something important is missing from mainstream coaching development
You’re a practising coach who’s willing to have your assumptions gently disrupted in pursuit of something more real. You don’t need any prior knowledge of philosophy. You need curiosity, openness, and a willingness to slow down.
This programme is not for you if
You’re looking for new models, frameworks, or techniques to add to your practice
This programme deliberately moves away from that territory. If you arrive expecting a new toolkit, you’ll be disappointed — and that honesty is itself part of the invitation.
The Facilitator
Stephen
Coach & Coach Educator
Stephen is a coach and coach educator whose work sits at the intersection of phenomenological philosophy and coaching practice. He has spent years asking the question that underlies this programme: what does it mean to be genuinely present with another human being — without agenda — in a way that creates space for something real to emerge?
Being With is the result of that inquiry. And an invitation to explore it together.
Pilot Cohort
A closed pilot group, now forming
The first cohort of Being With will be a small, closed pilot group of 6–10 coaches, offered at a significantly reduced investment.
In exchange, pilot participants are asked to engage genuinely with the programme, offer honest feedback on their experience, and — where it feels authentic — advocate for the programme among their coaching community once it opens more widely.
If the programme speaks to something you’ve been sensing, I’d love to hear from you.
What we’re asking of pilot participants
Full engagement across all five sessions and between-session practices. Honest, reflective feedback on your experience. Where it feels authentic — sharing the programme with coaching colleagues who might be ready for it.
Being With: Letting Go of Coaching
20 ICF CCEUs · 5 × 2.5 hours · Online