Presence is the cornerstone of powerful coaching, yet many struggle to be truly present for clients. Not so transformational coach and leadership development expert, Nicholas Janni.

Having had the pleasure of recently interviewing Nicholas Janni, whose book Leader as Healer (Janni, 2022), won the Business Book of the Year 2023 Award, I can vouch for his capacity for transformational presence and attunement. Sitting with him felt extraordinary and a smile comes to my face as I recall the experience. It’s rare for any of us to feel truly met, yet this can be so potent, and is one of the greatest gifts we can offer as coaches. 

Asked to define presence, Janni pauses and says, “I could give what I already know or some new words.” He pauses again, finding fresh vocabulary: 

“[Presence] is deeply embodied and with a wide-open perceptual field to multiple dimensions of what we call reality [where], as I used to say, ‘I’m here and I’m available’.

“I think what’s beautiful is that our experience of the meaning of that… on our part, just gets deeper and deeper. And therefore our, ‘I’m here for you, client’, gets deeper and deeper, and that’s felt. There’s no question that’s felt because none of us had nearly enough of that as children. So our nervous system in itself is craving that and loves that feeling of being met. That in itself is restorative. It’s very important.”

Janni believes as coaches we need to be “agents of presence” – being on our own journey of awakening and healing and accompanying others on their journeys. It requires us to go deep.

“If I have a core message for coaches now, it is that we need to be part of the waking up that’s happening, and as much as we can, we need to stop collaborating with the mass coma, and the mass absence.

“And we need to help our clients understand this is not just about improving your life or being more successful. At least from my perspective, coaching needs to honour the call to go deeper, as much as people can.”

The quality of Janni’s presence and awareness is perhaps unsurprising, given his dedication and commitment to developing this capacity along a life journey that has included decades of theatre work, drumming, meditation, studying with spiritual teachers, including Thomas Hübl, coaching and training leaders, and intense bodywork.

Janni describes himself currently at a developmental edge, expanding his capacities further, getting into more subtle layers, and exploring the power of “frequency”, supported by mentor Patrick Connor, founder of the Sharmadá Foundation.

 

Training 

Janni, who also teaches at IMD Business School in Lausanne and at Oxford University, offers leadership development programmes, individual and team coaching, and transformational coach training through Matrix Development, which he co-founded in 2023. It has a team of eight or nine coaches. 

He says, “It’s actually very difficult to train coaches to do what I do, because it’s not like a manual. In its core, it’s [about] going into deeper and deeper, more open perception, wherein the client becomes more and more transparent. Not in any way through linear thinking, but as a state of wide-open perception in the coach. This requires us to keep doing our awakening and healing forever, because that’s how we become more and more present. And as that gets deeper in me, that’s one of the biggest developmental interests, because it’s changing certain things. 

“I think the most challenging radical thing I teach to coaches is stop trying to get anywhere. Stop trying to always think you know what should happen, or even what is happening. 

“To be in a more and more radical presence with someone and to totally trust that is a huge step, because it requires us to not be in any kind of control. For most coaches, that’s really challenging. All the voices come up about how I should be and what I’m supposed to be, the value I’m supposed to be delivering. 

“It’s amazing territory because really deep things happen now in the work and then, an apparently, relatively effortlessness starts to download.” 

 

Embodiment

When it comes to embodiment, Janni stresses the importance of the coach’s capacity, meeting a client unconditionally so they can really feel what’s coming up, and “coming home to the pelvis”.

 “The depth of the coach’s embodiment is a very central part to the safety and warmth that’s transmitted.

“And when someone is met unconditionally and allowed just to feel, for instance, fear, without interpreting, without saying what it is or why, what almost always happens is a beautiful opening in the body. Very often people say, ‘Wow, I feel my legs more, my whole bottom half of my body more [for example]. It’s like energy starts to flow through the body when an emotion is allowed. If it’s fear, then often there’s a whole sense of softening of the body.”

On the pelvis, he says:  “One of the most core parts on the embodiment level on the overall journey for all of us, I believe, is a coming home more and more and endlessly deeply to the pelvis.

“Because I’ve done a lot of extreme bodywork in my training, I understood that a central aim of embodiment work is to go back home to the pelvis. Later, I understood that when we contract as a child, when we’re in an emotion which isn’t met by the environment, we tense our breathing in order to manage it and we lift, and that becomes the baseline, the basecamp. The great majority of us are lifted out of the pelvis. 

“When as coach, we’re really settled, and in that transparent perception I’ve been talking about, it becomes quite obvious how far down the person’s energy goes and how lifted they are out of their pelvis. It’s very precise. And often, if the moment and the communication field are right, if you ask the client, ‘How far down does your energy go’, they can usually notice that and notice exactly where it stops, often just above the solar plexus, for instance, sometimes higher. 

