This reflection from a Newfield graduate captures something many of us have witnessed but struggled to name: the internal unraveling that occurs despite visible success. On the outside, a leader may appear to be thriving. Their actions align with strategy. Their results speak for themselves. But internally, they may be quietly collapsing or struggling to sort out the timeless question: Who am I, Why am I here, and How do I be human in a way that matters.
In a recent panel of Newfield graduates, this paradox was explored through the lens of ontological coaching. What emerged was a clear message: even the most competent professionals can be undone by the unseen battles within. And coaching that focuses solely on performance misses the deeper work.
From Doing to Being: The Shift in Coach Training
One panelist offered a powerful distinction that echoes across coaching conversations: coaching involves both doing and being.
The first domain, doing, involves structures, processes, and accountability. It’s the realm of strategy, execution, and metrics. Coaches in this space help clients implement change and reach goals.
But the second domain, being, is often where transformation truly happens. It’s about who the client is while they act. It’s about the emotional, somatic, and narrative elements that define their lived experience.
“How are you being while you’re doing?”
This simple question reframes coaching as more than performance enhancement. It invites exploration into the internal stories that shape external results.
The Invisible Challenges: Inner Critics and Impostor Syndrome
The panelists named familiar adversaries: the inner critic and impostor syndrome. These internal voices distort perception, erode confidence, and often surface precisely when everything seems to be going well on the outside.
Our ICF-accredited coach training programs support students in recognizing and shifting these internal dynamics; not only in others but in themselves. This helps us change our relationship with our inner landscape that supports a new posture of self-understanding—a new way of being. This sense of being becomes the ground from which we act.
A Coach’s Journey to Depth
One Newfield graduate, with a background in corporate and high-tech spaces, shared how they initially offered action-based business coaching. But something was missing.
“I was helping, but it didn’t feel deep enough. I needed the depth. I was craving the depth to help people at a deeper and more core level.”
This craving led them to Newfield, where they encountered a methodology that honored the full human experience: language, emotion, soma, culture, history, and wholeness. It was here that they discovered coaching as a transformative tool.
What Whole-Person Coaching Looks Like
This training introduces what coaching the whole person looks like and supports participants to discover many lesser-known aspects of the self, and learn how these key domains impact who we are and how we engage with the world.
For example:
- A high performer overwhelmed by burnout learns to listen to their body’s signals and make meaningful changes.
- A leader crippled by doubt begins to explore their inner narrator and tools to transform this into a voice of wholeness.
- A manager navigating conflict explores inherited beliefs about power and worth
These are ontological shifts arising with a change in how a person understands themselves and their world.
Coaching in Cultural and Emotional Context
Ontological coaching invites us to see people not just as individuals, but as carriers of culture, history, emotion, and inherited meaning. Every conversation holds echoes of the environments we’ve come from—family systems, social norms, cultural assumptions, and historical experiences. These influences live in the body and shape how we act, feel, and make sense of the world.
In our coach training, we encourage students to become curious about these deeper layers. What unspoken expectations are guiding a client’s choices? What emotional habits come from cultural conditioning? What stories were inherited rather than chosen?
The more we can see these patterns at work, the more we can meet ourselves and others with honesty and care. Culture and history are not barriers to change. They’re part of the fabric of who we are, and when brought into awareness, they can become a powerful source of insight and transformation.
The Role of the Body in Learning and Change
One of the most powerful and unique elements of Newfield’s ICF-accredited coach training is its emphasis on somatic learning. In this era, we have plenty of information. Despite this, many human beings are still not happy. This is because deep learning requires something more than cognitive understanding. We need to learn with our whole being. The body is a vital aspect of this learning.
Through somatic exploration, students learn to tune into their bodies to discover the hidden messages. The body, after all, doesn’t lie. It holds patterns, memories, and truths that words can’t always reach.
By integrating the body, emotion, language, culture, history, and wholeness coaching becomes deeply transformational.
A Global Community of Learning and Transformation
What sets Newfield apart isn’t just our methodology. It’s our community. Our coach training programs welcome participants from across the globe, creating a rich, multicultural environment for learning and growth. It is not uncommon that we have participants from over ten countries in a single cohort. This creates a unique learning environment where we experience a safe learning space enriched by multiple perspectives. In this age of division, learning with our whole being, in a diverse collective of people, provides a transformative experience unlike anything else.
In this way, participants of our coach training program join a global community that, together, is helping usher in a world with less suffering and greater meaningful impact. This means that your learning is more than getting a certificate. Rather, you are joining a collective of lifelong learners who are shaping the field of coaching and how to ‘human better’.
An Invitation to Transformative Coach Training
At Newfield, we train coaches in presence, language, emotional intelligence, somatic learning, and wholeness. Our coach training programs are ICF-accredited at the PCC level and equip you to support the full human experience.
Our flagship program, Coaching for Personal and Professional Mastery, begins soon. Check out this link to see when the next cohort starts. Entirely virtual and globally connected, it’s one of the most profound coach trainings available.
Whether you are an experienced coach or beginning your path, we invite you to deepen your presence, expand your impact, and transform your own way of being.
This article is based on excerpts from the Newfield Grad Panel.
