Some coaches spend a career chasing the next technique. Dr. Pam Garcy has spent hers learning to put the techniques down.

By Jonathan Carroll

What follows is our conversation: the arc of a career that kept following the tug of growth, the two decades of being coached that quietly reshaped how she works, and the profoundly simple idea at the heart of her new book. That the only ingredient a session truly needs is a present coach, inviting the client back to here and now, over and over, until awareness settles in.

Jonathan: You've built a thriving practice since 1996 spanning both therapy and coaching. What first drew you from one world into the other?

Pam: When I started off, I was basically only working as a clinical psychologist, which was plenty. But I noticed that clients would sometimes complete their work and want to do something more toward their growth, and I really didn't have a place to send them in terms of my own work with them. So I started to explore the world of coaching and realised it was a great option to offer my clients.

Jonathan: You've trained with an impressive roster of mentors. Who shaped you most, and what did they teach you that still shows up in your work?

Pam: I would definitely say Steve Chandler. Besides my husband, he's the other person the book is dedicated to. When I came to Steve, I was really caught in the world of trying to be impressive, and he quickly helped me with that and settled me down. One of the first assignments he gave me was to just take some slow walks outside and do less, which was not what I was expecting. I thought he was going to give me more tasks, because that was how I was oriented. But he was all about calming me down and getting me focused on service. He kept asking me why is that important, what do you want there, what are you really seeking, getting to the goal behind the goal. And I started to see that maybe I already have a lot of the stuff I think I want, and maybe I could connect with that and help other people, rather than just attaining a goal.

Jonathan: You've been a clinician, trainer, keynote speaker, author, and coach. Is there a through line that connects all of those roles for you?

Pam: Every day. Just kidding. Well, sometimes. When I first started, I was questioning whether I was doing the right thing. I'd been training to go to medical school since the age of seven, when my parents bought me a little doctor's kit and started to program me. Then I changed my mind in college, and even when I got my PhD they were asking if I wanted to go back to medical school. It was challenging to honour what was pulling me toward psychology, even though my parents meant so well. Another turning point was really seeing the power of coaching. I signed up for a programme where six different coaches were coaching me to write my first book. I'd call in every day not knowing who I'd get, but the questions they asked and the presence they demonstrated were so powerful that I started to realise I wanted to do some of that work too. And teaching in grad school, I'd see myself in my students, their insecurity, their fear of saying the wrong thing. I used to tell them, whatever is worth doing well is worth doing badly at first. That was a good one for me to apply to myself too.

Jonathan: We get deeply programmed growing up, from school, family, all of it. What does coming back to the self look like, and what was that process like for you?

Jonathan: Of all the clinical areas you could have focused on, what pulled you toward anxiety in particular?

Pam: I feel like this interview is revealing all my neurosis. There's this dance, for me anyway, between excitement and anxiety. My mind often labels it as anxiety, but in the clinical work I was doing, I was really drawn to methods that affirmed people as whole and complete, and that looked at the power of thought and behaviour on emotion. With anxiety, people are often in the future. Their thinking is, what's going to happen about this, about that. There are a lot of what-if questions, and the what-if questions go unanswered, so people are in a kind of suspended animation, imagining themselves in a helpless place. I found that if I could get them to answer the what-if, they'd realise, well, I would just cope with it, or maybe I'd even like it, maybe there's something to learn or some place to grow. There's a lot of potential in the spaces we look at as dark.

Jonathan: What's the biggest misconception people have about managing their own anxiety?

Jonathan: You've spent two decades being coached by Steve Chandler. What did being coached that long teach you about the work?

Pam: One thing is that the work never stops. There's always more to talk about, always more to learn. Sometimes I'd feel like I'm really settled, I have it all figured out, and then I'd share something and almost instantly Steve would reflect it back with a question that opened my eyes one step more. He was such a deep listener. The other piece is just how important it is to be listened to and held in presence. That's such a settling, wonderful experience, to be coached by someone who doesn't come in with an agenda, whose only agenda is to be there for you. He was also very humorous, and there was a playful component, sort of, why are you taking yourself so seriously right this moment. I remember saying, I still haven't even made my vision board. I said it a few times, and he said, Pam, why do you need a vision board? And I was like, wait, don't we all need a vision board? He just had this way of slowing me down and letting me be myself, bringing me back to that.

Jonathan: Steve emphasises presence, integrity, and conscious leadership. How did his influence reshape your own approach?

Jonathan: Your new book centres on returning to presence. What does that actually look like in a coaching session?

Pam: That's really the reason I wrote the book. One of the most important things we can do, whether we're coaches or leaders or teachers, anyone in relationship, is to settle ourselves before we go in and reconnect with our being. We're coming in from the heart space. Yes, we have all the intellect and wisdom available, but the heart is open too, and that helps so much in how we connect. In a session, I might notice myself feeling tense, or excited, or eager, or pushy, or even angry. There are all sorts of human experiences we have because we're human. If I can recognise it as a human emotion, then I can refrain from acting on it, breathe, and settle myself. Lately what helps me is just paying attention to my client's face, their voice, their body, whether I'm online or in the office. I also ask myself, what would I prefer if I were the client? Do I want a coach who's present and listening and settled? Yes. Do I want a coach who's using the word should on me? No, thank you. When we create that space for ourselves, our whole essence communicates it, and the client can feel it, whether they're aware of it or not.

Jonathan: You ask a striking question in the book: what if presence were the only ingredient a session needed? What led you to that?