“And then we just invite the client to really be at that exact point, not to try and change it, just to fully notice the whole texture of that lid, or barrier, or whatever you want to call it, and very interesting, things often happen.” 

 

Background

Janni’s father was award-winning film producer Joseph Janni (his films included Billy Liar and Far from the Madding Crowd) so the young Janni’s home was often filled with film stars.  

Then when he was just 16, Janni had an “awakening” at the Tibetan Buddhist monastery, Samye Ling. 

“I was in London, age 16, and I’d committed to sex, drugs and rock  ‘n’ roll. A friend said, ‘my grandmother is a Tibetan Buddhist nun. I’m going up to visit. Do you want to come?’ And it was like, why not? 

“The first days were challenging, because it was a lot of meditating and chanting that didn’t really make that much sense. But one day, I was sitting on my bed, and someone had given me a classic Buddhist text. I’m really recalling it now, suddenly completely knowing the truth of what this text was saying, which was essentially that we live in a very small version of reality compared to the vastness of reality. It was like, I know this in every cell of my being.”

Does he believe this knowing comes from former lives? “That’s an unknown for me. The teacher I’m working with is very clear about past lives, and I do have a very strong sense that I maybe was a Tibetan monk many times. And other times I’ve had a strong sense of being a rabbi. All I can say is that I connect with those frequencies. Whether it really means past lives, I don’t know. 

“My wife and I went to Tibet 15 years ago, and it was extraordinary. The moment we landed, I burst into tears. Then literally every night, I could barely sleep, because as soon as I lay down and closed my eyes, I had a whole gaggle of Tibetan monks around me talking. It became a joke for about ten nights, I hardly slept. And I was totally fine. So I have something very strong with Tibet.

 

Bodywork

After studying drama at Bristol University, Janni studied in Poland with Jerzy Grotowski, who’d moved from theatre performances to research into consciousness. He was introduced to extreme bodywork, including intense physical activity and sleep deprivation to generate altered state experiences. For Janni, this period represented his first major understanding of the “gateways that open through the body, and how thinking often gets in the way of more direct experience”.

He then joined a new theatre company based on Grotowski’s methodology, engaging in intensive actor training, which became the basis for his subsequent two decades as a director and acting teacher. 

Between 1981 and 2000, he brought Grotowski’s radically experimental actor work to the UK.

Janni saw theatre as a spiritual path, focusing on actors exploring the most open body/mind states possible. This focus helped him to deepen his capacity to tune into others’ energy. As he watched actors, he found he was seeing and feeling how and where their energy wasn’t flowing.

Drumming has also been a part of Janni’s journey. Already a keen amateur percussionist, he joined master African drummer, Adama Dramé on the Ivory Coast to study the djembe. Soon he was accompanying Dramé at ceremonies, and later taught djembe drumming. Later, after seeing Japanese Kodo drummers perform, he persuaded them to let him study with them. He says that although this involved physical intensity and pain at first, it gave way to energy moving much more freely and the pain all but disappearing. 

He later became the accompanist of Japanese master drummer Joji Hirota, playing concerts including at WOMAD festival, and formed a percussion group, River of Time.

After running numerous personal development programmes, including with Richard Olivier, he transitioned in 1997 to executive development, co-creating an approach called mythodrama. In 2001, he co-founded the highly successful Olivier Mythodrama Associates (OMA).  

He left OMA in 2013, forming consultancy Core Presence, continuing to work with executives. In 2018, he launched his first online Transformational Coaching course.

 

Spiritual teachers

In 1989, he encountered Hawaiian spiritual teacher Abraham Kawai’i who claimed the bodywork approach he espoused was restorative at a cellular level. Janni studied with him for two years, subsequently running training programmes. This work deepened further Janni’s ability to “feel into people’s energetic structures” and “work from a high energy, completely empty and receptive state”.

Between 2013 and 2018, Janni studied with spiritual teacher Thomas Hübl in what he says was one of the richest learning periods of his life. It helped him practise to much deeper dimensions that he could have imagined, and he learnt how to access higher levels of consciousness and work more deeply with shadow material.

Although his work is “expanding now” and he doesn’t much like using the word trauma any more as “it’s almost become an overused word”, trauma has been a core part of his work over the last five years. 

 “[Hübl] has an extraordinary capacity for [working with] what we call trauma. I learned a huge amount from him.”

 

Awakening and healing

Janni is currently “on more of a developmental edge than I’ve been for a long time” [meaning] “new territory, new understanding, on top of a lot of knowing, a lot of not knowing. It’s really all about what is real transformation in an individual, let’s say in coaching.

