Episode 195: Managing chaos through adaptive presence with guest, Dorothy Siminovitch

Disruption doesn’t “settle down” anymore. It stacks, spreads, and speeds up until leaders start feeling like the only stable thing is the chaos itself. That’s why I sat down with leadership, team, and organizational coach Dorothy Seminovich to unpack a powerful concept gaining traction: meta-ruption, the relentless convergence of disruptions across technology, geopolitics, climate, economics, social systems, and even personal identity.

From there, we get practical about what leaders and coaches can actually do. Dorothy makes a clear case for adaptive presence, not just showing up with confidence, but expanding your range so you can meet the moment as it changes. We talk about how trust forms in an instant, why presence is relational, and how a leader can name uncertainty, reduce shame, and keep connection without pretending to have answers they don’t have. If you care about executive presence, adaptive leadership, high performance teams, or coaching in chaos, this conversation offers language and tools you can use right away.

We also dig into stabilizing the inner system through Gestalt coaching and embodied awareness. Instead of looking outside for certainty, Dorothy shares how “checking in with your interior” reveals real data: what you feel, what matters, what’s missing, and what you’re avoiding. Those small, unscripted moments often become the turning points that create psychological safety, spark courage, and move a team forward even when the future is unclear.

Subscribe for more conversations like this, share the episode with a coach or leader navigating constant change, and leave a review so more people can find the show. What does “adaptive presence” look like in your hardest moments?

Watch the full interview by clicking here. 

Find the full article here. 

Learn more about Dorothy here.

Connect with Dorothy via email: admin@gestaltcoachingworks.com

Grab your free issue of choice Magazine here - https://choice-online.com/

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

Garry Schleifer 0:08

Welcome to Beyond the Page, the official podcast of choice, the magazine of professional coaching, where we bring you amazing insights and in-depth features you just won't find anywhere else. I'm your host, Garry Schleifer, and I'm excited to expand your learning as we dive into the latest articles, have a chat with this brilliant author today behind one of them, and uncover the learnings that are transforming the coaching world. When you have a chance, join our vibrant community of coaching professionals as we explore groundbreaking ideas, share expert tips and techniques, and do what we coaches love to do: make a real difference in our clients' lives. Remember, this is your go-to resource for all things coaching. But for now, let's dive into our podcast.

Garry Schleifer 0:50

In today's episode, I'm speaking with leadership, team, and organizational coach, mentor coach Dorothy Siminovitch, who's the author of an article in our latest issue, Coaching in Chaos. Her article is entitled Managing Meteruption: Coaching in Chaos Through Adaptive Presence. So much to ask right there in the title, but we'll get there. A little bit about Dorothy. She holds a PhD and an MCC. She's a leadership team and organizational coach, mentor coach, speaker, and author. She's the director of training for the ICF Level 2 Gestalt Coaching Program in Istanbul and has lectured, coached, and taught around the world. I know that for a fact. I've seen her do it. She uses Gestalt Theory and awareness process tools to support personal and professional development and mastery. Her areas of specialization are coaching for executive presence, awareness intelligence, and high performance team development. Dorothy has published seminal articles on gestalt coaching and is the author of A Gestalt Coaching Primer, The Path Towards Awareness and Awareness Intelligence, sorry, in its second edition already. Congratulations. And I can call Dorothy one of my friends. We've met for coffee many moons ago and had many interactions ever since. And so it's a thrill to have you here as our guest today. Thank you for coming, Dorothy.

Dorothy Siminovitch 2:17

Well, Garry, I thank you for the invitation and being with you today.

Garry Schleifer 2:22

I have to say I always okay. So a little background on publishing a coach magazine or any magazine, I read the article, scan. Yep, good. Then I read the article for are we gonna, you know, what's next? Then I proofread it, then I read it again before the podcast. I'm always highlighting and highlighting and highlighting and like I want to know more about this, and oh, this is brilliant, and oh, this kind of finally had to stop because it was just like I would have ended up with a whole highlighted article, nothing in between. So thank you very much for sharing your wisdom. I want to get right into it and let's hit with the title.

