Something shifted quite profoundly the day my teacher Fanny Behrens said to me: “How would it be if you weren’t a problem that needed to be solved?”
Her work questioned my fundamental assumption about life – that there was something wrong with me that needed to be fixed. And it turned my life upside down, in the best way.
I discovered that I was not broken. That my flaws were human, and they made me human. And that there was an aspect of who I am that could both see these flaws compassionately and relate with them the way a parent would relate to a child who was struggling. Fanny and her teacher Adam Bradpiece called that aspect “Presence”. Sitting in that place, experiencing myself coming from Presence, I felt deep relief, calm and wholeness.
I realised at that moment that I needed to learn much more about this and make it part of my life.
As I continued to explore Presence, I experienced many profound transformations. I felt so much more ease and okayness in myself. And yet there was a part of my experience that seemed to be holding back. That was not yet being spoken to. That needed attention. I now realise that that aspect of my experience was baggage from my early childhood, what’s commonly referred to by therapists as “trauma”. Not abuse. Not a car crash. Just the everyday wounds that most of us pick up one way or another when we are young, and which still influence us significantly when we are older.
When Fanny and Adam started to include the language of parts (borrowed from Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems therapy) to refer to these aspects of ourselves that carried wounds from the past, something inside me deeply relaxed. Like a pain I had never been able to name was being spoken of and properly met. It finally felt like the model of the world I was being offered was complete. It spoke to all of my experience. There was nothing missing. And deeper changes started to happen.
When I started to read into Internal Family Systems therapy more deeply, I discovered that Richard Schwartz names an aspect of who we are called “Self”, which I was delighted to find was extremely similar, if not identical, to Presence. (There is always something in me that delights in seeing the same truth named in different ways, from different directions.)
I want to explore that recognition in this article – as a way of making both concepts clearer, and because I think the relationship between them matters practically, for anyone trying to lead, speak, or simply function from a more grounded place.
What IFS means by “Self”
Internal Family Systems is a therapy model developed by Richard Schwartz. Its central insight is that the human psyche is naturally multiple – we contain many “parts”, each with their own perspectives, fears and protective strategies. This is not pathology. This is how we are built.
But beneath the parts, or more accurately, prior to them, there is something else. Schwartz calls it the Self. It isn’t a part. It doesn’t have an agenda to protect. It can’t be triggered in the way parts can be.
When people access Self in IFS work, they typically notice a cluster of qualities arising naturally: calm, curiosity, clarity, compassion, confidence, courage, creativity, connectedness. (Schwartz calls these the “8 Cs”.) The crucial thing is that these aren’t qualities we generate or perform. They arise when the parts that are usually running the show – the anxious ones, the critical ones, the ones trying hard to make a good impression, step back a little.
This is why I find IFS so compelling, even though I’m not a therapist and make no claim to practise it. It isn’t that I do IFS therapy work with the people I coach. I don’t. (Although I do use the “parts” model, for reasons that will become clear shortly.) But it points at something real that I recognise from many years of working in this territory from a different angle.
What Presence is and how it feels
Presence is a quality of being. It is a state that we can be in. It is a place that we can be “coming from”. The key qualities of Presence are that it is aware, intelligent and compassionate.
I experienced this state of being first with Fanny Behrens and her partner Colin Harrison and then later with their teacher Adam Bradpiece.
A somewhat similar state of being has been articulated by the embodied leadership teacher Wendy Palmer, whose work I have drawn on for many years.
Presence is more than just simply awareness. Our hearts are involved, we can be touched by our experience of the world. Thoughts may occur when we are coming from Presence, but they are not predominant and they are not in charge. There is a sense of seeing clearly and being in a state of flow.
When I’m anchored in Presence and that is predominant, the most striking thing is there is an absence of a sense of “problem”. There may be things that I notice as difficulties or even challenges, to be met and related with. But there is no sense that there is anything wrong.
There is a fundamental sense of kindness and safety, even though parts of me may feel challenged or even unsafe. And there is a sense in me of compassion for those parts of my emotional system or my psychology that are experiencing this difficulty. I feel touched that they are having a hard time right now. And at some level I feel moved to ease their pain.
This is an incredibly easy and stable place to operate from, because of the underlying sense of well-being and that everything is okay.
From this place I feel like I can step into my leadership qualities, making clear-eyed assessments of the situation and responding to what needs to be met, rather than going into knee-jerk reactions.
I can think more clearly. I can actually hear the person I’m speaking with, rather than half-listening while the other half of my attention manages my own internal weather. I can stand in front of an audience and be genuinely with them, rather than performing at them while hoping they won’t notice how frightened I am.
This is not a technique. It is a state. And the work, The Presence Method™, that I’ve developed over many years of practice and teaching, is fundamentally about training the ability to access this state reliably, and to return to it when we drift away. Which we inevitably do, because we are human.
Where Presence and Self converge
When I look at what IFS calls Self and what I call Presence, the overlap is striking.
Both are described not as something we build or acquire, but as something we uncover. A natural quality of awareness that becomes available when the more reactive layers of our psychology are less dominant. Both are associated with a similar cluster of qualities: steadiness, openness, genuine curiosity about what is actually happening rather than what we fear might be happening, and compassion – for others and, crucially, for the parts of ourselves that are struggling.
Both models also notice that you cannot force this state into being. Trying harder tends to produce the opposite effect. We can, however, create the conditions in which it becomes more accessible, and that capacity can be trained.