“What’s very important still – and now I speak more from what’s known to me – is that we have to work with what I call an awakening pillar and a healing pillar. My sense, and what I see, is that the healing pillar is often not dealt with enough, and the awakening pillar is, for me, [often] not enough. Or put another way, what we might call ‘the light’ has to come right down and meet all the places in us that are contracted and that veil much deeper, much more open, naked, vulnerable experience of life. 

“Those contractions are obviously personal [and] they are almost always also multi-generational, sometimes collective. And then I think one of the edges I’m on is that there are also more subtle layers as well. 

“So I’m in a very delightful learning edge, actually. I know a huge amount, but I’m also in quite new territories.

“A lot of what I’m experiencing more and more is something that’s been a bit more conceptual before, which is the reality of frequency.” 

With Patrick Connor, he says, “I’m going through a lot of process, both awakening and healing, even revisiting, because I think we carry very core imprints. And we may think, ‘Oh, I’ve finished with that’, but most probably not, certainly in my experience. I was revisiting recently a very core childhood pattern, but it felt like in a new way.

“The core of all the work is to be much less dominated by our thinking – we’ve made it our master. So it’s [more about being] located in an altogether different level of being, in which I’m thinking but it isn’t the dominant function. 

“I believe that that’s why our culture is in such crisis, because thinking became so over-dominant, and I see it obviously in all the corporate people I work with [who have a] huge level of disconnection and numbing.

“One thing I worked with for a long time, and that’s still very core, is to really be with people in what would look like their darkest places, like [when] someone says ‘I’m totally lost’, or ‘I feel so helpless’. What I’ve been teaching and practising for a long time now is ‘Don’t in any way try and change that’, [instead] actually help a person to stop having any opposition to that and just be totally with it. [Asking] ‘would it be OK just to let yourself really feel that whole territory you call powerless?’ 

“Because when someone does that, usually a very deep river starts flowing, and we have no idea how it will be or where it’s going, but we trust that. Because it’s such a developmental edge, it’s not so easy to talk about it in a way, because it goes beyond some of the language I already have. There I’m using language I already have, but I’m beginning to experience, both through the mentoring I’ve been receiving and in the work I’m doing, that if certain frequencies start to come through, they have a different capacity of dissolving these layers. So we have to be fully with them, but from this very high frequency.

“And I’m beginning to know and believe that everything can be healed. I didn’t think that before. It’s really a quite amazing learning period for me.”

Janni recalls having a dialogue recently with Connor. 

“I said, ‘Okay, Patrick, I really need to understand something, because let’s say I’m working with someone in deep grief or fear, and I do what I know how to do, which is, I’m totally with them. And almost always, they will start to feel huge peace and ease through having been met.’ Then I said, ‘But Patrick, I really need to understand, has something really changed there, or is it just a kind of temporary easing? And I’m kind of cutting it short?’ Basically he said, ‘Well, of course, in that moment, something really eases, because of, not least, your capacity to meet them in that… but two days later, they still come back to ‘Now, I need to be held.’ To ‘Where’s Nicholas?’, in essence. 

“It was an extraordinary dialogue but it was making me realise that there’s more of what I’ve been really refining and teaching. And people who train with me intensively develop that capacity [and] I don’t see that many coaches who have that capacity, even very experienced ones, because we’re so in the strategic thinking. So that was the beginning of OK, something else needs to happen. 

“And in a way, the last few months have been a gradual unfolding of that, and it would be difficult to speak much about it, other than to say it’s an even more radical open space where there’s even less strategic knowing, and actually a kind of huge love as well. And it’s really remarkable what can happen when that frequency opens.”

Through Matrix, clients are offered ‘matrix coaching’, 30-minute online sessions, before which the client is told they’ll have only two minutes to talk about their issue. “They come prepared, and they know that then we’re going to work really directly and the most unbelievable things happen in 20 minutes when we work that high up.

 

inner landscape

“I gave a session with someone the other day, and after about 10 minutes… everything becomes transparent, like the whole structure of the person, the whole inner landscape, not through any efforting. It’s really incredible. I remember saying to this person, this is really about your whole right to exist.

“I call that the ‘acupuncture needle’, when it’s 100% accurate and is transmitted with this frequency. 

“This is what I learned with Thomas [Hübl]… I remember when I first was watching him working with people, I was literally like, ‘I have no idea how you’re doing that. I’ve never seen anything like that. It’s like you go straight to the core.’ 

“What’s happening when you’re doing that is that it’s like the person’s whole dimensionality becomes transparent, and sometimes then you just feel this core programme. It’s really nothing to do with thinking, or perception. I believe that’s our natural state. I think as children we had huge amounts of direct knowing, you could call it intuition, or body knowing. It’s a mixture of everything. But this is what grows and grows. I see it. It’s just getting deeper and deeper. But it’s also about places. You can be in a place and you suddenly have all this information.” 