Defining Meta-Ruption And Why It Matters

Garry Schleifer 3:00

So, what do you mean by metaruption? What is it? Where'd it come from?

Dorothy Siminovitch 3:04

Well, first of all, I'm with you. I think that word is a new word for the times. It's an interesting word. It's a word that I was introduced to by a global leadership management theorist from Kazakhstan by the name of Nadia Zembukskayova. I had to pronounce that name.

Garry Schleifer 3:23

And you do a great job. Sounds like a great job pronouncing that.

Dorothy Siminovitch 3:27

Yeah, I practice a little bit, but she's quite extraordinary. Her PhD is out of case western, and she really is a global thinker. And she kind of innovated this way of responding to change with something called the Reinvention Institute. And she uses the word metaruption, the concept of metaeruption, as descriptive of what's going on in the times. Well, lo and behold, as I track this down, it turns out, and this is interesting, she made the term famous, but it really was coined by a thinker from BC, from an institute that he developed, the Futures Disruptive Institute in BC. And his name is Roger Spitz. And meta-ruption, which they decided to be the word of 2026, is like two words together for meta and ruption. And meta refers to a large perspective of change, meta, ongoing. We look at it, ongoing eruption, disruptive systems. And when you put it together, meta-eruption captures that we are not just in the old VUCA days, which were VUCA was a way of a lens of helping us be adaptive to volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and agility, and the need for it. But what meta-eruption really says is this is not only the new normal, but that we need to understand that we need accompanying stance of a mindset and a way of organizing our thinking, our responsiveness, our capacity to act in times that are constantly changing. In fact, there is no stability. In fact, the stability is the chaos, and we need to be able to respond in the chaos with some kind of capacity for going forward.

Garry Schleifer 5:22

Well, it's interesting when you broke down the word because the word that came up for me was eruption.

Dorothy Siminovitch 5:29

Yeah, of course.

Garry Schleifer 5:30

So disruption, all that sort of thing. I'm gonna quote the article to your point about chaos is here to stay, basically. Today's leaders and their coaches operate in an environment where disruption is both continuous and compounding. This is the experience of metaruption, a relentless, accelerated, and dynamic conversion convergence of disruptions across fields of technology, geopolitics, climate, economics, social systems, and even personal identity. So, like I said earlier, I could highlight this whole article and reference it. It is fabulous.

Dorothy Siminovitch 6:05

But it isn't, thank you. But first of all, I think what's interesting about it, because you and I, first of all, again, I always want to tell you how marvelous it is what I think you're doing with choice, as I've seen you over the years hold constantly for development, for conversation, for exploration. So I really admire that and respect that about you, Garry.

Garry Schleifer 6:25

Thank you.

Dorothy Siminovitch 6:26

Absolutely. And I want to hold this moment and also say with a little bit of excitement that when I saw that you were doing an invitation for the present edition, I thought, okay, I'm going to introduce this word because this word feels like it's a little outside our coaching sphere, one, and that we actually needed to bring it in our coaching thinking because it enlarges our perspective, it enlarges our sense of if we see the geography, we will understand, well, what do we need to explore this geography? And this geography is chaotic, it is ungrounding, it is uncertain, it scares us. And this is what leaders are inhabiting. And how do we who coach them need to do our work to support ourselves to coach leaders? In even listening to you, we have to read it out because we can't even say all the changes without getting ungrounded.

Garry Schleifer 7:20

Yeah. Yeah. And like you said, disruptions no longer interrupt the system, they are the system.

Dorothy Siminovitch 7:27

Exactly.

Garry Schleifer 7:27

Yeah,

Adaptive Presence Under Constant Change

Garry Schleifer 7:29

exactly. Well, you brought it up, um, and it's in the title, and I have to ask, not just presence, but why adaptive presence? Like what does that add to presence, the adaptive?