And both, in my experience, describe something that we can genuinely feel when it arrives. A quality of settledness. A reduction in internal noise. A sense that we can meet what’s in front of us without needing to fight it or flee from it.
There is a related thread from neuroscience worth mentioning briefly here. The researcher Stephen Porges, in developing Polyvagal theory, describes what he calls the “ventral vagal” state, a physiological condition associated with social engagement, genuine openness and connection, distinct from the more defended states of fight-or-flight or shutdown. I’m cautious about over-claiming, because Polyvagal theory is complex and sometimes gets oversimplified. But I would suggest from my experience that the ventral vagal state is a necessary (though not necessarily sufficient) condition for landing in Presence.
Indeed, a number of the techniques that I use within the Presence Method™ link strongly with Stephen Porges’ primary gateways into the ventral vagal state, for instance the use of non-threatening eye contact and the use of a 4/8 breath (where the out-breath is twice as long as the in-breath).
Many people experience a similar sort of state when they are absolutely engrossed in an activity that they enjoy, often in sports or in the arts. People call this state “flow”. So there’s a good chance that you have already experienced this state, without fully understanding what it is.
So, what we have here are a number of different maps converging on strikingly similar territory.
Where Presence and Self differ – and why it matters
Here I want to be careful, because there are potentially some important differences here.
IFS is a therapy. Its power lies in the process of going towards the parts that are activated – meeting them, understanding them, unburdening them of the old beliefs and protective strategies they have been carrying, often for decades. It is a model for healing. In skilled hands it can reach things that other talk-based therapy rarely touches. My own experience of encountering the language of parts, that profound relaxing I described at the start, points at exactly how much there is to be done in that territory.
What I do is not that.
When I work with a leader or a speaker, I’m not attempting to heal their parts or resolve what lies beneath their reactivity. That is not my role, and I don’t have the training to do it responsibly. What I am doing is training the ability to access Presence even when the parts are activated, to find the still point inside the storm, without necessarily needing to clear the storm first.
I absolutely do use the parts model as a way of accessing those parts of our psychology and our emotional world that are in disturbance. And I have my own model for meeting those parts, relating with them and helping them to achieve a place of feeling settled and at peace. The big difference here is that although understanding, confidence and self-regulation may arise, we are not specifically doing healing work.
This is a meaningful distinction, and I think it’s worth being direct about rather than letting it blur. The work of The Presence Method™ sits alongside therapeutic work rather than replacing it. Many of the leaders I work with are also working with therapists or coaches in more depth-psychological directions. These things are not in competition. They address different things, and often complement each other well.
The other key difference is that my work is primarily about application. What happens in the room, on the stage, in the boardroom, in the conversation that matters. Presence is not, for me, simply an end in itself (though it is a rather wonderful place to inhabit). It is the foundation from which authentic, grounded leadership and communication become possible.
What it actually looks like in a boardroom or on a stage
I want to bring this down to earth, because there is a risk that describing these ideas in the abstract makes them sound like spiritual concepts with limited practical relevance. They are not.
Here is what I observe repeatedly with the leaders and speakers I work with.
Someone walks into a room to present to a senior team, or stands up to give a talk, and they are almost entirely not there. They are primarily “in their heads”. Their attention is split between what they are saying and what their inner voices are telling them about what they are saying – the inner critic “scoring” everything in real time, usually negatively, the anxious part checking whether the audience looks engaged, a protective part secretly hoping to get this over with as quickly as possible.
From that place, every difficulty feels larger. Silence feels threatening. A difficult question feels like an attack. Running over time feels catastrophic.
Now imagine the same person in the same room, rooted in Presence. Their attention is genuinely here. They can see the people in front of them, not as a collective threat to be managed, but as actual human beings who have shown up to hear what they have to say. They can meet them and value the connection with them. And the audience can feel this too. When a question comes that they don’t immediately know how to answer, they can pause, actually think, and respond from what they genuinely know, and even from their deeper wisdom, rather than from what they think they ought to say.
The content hasn’t changed. The preparation hasn’t changed. What has changed is the state from which they are relating to the whole situation.
That shift, from defended reactivity to grounded Presence, is what I’ve spent many years learning how to help people make. It isn’t always quick, and it isn’t always easy. But it is learnable. And in my experience, it makes more difference than almost anything else.
Different paths, the same place
I am not saying that Presence and IFS Self are identical. I am not saying that my work is a substitute for therapeutic IFS work. And I am not saying that the other traditions pointing at adjacent territory, embodiment practices, Polyvagal theory, contemplative traditions, are all describing exactly the same thing.
What I am saying is that when several rigorous traditions – psychological, somatic, neurological, and what I can only describe as experiential, converge on a similar description of a similar state, that convergence is worth taking seriously.
There is a place; call it Self, call it Presence, or give it any other name, that most of us have access to more than we realise. And operating from that place, when we can find it, makes us more effective, more honest, and considerably easier to be around.
That is what I am interested in. It’s what I’ve always been interested in. And it’s what, if you’ll let me, I’d love to help you explore.
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If you’d like to explore what developing Presence might look like in your own leadership or communication, we work on exactly these foundations in our Foundation Public Speaking Courses in London, or I’m very happy to explore them with you in one-to-one coaching.
- I and Thou:The Secret to Truly Connected Communication - June 4, 2026
- Presence and Self: The same place, different paths - April 9, 2026
- Where we’re coming from. The source of leadership and communication. - March 12, 2026