When Presence Comes Before Performance
Award-winning coach and multi-certified professional coach Catherine Finger contributes to the well-being of others by offering transformational coaching for leadership, health, and life.
In a few days, I’ll board a plane to join colleagues at a coaching event. Three days later, I’ll board another plane to meet my horse in Scottsdale for a ten-day equestrian competition.
Two arenas. Two very different worlds. One shared lesson.
As I prepare for both, I keep coming back to three intertwined ideas: presence, competence, and performance.
In my professional coaching life, we begin with competencies. We study them, practice them, refine them. We learn how to establish agreements, listen deeply, evoke awareness, and maintain ethical boundaries. Early on, it requires effort. We think about every move.
Competence comes first. Over time, if we stay committed, those competencies begin to move inward. The structure settles. The internal monitoring quiets. What once felt effortful becomes embodied.
Presence begins to emerge. In my horse life, however, the order is reversed. With Clara, my equine partner, presence comes first. Our partnership has been built over years, through repetition, setbacks, subtle adjustments, and quiet trust. In the arena, she responds to things I cannot hide: tension in my shoulders, distraction in my mind, hesitation in my breath.
Horses are masters of incongruence detection. If I am not fully present, she knows, and our performance will reflect it. Our competence grows out of our presence together. Without that attuned connection, no amount of technical skill carries us through a pattern cleanly. With it, performance becomes fluid and beautiful.
This contrast has been teaching me something. In coaching, competence can become the gateway to presence. In horsemanship, presence is the gateway to competence. In both arenas, performance is the visible outcome, but it is the least interesting part of the equation.
What makes performance in the show ring sustainable is the connection between horse and rider, another way of describing presence. As I maintain my connection with Clara, our shared presence steadies our shared competence, refines our performance, and deepens our partnership.
Clients feel when we are performing competence rather than inhabiting it. They sense when our questions are technically strong but relationally thin. Just as a horse senses tension, a client senses our divided attention. Presence in the coaching arena is not passive. Rather, it is disciplined attentiveness.
It requires regulation. It requires coherence between intention and action. It requires the humility to soften when pushing forward would be easier.
As I zip suitcases and review schedules, I’m reminded that both the coaching arena and the show ring ask the same thing of me: "Settle yourself. Trust the process. Stay attuned."
Let competence support you, but do not grip it. Performance may be what others see. Presence is what makes it real.
Where in your work does presence come before competence, and where does competence lead you toward presence?
Catherine Finger, Executive Coaching & Consulting
Award-winning coach and multi-certified professional coach Catherine Finger contributes to the well-being of others by offering transformational coaching for leadership, health, and life.
Her passion to instill hope and celebrate beauty, goodness, and truth in the lives of leaders led her to launch her executive coaching and consulting business in 2019. Her years of successful experience as an educational leader, board member, adjunct professor, award-winning author, law enforcement chaplain and community leader equip her with unique insights and deep intuition on both organizations and individuals.
