PRESENCING AS A WAY OF BEING

Inhabiting Fourth-Person Knowing in Dynamic Presencing Coaching

Abstract

This article responds to the fourth-person perspective introduced by Scharmer and Pomeroy (2024), which positions the social field as a new epistemological category of collective knowing. In contrast, it introduces Dynamic Presencing Coaching (DPC) (Gunnlaugson, 2024a–2025) in contributing to evolving development of fourth-person knowing by offering a fully embodied and inhabitable approach to presencing in both individual and collective coaching contexts. Central to this contribution is the presencing self-sense—a lived, phenomenological orientation that functions as a dynamic conduit of presence. In DPC, this self-sense is enacted  through the coach’s inner presencing body as it connects their presencing self in the presencing field as a living, self-generating circulation and flow of presence. From this perspective, the accessibility and depth of fourth-person knowing emerges through an inner enactment of five dimensional, embodied level-depths of presence. To support this reframing, the article articulates five critical contributions of DPC: (1) recasting embodied participation in relation to the presencing field; (2) providing a cohesive ontological framework for field engagement; (3) integrating individual and collective dynamics through presence; (4) reconfiguring the temporal architecture of presencing to integrate past, present, emerging future, and eternal dimensions of deep time; and (5) restoring practitioner agency as a co-creative force in shaping the field. These contributions build upon the ontological foundations of Dynamic Presencing (DP) (Gunnlaugson, 2020–2025), which affirms the presencing field as an emergent, immanent dimension of presence. Overall, Dynamic Presencing Coaching contributes to a reframing of fourth-person knowing as an embodied generative way of presencing within coaching and the whole of daily life.