Dorothy Siminovitch 7:42

I'm so delighted to respond because, in many ways, you know, presence as a term has been used from the world of organizational development. It's considered a real construct in that world. And of course, we've used it in the coaching world, one of our core competencies from the ICF perspective. And we know that it's one of the powers of who are we as coach? What's the presence that we bring? We understand that word, but then the real question is: do we understand that our presence itself is also affected by the change that we are living through? So, first of all, it's not only understanding, and this is where all the work on narrative theory and identity on development comes together. Who are we as a coach or as a leader? So I use the terms connected because we need to do our work to support the leaders that need to really influence their work. So who are we? That's what's the presence that we bring? And then this is this new dimension. What's our capacity of range for being able to meet whatever our context, whatever our ground either shifts, you know, puts at us, or we end up tripping into. You know, I was walking down the street here in Toronto and I ran into a person I hadn't seen in the gym for several years. I said, Oh, how are you? I haven't seen you. And she said, Yes. As COVID hit, we put a gym into our home. And I thought to myself, what an enormous shift this was. This woman is very frugal, very thoughtful. She needed to be adaptive. That was a huge shift. And I thought, and she felt so good about it. She would never have done that 10 years ago, never have spent that kind of money. And now she managed it in a way that you could see how satisfied she was. So she shifted her thinking, she shifted her response to the world of COVID, which by the way was the, you know, not since 1918 when the influenza epidemic took 55 million, did our world go through something traumatic? And you know, Garry, what's amazing to me? How many people are almost can't believe that it happened. So when, you know, I can't believe it myself, actually. But when something changes, when it's radical, when it's unsettling, now it's a heat dome going on. We're going to have to look at what's going on. What do we need to think differently because this has happened? And this is where presence undergoes the question of can we maintain our identity and still respond somewhat differently, given our rules, given our expectations, given our shoulds, in order to move forward. And this is where, Garry, in some ways, being adaptive, people didn't really factor that in is how can I bring my presence? Because presence gets interpreted as a measure of inviting trust.

Garry Schleifer 10:42

True.

Dorothy Siminovitch 10:42

Yeah. And how do we use our presence being adaptive and still maintain trust and not lose our identity? And isn't that saying a lot?

Garry Schleifer 10:55

Hugely, yes. Take that one in.

Dorothy Siminovitch 11:00

Yeah. And so, you know, very often I'll say to people, okay, what were you expecting? And right now, what might have to shift because of where we are? Small question. I find actually, Garry, in many ways to be adaptive. Well, I would just so there's a lot of thinking about this. I love the question, but in a sound bite, let me say this to you: presence, as we understand it, is the capacity of authentic truth that we bring by our being, how we show up and send a message of our narrative ourselves that communicates to others, because presence is relational, communicates to others with a sense of connection. And the receiver feels, I can trust you. And that happens what between in 0.07 seconds, maybe even oh five seconds. That's how so that happens, and then our question becomes how can we meet, knowing that even as we're meeting, I might have to tell you things are shifting. How can we connect anyway and then be adaptive? So even before we are we have any kind of certainty, I'm inviting you to do kind of a a movement in your thinking, your being, your relationship with me.

Garry Schleifer 12:29

Wow.

Dorothy Siminovitch 12:30

Yes. And again, you know, many of our leaders that would say, What do you mean, what am I thinking? What am I feeling? What's my emotion? Now it's what's the presence I bring, and how are you experiencing? And that becomes that invisible dimension of saying to people now, even and this is where I think we can help our leaders understand in a world of uncertainty, what do you know that people sense or feel just when they meet you that is your resource to bring in and also your resource to know how to be adaptive with. And I think that we're gonna start teaching this more because it's one of the dimensions now that leaders have been hearing about, but because it's so intangible, it's hard to it's hard to get, right? There's now gonna be a conversation. Well, when you talk about my presence, what are we talking about? And that becomes a conversation. What do I need to understand about being adaptive? How do people experience me? One, but when you talk about being adaptive, what does that mean? And and and Gary, I like to come up with I have dimensions of that, but also being adaptive is helping people understand we're right now, if we're rushing, can I take a moment and invite everybody, just like take a breath together. I'm not talking about being gimmicky, I'm talking about being small and grounding. If I see people feeling very uncertain, right, I might say, hey, I see nobody knows what's going on, me too. Small little kind of moment, you know, shame breaker, discomfort breaker.

