From Presence to Practice: Expanding Time, Expanding Love

Expanding Time Is Like Expanding Love: How to Expand Your Day and Your Heart with Slowness

Some people have become obsessed with saving time. They listen to podcasts at 2x speed, eat standing up, and treat their calendars like a battlefield. I remember those days!

One afternoon, I had two phones in my two hands and a computer on my lap, attempting to set up a 20-minute meeting between a CEO in France and the US Vice President. The meeting was two months away, and finding a 20-minute window to converge felt like a high-stakes, high-stress game. My job complete, the 20 minutes scheduled, I felt exhaustion as if I had just run a marathon.

Soon after leaving that fast-paced corporate world, I found myself learning the art of "basking" in Kenya. The practice is to lay a colorful cotton cloth on the grass, lie on it, and do nothing other than enjoy the feel of the sunshine on my skin, watch the clouds float by overhead, and take in the scent of the nearby passion fruit vine. Noticing my own body as part of it all.

What if the secret to having more time, and more love, isn't moving faster, but deliberately slowing down?

The Surgeon's Second

Imagine a trauma theater. The lights are blinding, the monitors are chiming, and a surgeon has exactly 60 seconds to repair a ruptured artery before the damage becomes irreversible.

In that moment, the amateur rushes. The amateur's hands shake, they fumble the needle, and the clock wins. But the master surgeon? The master slows down.

The calm mind and body know things that the rushed mind and body can't. By refusing to be hurried by the ticking clock, the surgeon ensures every movement is precise. By expanding their internal sense of time, they create the space necessary for excellence. When you stop racing the clock, you actually gain the freedom to allow time to pass through you.

Entering Kairos Time

You can leave the world of chronos time, and enter kairos time.

Chronos time is measured in seconds, minutes, and years. Its perspective is horizontal and linear from the past to the future. Its actions involve managing, scheduling, and tracking.

Kairos time is measured in depth, impact, and significance. Its perspective is vertical — the "eternal now." Its actions are sensing, noticing, and responding.

This shift from chronos to kairos is at the very heart of masterful coaching skills and the power of presence in coaching. You can explore how these same practices ground transformational coaching work in our post on centering and grounding in transformational coaching.

The Wisdom of the Bookends

When living through the toddler years as a parent, the children's pace was often excruciating. I viewed the pace of the very young and the very old as an inconvenience to be managed, hurrying the kids along the sidewalk and fitting in a visit to an elderly relative. But many cultures view these slow generations as our greatest teachers.

• The Pace of the Child: To a toddler, a walk to the mailbox isn't a destination; the journey itself holds the beauty. They stop to inspect the iridescent shell of a beetle or the way sunlight hits a blade of grass. They aren't wasting time. With the absence of clocks, they are experiencing life at full resolution.
• The Grace of the Elder: In cultures that cherish the elderly, slowing down for a grandparent isn't a sacrifice of productivity, but a sacred blessing. Taking an hour to help someone walk across a room reminds us that the person, and the moment, is what matters.

When I match my stride to a two-year-old's or an eighty-six-year-old's (that second one is getting closer to my actual age faster than I'm ready for….), I stop skimming the surface of my life and start diving into the depths.

What Expanding Time Teaches Us

When I choose to notice rather than rush, my life improves in three fundamental ways:

1. Increased Creativity: When I stop the frantic multitasking, my brain moves out of survival mode and into creative mode. Shower time, Sunday afternoons, hanging out in my hot tub, those are the moments when my next bit of writing, or my next project magically appears. Solutions arrive in dreams more easily than in thinking moments.
2. Love: I cannot love someone at 2x speed. Presence is the ultimate form of generosity. By slowing down, I can hear what isn't being said and see what has been right before my eyes. The beauty of this exact person, just the way they are right now.
3. Resourceful Memories: Weeks of office work sometimes speed by, and I can't remember anything about them without my Notion task list reminding me. But I can surely remember the joy of looking over the deep gorges of south-eastern France that have been carved for millennium. That's because I was slow enough to pay attention, making my life feel longer and richer.

