Holding the Drawing Higher: Presence, Care and the Work We Hand Back
Most of us have seen it, and many of us have done it. A child runs up holding a drawing, and the adult, halfway through an email or a conversation, says “Wow, that’s amazing!” without really looking. But if you watch the child and you’ll notice they rarely walk away satisfied. They hold the drawing up higher, closer to your face, and start explaining it: this is the dog, this is the house, this bit at the top is the sky. They work harder to be seen, because some part of them already knows they haven’t been.
I think adults do exactly the same thing, only with more sophistication, and perhaps nowhere more than in the rooms where they’ve come for help.
Theatre has a name for what that adult was doing. Directors often call it indicating, which means showing a feeling instead of having it. An actor who is indicating nods in the right places and softens at the sad line, and the audience can’t quite say what’s wrong, but something in them stops leaning in.
The rest of us know indicating far better than we might think. It’s the shop assistant whose smile switches on as you reach the till and off again as you leave, or the friend who says “I totally get it” and moves straight on to their own story. In the 1980s the sociologist Arlie Hochschild studied flight attendants and found two very different ways of offering warmth. Some smiled on the outside while feeling something else underneath, which she called surface acting. Others worked on the feeling itself, so the warmth was there before it reached their face. Later research by the psychologist Alicia Grandey found that customers could tell the difference and consistently rated surface acting as less warm, even when the smiles looked identical. Nobody had told them who was faking. They simply felt it.
Coaching has its own version of surface acting or indicating. We learn presence as a set of visible behaviours, the open posture, the nod, the reflective summary, the silence held for a respectable number of seconds, and every one of them has its place. They turn into indicating when they’re offered as proof of attention while the attention self has drifted somewhere else, to the next question, the clock, or the private worry about whether the session is going well.
The most revealing part is what happens on the other side of the room. In 2003, Emily Butler and her colleagues at Stanford paired strangers to talk about a distressing film they’d just watched. In some pairs, one person had been privately asked to hide their feelings and keep a pleasant, composed face. Their partners had no idea, yet their blood pressure rose more than it did in ordinary conversations, and they came away feeling less connected. When one person in a conversation is managing an appearance, the other person’s body starts working harder.
Hold that finding next to the child with the drawing. When someone can’t feel us with them, they rarely say so. They take on extra work instead. They explain more, polish their story, offer the insight they suspect we’re hoping for, report progress so the hour feels worthwhile, and reassure us on the way out that it’s been really helpful. Anyone who has coached for a while will recognise the client who looks after their coach. We tend to read it as engagement, and sometimes it’s a person holding the drawing higher.
It might also explain something most of us have noticed without ever questioning it. People often say the hardest things in the car, on a long walk, or while washing up side by side. Parents of teenagers know this well, since the real conversation tends to start twenty minutes into a drive. We usually put it down to the lack of eye contact, but there may be more to it. When nobody’s face needs reading and nobody’s attention needs checking, there’s no drawing to hold up. The work of being seen falls away, and the truth finds its way out.
This is a part of care that rarely gets named. When we perform attention, we hand the emotional work back to the very person who came to set some of it down.
So why do we do it? Almost always out of care. Actors indicate because they’re frightened the audience won’t see what the character feels, so they push it outward to make sure. Coaches, managers, friends and parents do it for much the same reason. We want the other person to know they matter, and we’re anxious they won’t feel it unless we show them. Indicating is usually care that has lost its nerve.
The natural instinct is to try harder to be present, and psychology suggests this tends to backfire. Daniel Wegner’s research on mental control, which began with people trying not to think about a white bear, found that every attempt to steer the mind sets a second process running in the background, one that scans constantly for signs of failure. I believe that once we set out to be present, part of us starts checking whether we’re present enough, and that checking is its own kind of absence. Our attention has turned back towards ourselves and away from the person we came to meet.
Actors found a way through this long before psychologists described it. The acting teacher Sanford Meisner gave his students a single instruction: “Don’t do anything until something happens to make you do it.” His actors stopped indicating by moving their attention entirely into the other person and getting curious about what was there. Curiosity is very hard to fake for long, because it always has to be curious about something, and that something is sitting right in front of you.
I believe the deepest form of presence in coaching is needing nothing from the session, whether that’s a breakthrough, glowing feedback or the comfort of having been useful. When a coach needs nothing, but is simply present; the person in front of them is relieved of a job they may not even know they’ve been doing. They no longer have to hold the drawing up for someone else. They can lay it on the table between you and look at it themselves, and they’ll often notice things in it they could never have seen while they were busy making sure someone was watching.
Perhaps that’s what being met gives a person: the freedom to stop showing their life to an audience and finally look at it.
Thank you for reading.
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If any part of this resonated, it may be worth reflecting on the places where you feel you have to be interesting to be heard, and the people who let you set that work down.
At Logos Coaching, much of our work begins with questions like these: questions about presence, attention, care and what it means to create spaces where people no longer feel they have to earn being listened to.
If you’d like to explore any of the ideas in this piece further, or speak with the writer about coaching through Logos Coaching, you can get in touch here.
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