The Key to Real Transformation
SPECIAL HIGHLIGHT EPISODE
Episode 10 of the Teams Transformed Podcast
Teams Transformed is the podcast for courageous coaches, curious leaders, and anyone passionate about unlocking the true power of teams. Hosted by TCS Founder and Senior Faculty Georgina Woudstra and Allard De Jong, listen to explore transformational insights on how to coach teams with presence, depth, and emergence, diving into not just the tools, but the art of team coaching itself.
About this Episode
As we close out 2025, we prepare to welcome practicing team coaches into the podcast conversation during 2026. To bridge us from ‘here’ to ‘there’, episode 10 offers something special: a distillation of the essential insights that make emergent team coaching possible.
This highlights episode captures the heart of what Georgina and Allard are curious to explore in our next series Moments of Emergence.
Before expanding the conversation to include the voices of other practitioners in the new year, they wanted to crystallise the conditions, skills, and mindsets that form the foundation of this transformational work.
Key Moments of Emergence
From Change Agent to Awareness Agent
Georgina offers a fundamental reframe:
"Instead of thinking about myself as a change agent, I think about myself as an awareness agent."
It starts with awareness: yours first, then what you bring forth in others.
Contact: The Foundation of Real Work
Perhaps nothing matters more than deep relational contact, when it's truly "on" versus when it's "off."
Without open-heartedness and energetic availability, transformational work becomes nearly impossible. Contact creates the container. Contact builds trust. Contact makes risk-taking possible.
The Active Practice of Relational Empathy
Allard describes empathy as allowing yourself to "really receive people 100% without judgment and projection." This means tearing down any walls between self and other, staying open even when someone speaks about something that triggers you.
Empathy isn't something you have; it's something you actively practice, moment by moment.
Attuning to the Living, Breathing Team
The power isn't in tracking everything that's said. It's in what's happening interactionally between people. When you see it this way, there's an aliveness to it and the work becomes about attuning to patterns, to levels of connection, to what wants to become figural.
Presence as Atmosphere and Intervention
Allard offers a striking metaphor: presence is like an atmosphere that each person brings with them. Beyond their name or title, there's how you feel in their company and what that makes possible in the relational field.
Georgina describes building range between evocative presence (creating safety, opening things up) and provocative presence (inspiring change, naming what hasn't been named). Your presence isn't neutral. It's a tool.
The Slower We Go, The More We Know
One of the most counterintuitive practices: slowing down. There's often real resistance in teams to this. The pull is toward speeding up, crunching through, getting more done. But for learning and transformation to happen, teams need to slow down and get into greater contact.
Speaking Your Truth in the Here and Now
Allard introduces a deceptively simple guideline: "Speak your truth in the moment." Not absolute truth, but what's true for you here and now.
This becomes invaluable for deepening conversation. But as Georgina notes, speaking your truth about how you're experiencing relationship in this moment, or how you're feeling when there's conflict, requires courage.
The Impact: A Client Story
Georgina shares a powerful illustration: A team leader facilitated her team's two-hour away day with no predetermined output, just the intention to get back into contact. In those two hours, they discovered tensions, dynamics, and assumptions that had been playing out for a long time. They cleared away the noise, emerging much more aligned and clear.
This is what becomes possible when we hold teams in a different way.
Key takeaways
🎯 Essential Conditions Framework: Awareness, contact, relational empathy, attention to process, presence, and the ability to deepen/elevate conversations all work together to make emergence possible.
🔄 Process Over Content: The power lies not in tracking everything said but in what's happening interactionally between people.
⏱️ The Slower We Go, The More We Know: Transformation requires resisting the pull to speed up and instead creating space for teams to slow down and make genuine contact.
💫 Presence as Intervention: Your atmosphere, how people feel in your company, and the range you can offer between evocative and provocative presence becomes a powerful tool for influence.
🎤 Speaking Your Truth: Moving from pre-thought content to what's true here and now deepens conversation and enables real work.
📊 The Richness of Here and Now Data: Teams don't need more data than what's present in the aliveness of the current moment.
🌊 Opening to What Wants to Find You: Rather than only looking for what we think we need to find, emergent work means opening up to whatever wants to find us and trusting there's something seeking us in every moment.
What's Coming: Moments of Emergence with Practicing Coaches
This highlights episode marks both an ending and a beginning.
Starting in the new year, Georgina and Allard will be joined by other team coaching practitioners: Diploma graduates, faculty members, and friends from the broader community, all bringing their own real-life stories of emergence.
These are coaches who are forever practicing, forever sharpening the saw, discovering new aspects to themselves and to the art of creating meaningful spaces where transformational work can happen. They'll share:
- Their magical moments of emergence with teams
- How they held the space when things got challenging
- What they did differently that created breakthrough
- Their own learning journeys and transformations as practitioners
The conversation is expanding. The exploration is deepening. And if you're a team coach listening to this thinking, "Yes, this resonates, I'd love to share my moment of emergence," reach out to hello@teamcoachingstudio.com. This is becoming a movement of doing deeper, more transformative work together.
The first guest episode launches January 8th, 2025.
Why listen?
Emergence isn't ethereal theory. It's practical, transformative work that creates lasting, sustainable impact. And as this episode makes clear, the conditions that make it possible can be cultivated, practiced, and mastered.
As we prepare to welcome new voices into the conversation, this episode reminds us why this work matters and what becomes possible when we have the courage to work this way.
About your hosts
Georgina Woudstra is the Founder and Senior Faculty of Team Coaching Studio, an ICF Master Certified Coach (MCC) with over 20 years of experience. Georgina is recognised globally as one of the leading lights in team coaching and was among the first coaches to receive ICF's Advanced Certificate in Team Coaching.
Allard De Jong is a seasoned leadership development expert with two decades of experience solving organisational 'people problems' and accelerating leadership development. He brings a unique perspective on transformative inquiry and divergent thinking to team coaching practice.
Never miss an episode!
- Follow the Podcast: Available on all spotify, audible, apple podcasts and all major podcasting platforms
- Watch on YouTube: For full video recordings of episodes and additional content
- Stay Updated: Sign up to the Team Coaching Studio newsletter: a monthly roundup including all our recently launched podcasts
Teams Transformed is brought to you by Team Coaching Studio - dedicated to advancing the field of team coaching through world-class education, certification, practice, connection and community.