This is depth coaching made visible in a life. The 6 core practices of spiritual coaching that create transformation with clients, including listening at multiple levels, trusting silence, and receiving the client fully, all begin here, in the practitioner's own relationship with time.

The Practice

You don't need a meditation retreat to expand time, although those are lovely. At any time, you can reclaim a kairos moment.

Next time you're rushing to finish a task, or walking to your car, or pouring a cup of coffee, you can stop the hurry. Breathe. Look at the texture of the world around you. Mary Oliver poems are so poignant because she took the time to notice this particular grasshopper, and that particular goose.

At Awaken Coach Institute, one of our 10 Masterful Tips includes this phrase: "Coach naturally brings slowness and spaciousness, getting in sync with the client's rhythm, and accessing timelessness." To coach that way, you want to live that way.

What moment would you like to notice today? Maybe this one? When you slow down, you might even find that you're deeply, completely loved. As the clock on your phone recedes in your awareness, and the feeling of the breath entering your body just now is all there is, how cherished are you right now?

I'm so grateful that you're alive right now on the planet, with your exact ways of being. Yes, you. Yes, now.

Slowness as a Coaching Skill

Transformational coaching is not only a set of techniques. At Awaken, we teach that the quality of your presence is the quality of your coaching. When you learn to inhabit kairos time in your own life, you bring that spaciousness into every session.

If this resonates, you might want to explore what it means to become a spiritual awakening coach, and how deepening your skills as a coach begins with deepening your relationship with time, attention, and love.

You can also watch this video where I share the power of presence in coaching, grounded in spirituality: What Does It Really Mean to Become a Spiritual Life Coach?

If you feel called to coach with this kind of presence and depth, I would love to meet you. You can join me on one of our weekly live Q&A calls and we can explore together whether this path is calling you.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the power of presence in coaching? Presence in coaching means bringing your full, unhurried attention to the person in front of you. It is the capacity to listen beyond words, to sit in silence without discomfort, and to trust that your quality of being shapes the quality of the conversation. At Awaken, we consider the power of presence in coaching to be a masterful coaching skill, not an advanced technique but a foundational one, taught from the first day of training.

How does slowing down improve coaching skills? When a coach operates from kairos time rather than chronos time, they stop managing the session and start inhabiting it. This creates the spaciousness where clients access deeper truth. Deepening your skills as a coach often has less to do with learning new tools and more to do with learning to be fully still with another human being.

What is depth coaching? Depth coaching is a way of working that prioritizes the inner landscape of the client over goals and performance metrics. It explores identity, values, belief, and being. At Awaken, depth coaching is inseparable from spiritual awareness and transformational presence. You can read more in our post on the 6 core practices of spiritual coaching.

Is coach training at Awaken connected to these principles? Yes. Every element of Awaken's ICF-accredited coach certification is built on the belief that the coach's own inner life is the most important tool they bring. You can begin exploring that path by joining a weekly Q&A call at awakencoachinstitute.com/book-an-intro.

How can I deepen my coaching skills on the path to PCC or MCC? Deepening your skills as a coach at the PCC or MCC level is less about adding techniques and more about refining the quality of your presence. The ICF competencies at those levels specifically assess whether a coach can create spaciousness, follow the client's lead, and access what is unspoken in a session. Practices like moving from chronos to kairos time, slowing down your internal pace, and learning to trust silence are exactly the kinds of inner shifts that distinguish masterful coaching from competent coaching. At Awaken, we train with MCC-level presence in mind from the very first day. You can explore what that looks like by joining one of our weekly Q&A calls.

About the Author

Christi Byerly, MCC, is the Founder of Awaken Coach Institute. Her coaching process motivates you to build a community of empathy and grace around you, and to live your mission as part of something bigger than you are. With over 15 years of coaching experience, Christi has trained hundreds of new coaches and maintains a thriving practice focused on depth, presence, and authentic transformation.