Pam: That old conditioning, like I need to be impressive, would enter my brain and clench me up. I'd feel like I need to get this client from here to here in this session, and that goal orientation didn't work as well as just sitting and listening and being there. Through years of making mistakes, thank goodness it's called practice, I started to notice that when I said things to myself like be unimpressive, or just be here, just listen, don't do anything for the first twenty minutes, just fully hear what this person is saying, one human to another, that worked so much better. A behavioural psychologist would say a new behaviour emerged and was positively reinforced, and through repetition it grew stronger and stronger. Plus feedback from clients. I've had people come back over time and say, wow, you really changed, I like how you're doing it now. What's incremental for me might be something they notice because they've had space between.

Jonathan: You write about naming when you're hungry or tired so an attuned client doesn't misread you. Tell me about that attunement.

Jonathan: Jack Canfield says the book is for anyone, not just professionals. Was that broader reach intentional as you began writing?

Pam: No. But I started to realise the book was appealing to non-coaches. I have a couple of communities I'm involved in, and some of the friends started to read it and said, let's study this together. I was like, wow, people who aren't coaches like this book, what is going on? I think it's because we all can use that reminder to just settle ourselves and get present. All the things that pull coaches out of presence pull humans out of presence. So many of us are in relationships of one kind or another, parental, spousal, friendship, any kind of helper relationship, and it's useful to connect with these ideas. It's more about the ideas than me, though. They're ideas that have been out there, that I'm just bringing into the book.

Jonathan: You designed the book as a daily reader with short chapters from real cases. Why that format over a traditional how-to?

Pam: The book I wanted to read was one I could come into my office and open to a page or two, not a big long chapter, just something simple that would make me exhale. Not too clinical, not too intimidating, not too technical, just a gentle invitation to return. And to me, doing it on the daily is the practice. A daily reader reminds me to do it. I can go back over time and look at what I underlined and see that what was important to me a year ago isn't where I'm underlining today, so I can observe my own growth. You don't have to discontinue reading it when you reach the end, it just rests on your desk and you pick it up. I love the idea of reaching out through the pages to be a companion to my fellow people who are trying to help others. My other intention was always that the book gets into the hands of the people who want or need to read it. That was really the only intention.

Jonathan: Presence is hard to hold when a session goes sideways. What keeps you grounded in those moments?

Jonathan: Steve's Foreword highlights how you marry the clinical with the spiritual, the woowoo side. What led you to include that, and where does it show up in the work?

Pam: Initially I still had perhaps an egoic need to call it woowoo. But I can't expect to write an honest piece if I'm not being honest. So many experiences I've had have felt like a kinship or connection, that space between you and me. What is that? It doesn't have a clinical name for me. That's just essence. One example in the book is when I talk about Abraham Hicks, which to me is like the ultimate woowoo, and yet there's a lot of wisdom that comes through. My mind's need initially was to criticise, that's not academic, that's not science, and I was closing myself off to something I could try on, and some of it helped. It's like going into a shoe store and trying on a pair of shoes. Sometimes they fit, sometimes they don't. Life is like a buffet. You don't have to eat everything on it, you take what's going to nourish you in that moment and leave the rest. And playfulness, I've discovered, travels hand in hand with presence. I have a beach ball in my background to remind myself not to take myself too seriously, that some of life is just showing up and playing.

Jonathan: For coaches reading The Coaches' Chronicle, what's one shift toward presence they could try in their very next session?

Jonathan: We're facing a major shift as AI answers people's questions before they've even gotten present to where they are. How do you see it?

Pam: It's something I've been noticing and exploring. Some of the folks I'm working with right now are in their twenties, and they'll come in and say they talked to a chatbot. Initially I'd bristle, like, how dare you. But I started to realise it was two things. It was a tool they could use between sessions, and they were still coming to their sessions. And it was not a replacement. I recently wrote a Psychology Today blog about whether it's time for AI to replace your therapist, and I concluded, self-serving as that may be, that it's not. Especially within coaching, we are still human beings who want to connect with other human beings, and there's an epidemic of loneliness in our culture that's yearning for fulfilment. It's like, please, I'm lonely, please see me, please appreciate me. Jack Canfield used to have a slide of a person with the words "appreciate me" written across their forehead. We still want to be seen and heard and understood and acknowledged. In that space of coaching, we have the opportunity to give and receive that. It's very easy for us to forget the value of that when we're hearing about the twenty great suggestions AI gave a client. You can get that there, and you can't get this here.

Jonathan: If you could give one piece of advice to a new coach entering the industry today, what would it be?

Near the end of our hour, something happened that seemed to prove Dr. Pam's whole thesis. The conversation had become, by my own admission, more present than these interviews usually are. Questions arrived that were never on the page. The script gave way to genuine curiosity. That is the invitation The Present Coach makes, not as a lofty ideal reserved for those certified in some rarefied skill, but as something available to any of us, right now, simply by slowing down and paying attention to what is in front of us.

That accessibility is the quiet genius of the book. Tell most coaches to be present and they will nod, check the box, and move on, certain they already are. Dr. Pam's short chapters gently reveal all the ways we drift, toward the outcome, the goal behind the goal, the next question, the version of ourselves we think we should be, and then offer us the way back. Read one chapter before a session, as I did before this very interview, and you arrive in a different state than you knew you were missing.

The Present Coach carries a Foreword by Steve Chandler and praise from Jack Canfield, Melissa Ford, Stephen McGhee, Ankush Jain, and Trevor Timbeck (many of whom have been featured in The Coaches' Chronicle™ already), and it belongs on the desk of any coach, therapist, trainer, or teacher who works within the context of a relationship. It is a daily companion built to be returned to, again and again, the way presence itself must be. We are grateful to Dr. Pam Garcy for her time, her honesty, and her contribution to this profession we love. As she reminds us, this is a co-creation, a practice we get to begin fresh every single day.