Garry Schleifer 14:22

Right.

Dorothy Siminovitch 14:23

Do I have that capacity? If I feel that someone is uncomfortable, right? Emotionally uncomfortable, nothing is worse than that, I think. As a leader, can I say, you know, I'm not sure what's going on, anyone else? Again, adaptive to the moment. If I see that somebody walks in late and they're kind of clueless, I mean that, you know, you're in traffic, it's easy, right?

Garry Schleifer 14:46

Yeah.

Dorothy Siminovitch 14:47

I can I say, oh, it looks like you know, an empathy moment. I wonder what you need just to arrive. I know how hard it is in traffic. Again, adaptive to the moment. If I feel that someone needs to hear something and didn't maybe get the instructions, the messages, what do you need me to say again? Because it wasn't clear before. I'm happy to do that.

Garry Schleifer 15:11

Yeah.

Dorothy Siminovitch 15:11

Can I be adaptive and do it in a way that what's it? No thing, but just the perfect, like the key in the lock. So when I say adaptive to the moment, you know, Garry, it turns out that these very small behavior, what's that book? Atomic habits?

Garry Schleifer 15:31

Atomic Habits, yeah. I was just talking with the client about that yesterday.

Dorothy Siminovitch 15:34

Isn't it a marvelous book? I just think it's brilliant, and he was brilliant to write it. But I think I would borrow the term atomic. Presence is an atomic concept. Because if you understand this moment, this present moment, the past is over, the future is uncertain. But this moment is where I, as leader or I as coach, can influence how you respond to me by the presence I bring, by how real I feel, by how much I recognize, by what I react to, then I understand the atomic power of the moment.

Garry Schleifer 16:17

You've really hit on a lot of things, and I'm chuckling in my head a little bit about one little aspect, and that is adaptive presence to the present.

Dorothy Siminovitch 16:26

Yes.

Garry Schleifer 16:27

So how close those two words are presence and present.

Dorothy Siminovitch 16:30

Yes.

Garry Schleifer 16:31

The moment. And then I'm reminded of what you were writing in the article about leaders requiring the the ability to remain grounded, aware, and rationally attuned while all this is going on. And then I think of the what you put in your article, stabilizing the inner

Stabilizing The Inner System

Garry Schleifer 16:49

system. Absolutely. So we go from like getting them ready to then getting them ready. And tell us a little bit more about the the stabilizing the inner system that you spoke about.

Dorothy Siminovitch 17:02

So thank you. I just love how you're unpacking it and then inviting. So thank you. There's a mantra that I think many people now in talking about development really says that change happens from the inside out, not the outside in. You know, the way we look at the world, our filters, our values, our beliefs. And so rather than me tell you from the outside, the question that really I think developmental thinkers, the great ones, Robert Keegan is one, always one of the ones that we reference because his work has been so profound. Also, you know, people in vertical thinking, the levels of perception. But in particular, what we'll say to people if we're working with people around getting more ground is uh take a moment and check in with your interior. That's the language I actually interior. Yeah, yeah. Check in with your interior. And then people look at me and I say, okay, by that I mean what you're feeling, what's important to you? What's going on that's giving you any kind of data of what's important? Maybe your stomach feels something or something, maybe you feel kind of a movement in your heart. And just take a moment, ask yourself what's going on, what do you notice? What do you want? What do you need? What might be missing that you can move towards? Very small questions, right? Right. Invariably, Garry, people will say, I realize I want to do this, or I realize I didn't ask this important question yesterday. It's been haunting me, but I didn't know it was haunting me because I didn't talk to anyone about it. Because the most important things we keep quiet, we hide, right?