Janni collaborated recently with Bob (Robert J.) Anderson, founder of the Leadership Circle. “He’s deeply into the study of quantum physics, and he keeps telling me that in that world, the core understanding is that we’re in a pure information field, which is what Hübl used to say. So it’s like the mystical and the scientific come together in a very real way.” 

His recent experience over the last five or six years aligns with what Hübl used to say – that “all the information is available all the time. I remember thinking, ‘Oh, well, that’s interesting.’ But actually, my experience in the last five or six years is exactly that – the more we work on ourselves, that’s the critical thing, the more the information field is just there. You can meet someone or even pass someone in the street, and you suddenly know a lot, it’s really quite magical, actually, and it’s very accurate and precise. Language becomes very important…Word and energy become one…And [then] something really happens…[in] a lot of our speaking, they’re separate, and that just increases our fragmentation. The Leader is healer is [about] the healing of fragmentation.

“I’ve been doing this in one way or another for all my adult life, and I had a very intense training period with [Kawai’i] some years ago. And he [would say], like I think many great teachers would always say, that if you can really drop down to a matrix level of reality, or what in quantum science might be called the unified field, if you’re really operating at that level, because that is the level from which all matter and all structure rises, things can happen in a much quicker way than a linear way.

“I’ve seen people catch fire suddenly with understanding what their whole life purpose is, even if they’ve been in months of depression. Suddenly it’s like because you’re working at this core level, basically, I would genuinely call it a path of liberation of our essence and an unwinding of all the ways we had to fit in. So a big part of the work is we talk about that, we conceptualise that but we need to feel it as well, so it’s met. I have a sense we really over-psychologise things, and then we think, ‘Well, if I understand it psychologically, that’ll be enough.’ [But] it’s core energetic work.”

Some of his work is with groups too and this can also go very deep. “It’s very powerful when a group gets into a higher and higher frequency. This happened recently most powerfully in the Leader is Healer retreat (a mixed white/black, female/male group) in South Africa because they were so ready. I remember at the check-in, thinking, ‘Oh my goodness, I don’t even know if I can meet them in their depth’, because they checked in with such a depth. And the field that opened up was incredible to the point where, what has happened? I could be really working deep with one person, but three other people would be having ‘lightbulbs’ in their energetic bodies. This energetic work is so far beyond our thinking, and it invites us into this radical willingness to be with whatever is arising.” 

 

Critical times 

“It’s quite obvious we’re in a very critical edge. I think it’s an extraordinary time to be alive, and it looks like we’re freewheeling into more crisis, because there’s no one at the rudder, at least no one with wisdom, as far as I can see. 

“I was working with a group yesterday, and I read them a very important quote for me, because I don’t have a sense in any way that we can avert the crisis. I’m not working because I believe, Oh, if enough of us do this, everything will be okay. I literally don’t even go near that kind of thinking. But here’s a quote that, for me, makes huge sense. It’s by Vaclav Havel, the Czech writer who became president: ‘Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out’.

“So what makes sense to me is that this work, my work, is part of a whole field that is birthing something new for humanity. I think we got really lost, chronically disconnected but there is this growing field everywhere that is birthing something new. We have no idea how that’s going to play out, but something is happening there, and my love and my passion and clearly, my whole life purpose serves that…”

For Janni, the journey is “forever…keep(ing) going deeper and deeper. 

“I think what’s clearer and clearer to me is that the common theme running throughout my whole life from when I had my epiphany aged 16 is always ‘How come we’re in such a small reality?’ Not even ‘How come?’ but ‘Let’s notice that we are and what needs to happen to really, really open?’ My whole practice and study and understanding of that just keeps growing.

 

Training and next steps

“We’re thinking a lot… about how to grow our community,” says Janni. With this in mind, last month (31 October), Matrix Development launched a series of free monthly Inspirational Sessions, inspired by his book.

The Transformational Coach training programme begins on 8 November and “will be the most intensive training I will have ever offered,” says Janni. 

He hopes to roll out a big programme for young leaders, and is in the early stages of co-creating a large-scale initiative called Love Aid, inspired by music-based initiative Live Aid. 

Janni is also thinking about writing a new book, with the working title, To Be a Blessing. It’s an apt title for Janni, too. 

 

• Matrix Development’s next Transformational Coaching programme starts on 8 November: https://bit.ly/4dZlGW7
• Nicholas Janni will be speaking on transformational coaching at the Coaching at Work annual virtual conference on 14 November: https://caw.nwsvirtualevents.com/