Guest Blog: The Love in Me is the Love in You: Coaching as a Practice of Love

Love is important to me, as you know by now if you’ve been following this blog series!  And it appears that I am not the only one who is sharing their love of love out loud and into this coaching space.  I want to build momentum through this beautifully loving community, so I have invited those I have connected with to write something of their own here.  The remit was to articulate something that they hadn’t seen in my writing to date.

It seems that some people are really uncomfortable with this series on love. I’ve had a few more unsubscribes than normal. That tells me how edgy this is and I won’t apologise for that. Look around us: Love is so needed in today’s world. We (coaches) are the vanguard of change in that respect.

This wonderful blog post is written by Allard de Jong…

---

The Love in Me is the Love in You: Coaching as a Practice of Love

(with Teilhard de Chardin in the room)

“As coaches, we are in the business of unconditional Love.”

－Jean François Cousin, former President of the ICF

When I first heard those words, something in me stopped arguing with reality. The centre clicked. What if coaching isn’t ultimately about performance, outcomes, or even transformation, but about Love? Not sentimental affection, but the elemental force by which Presence recognises itself and life learns to trust its own unfolding.

Teilhard de Chardin named this force without apology: “Love is the most universal, the most tremendous and the most mysterious of the cosmic forces.” Love, for him, is the energy of union, the same intelligence that gathers particles into atoms, atoms into stars, and persons into communion. We could say it this way: gravity pulls matter to matter; electromagnetism binds charge to charge; Love pulls Being toward Being. And coaching, at its best, is a deliberate participation in that pull.

What we’re really doing in the room

Unconditional Love in practice is radically ordinary. We meet people exactly where they are, raw, polished, unsure, uniquely alive, with no need to fix, no secret contempt, no subtle steering. We offer a rare gift in professional life: uninterrupted attention without agenda. In that warmth, truth becomes speakable. A client doesn’t have to contort into an improved self; they can unfold into their already-whole self.

Love isn’t approval. It’s precision without aggression, courage without intrusion, tenderness without collapse. It sees the deeper wholeness under every defence and keeps seeing it when nothing appears to change. Again and again, we choose the eyes of compassion. And in that choosing, something in the field relaxes; Being remembers itself.

Boundaries: the shoreline of Love

Boundaries are how Love stays trustworthy. Scope, time, confidentiality, consent, these are not bureaucratic husks; they are the shoreline that lets depth be safe. The stronger the container, the freer the sea. We do not merge; we meet. We are not saviours; we are stewards of a space where wisdom can arise between us.

Love as field, not feeling

Love here is not a mood. It is a field, like a Mandelbrot, infinite and self-similar, showing up as honesty, grief, fury, laughter, stillness. In that field, a person can tell the truth without being punished by it. Silence has dignity. Tears have information. Anger has guardianship. And the quiet that follows a hard sentence often carries more guidance than any technique.

Teilhard again: “Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfil them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves.” Coaching is one site where this cosmic labour localises. Two humans sit down; the world leans in.

The hidden curriculum

When Presence is shared, separateness loosens. Your story awakens mine; my steadiness invites yours. We become, for a time, a we-space where wisdom doesn’t belong to either one of us. It arises in the relational centre and belongs to all. What we discover is simple and quietly revolutionary:

• We are not separate.
• Guidance is immanent.
• Healing happens when Love sees Love.

This is the hidden curriculum of coaching. It rarely appears in competency frameworks, and yet it animates the finest sessions. Less about change, more about contact. Less about doing, more about being-with. Less about managing a life, more about meeting a life.

From dyad to culture

If Love is the engine of evolution, then every authentic coaching conversation tilts systems. The client leaves differently oriented toward honesty, toward responsibility, toward care. Orientation scales. Cultures are just repeated orientations. What begins as presence in a room can ripple as clarity in a team, integrity in a policy, tenderness in a metric. Love is not soft on consequences; it is soft on persons and firm on reality.

Love in a burning world

What does any of this mean when the world is on fire: war, collapse, injustice, ache upon ache? Love is not an anaesthetic; it is an anaesthetic’s antidote. It keeps us awake when avoidance would be easier. It widens capacity to hold complexity without snapping into cynicism or denial. It insists that care is not a luxury; it’s the only strategy large enough for the times.

Teilhard wrote, “Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being.” In a shattered age, we practice reunion. Not naïve unity, but hard-won communion, the sort that tells the truth, grieves fully, sets boundaries clearly, repairs diligently, and still chooses to belong.

A brief praxis for coaches

• Begin in Being. Before a word is spoken, rest as Presence. Let your nervous system announce, “Nothing needs to defend itself here.”
• See wholeness first. Interventions land differently when you’ve already located the client’s intactness.
• Name reality kindly. Precision is a kindness; shame is not.
• Guard the field. Protect time, confidentiality, and consent like a gardener protects soil.
• Trust emergence. When silence thickens, don’t rush. The seed knows what to do.
• Sense the collective. Ask, “If this were not just your pattern but our culture’s, what would Love invite now?”
• Close with gratitude. Gratitude metabolises vulnerability into strength.

Omega without dogma

Teilhard pointed to an Omega Point, a horizon where creation converges in Love, immanent and transcendent. In other words, evolution tends toward communion. Being seeks coherence. Presence recognises itself more and more completely. We don’t have to resolve the metaphysics to practice the movement. Each session can be a local gesture of that cosmic arc: from fragmentation toward wholeness, from reactivity toward responsibility, from isolation toward belonging.

Epilogue

Gravity gathers mass to mass.

Magnetism draws poles together.

Love gathers Being to Being.

And under its pull, a person, a team, a world remembers itself.

What else do we need to know? Only this: keep saying yes to the field where Love does the work. And watch how the future begins, one honest meeting at a time.

Allard de Jong, PCC | ACTC

August 2025
Director Team Coaching Studio
allard@teamcoachingstudio.com

“I write this as a practitioner who keeps discovering that technique without Love is efficient emptiness, and Love without bones is sentiment. Coaching, at its ripest, is the art of holding a trustworthy field where Being remembers itself and then letting that remembrance ripple into teams, systems, and a burning world.”