Garry Schleifer 18:51

Those things that are keeping them from being present to everything, not just to the moment. Yeah.

Dorothy Siminovitch 18:58

Exactly. And it's literally hiding on our interior. Yeah.

Garry Schleifer 19:02

So we don't remember the words you said to introduce this particular segment. You said something about it and it totally shifted because it's like clients aren't expecting to hear you say it that way. Usually it's like, what do you need to be present? What do you need to be in the moment? What do you need to let go of? Those things. But you said it in a different wording. And I always love when people introduce things that's just should stop the client and have them think because they're then have to understand what it was you were asking, or unpack that.

Dorothy Siminovitch 19:36

Well, you know, I actually, you know, it's one of those moments where is it me, is it you, Garry? I think it could be you, but I want to just borrow from you what you're saying. Because I think this is where creativity is a two-person job. It's what we say and what the other person resonates to. And feel it with you right now. So, but I do think very often we have people go outside themselves to find something. And when the truth is, it's on the inside, because physicists will say there is no air, there is no this, we construct it. Okay, that's a little bit too much for me. But it's a little, but the idea, the idea is interesting that we hold in ourselves instead of telling them to go out, what do you need? What out there is what you need, but we go to people, check in with so the I believe the words were take a moment to go inside yourself, check in with yourself what you notice, because it's an embodiment experience. Our body, what's that book that's uh wonderful from Amanda Blake, Our Body, Our Mind? Our body is a whole system phenomenon. You know, we don't just think with our head. We think with our throats, our chest, our stomach, the back of our back, a red flag goes up if someone says something.

Garry Schleifer 20:53

Goosebumps or hair raising .

Dorothy Siminovitch 21:00

That is what I call the data, and I like to call it the data of the moment because it can shift in 10 seconds, right? So if you can catch it right away, the data, you know, something important just happened. What was it? And this is where on the inside, check in with yourself. What did you notice? Maybe you felt something in your stomach, you felt something in your chest, maybe something you needed to say or a recognition, or maybe it was a message you needed to voice. What do you notice that you might want to pay attention to or that you need to pay attention to, or was missing? So again, small questions that wake up the person to something they could do that helps them be grounded, but also it comes out of something. It doesn't, it's not in the air. It's actually something tiny that actually will make a difference. So often, you know, if I work with people, particularly in groups, you know, today. I'll say to people, who do you want to ask a question to or let them know they said something that you heard? Small witnessing is so big. And someone will say, I want to say this to you, Gary. I heard you ask that question. And you sit there and you say back, I didn't know until you said that to me, how much it mattered. Again, what did we just do? We invited someone to be present to their own data. Pay attention, make it meaningful. That's where meaning plus noticing becomes the uh awareness data of the moment. And then find a way to ask, invite the question is using your presence data and making the invitation. And all of that is maybe within 10-15 seconds. And that is what people remember. Those unscripted moments that had actual data that really were alive that you touched. And people go, you know, he, she asked that question, he she noticed me, he she stopped for a moment to say, we can't do more, let's just do this. And those are the places that are the unscripted places that really make presence this emergent competency to use.

Garry Schleifer 23:24

Yeah. I hear you. I'm I'm again chuckling inside because I'm thinking of the clients that have said things like, I've never said that out loud. Exactly. Or, and this is a cautionary tale for me as a coach, is like, oh, I really wish or I felt stupid I didn't do that. And now I'm in recognizing that in this moment and then and then breaking that down. Um right. And so, but yeah, awesome.

Psychological Safety Regret And Courage

Dorothy Siminovitch 23:55

But you know, Gary, so it's so interesting. Let me say this to you, because I think this is where we're even what you just said, I mean, it's so exciting because now, you know, everyone's always said now the work of psychological safety, which is very important. But a big part of psychological safety is it has to be safe enough that you can make mistakes without feeling a retribution, you know, like language is shame, okay? Or sorry that you actually had a mistake, because if you can make mistakes and they don't get held against you, then you are entering the arc of creativity. But at the same time, to hear someone say, I regret that I did, this is where the regret that is acknowledged and used as data becomes the seedling for the future act of courage. Right.

Garry Schleifer 24:42

Well, I couldn't say that better.

Dorothy Siminovitch 24:44

Yeah, Garry, you said it at the beginning. So I think I'm following you. So I think actually, again, this is where you know Brene Brown talks a tremendous amount of courage, and I love her work. But I think this is also those moments to capture this moment, you just had a moment of regret. If you were to use wisdom, what could you do for the next time that you could just sit with? And people feel like, well, next time I'm going to make sure that I pay attention to this or let people know I need to pay attention to this. And then they smile. What's the smile for? I just felt that I could do something for the future. So the current moment holds a vision of the future. So presence is not only for the now, but it is the beginning of how I envision the now in the moment, how I envision the future in the moment of the now.

Garry Schleifer 25:38

Dorothy, we could go on all day. You know that. You are bringing such wisdom and depth to this conversation. I really appreciate

Questions Feedback And How To Connect

Garry Schleifer 25:48

it. What would you like our audience to do as a result of the article in this conversation?

Dorothy Siminovitch 25:56

Well, again, I'm so delighted that you ask. I'm just delighted for this moment. I'm delighted for your questions. I've been posting things on LinkedIn. I would love to have a response back to questions. You know, Garry, I sent in another article on presence. I mean, on this is on how presence is multifactorial, and to understand the different facets of it. I think some response is always a wonderful thing, or questions. I'm hoping to do even more writing on this. Maybe, Garry, this is if there is any kind of response to this, I would love to in the future do another part two of this. And the reason I say this is because I think presence as a word has been minimally defined. We keep using the words as if we know what it meant.

Garry Schleifer 26:49

Yeah.

Dorothy Siminovitch 26:50

And I think it's just beginning to get unpacked. So, what would I like to do is if there are real questions about this that emerge, we could hold a more full conversation. I would love that.

Garry Schleifer 27:01

And what's the best way to reach you?

Dorothy Siminovitch 27:04

They could reach me on LinkedIn, Dorothy E. Siminovitch on LinkedIn, message me. Also email, I think it's admin @ gestaltcoachingworks.com. Either of those two.

Garry Schleifer 27:20

Gestaltcoachingworks.com. Yes, and we'll put that in the show notes as well. Wonderful. So awesome, thank you. And you'll be sending us a little supportive document as well. So thank you for that. And just thank you for the seriously, the depth and thought and just everything around this particular article. It was like I say, I was highlighting like crazy, and I'm like, I can't wait. I always like to take an article and and it well, I don't know if I actually take the article, if the article then becomes part of me, but I start seeing I'm using the things that we read and talk about with our coaching. Well, of course, that makes sense, but in particular, the things I learned through choice. So thank you very much. You've given me some different ways to look at things and observe my life with presence.

Dorothy Siminovitch 28:11

And I think actually, this is how, Garry, you influence us. So I thank you for inviting this and look forward to co-creating more. Thank you so, so much.

Garry Schleifer 28:22

Oh, you're welcome. Thanks for everything you do in the world.

Subscribe And Closing

Garry Schleifer 28:26

Thank you so much for joining us for this Beyond the Page episode. For more episodes, subscribe via your favorite podcast app. We're on Apple, Spotify, all those. If you're not a subscriber to Choice Magazine, especially if you want to read this article, you can sign up for your free digital issue by scanning the QR code in the top right corner of my screen. If you are not watching but listening, pull your car over, get off the treadmill, whatever you're doing, and go to choice -online.com and click the sign up now button. I'm Garry Schleifer. Enjoy the journey of mastery.