The Team Coaching Journey Continues
Are we ever ready?
Episode 8 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
In this reflective eighth episode of Teams Transformed - and the final episode of this 8 part series - Georgina and Allard pause to look back on the evolution of the series whilst looking forward to the ongoing journey of development as team coaches.
Through vulnerable personal stories about their own family origins and the roles they adopted as children, they reveal how our earliest team experiences shape our coaching presence today. This conversation is both a retrospective celebration of the series and an invitation to embrace the uncomfortable, exciting, and never-ending path of becoming more fully ourselves in service of teams.
Key Themes Explored
The Family as Our First Team
Georgina and Allard open by exploring how our earliest team experience - our family of origin - profoundly shapes how we show up in groups. The roles we took up as children and the strategies we developed to navigate family dynamics were often creative and necessary adaptations at the time. Perhaps we learned to be the peacemaker, the good child who stayed quiet, the one who kept everyone happy, or the rebel who challenged authority.
These patterns served important purposes in childhood, helping us feel safe and connected within our family system. Yet what worked brilliantly as a five, six, or seven-year-old may become limiting when we're team coaches working with senior executives.
The Call for Inner Work
The hosts make a bold statement about the coaching profession: most coach training programmes require little or no work on self. Supervision often focuses on practice and tools rather than the practitioner's inner landscape. Georgina issues a direct call to action: "Anyone who's involved in team coaching should really commit to the development of yourself as a coach."
Growing Up: Beyond People Pleasing
The conversation turns to common patterns like people pleasing (a position Georgina identifies in many team coaches). She frames it as a child's position, developed to appease someone in power and dilute risk. The limitation becomes clear: when a coach needs to make an intervention that reveals an uncomfortable pattern about the team, they must be able to "stand in the heat of that, to stay with it, stay in the moment, so that the team don't instantly move away from the new awareness."
This capacity to stay present with discomfort, to not immediately rescue or smooth over tension, represents genuine growing up: moving from child to adult in our coaching stance. The hosts describe this inner developmental work through Ken Wilber and Peter Hawkins' framework: cleaning up, skilling up, growing up, waking up, opening up, and showing up.
Revisiting the Series Journey
Allard guides a reflection on the eight episodes, creating a tapestry of interconnected themes:
The hosts invite listeners to notice what thoughts and feelings are arising, what questions remain, what has shifted, what surprised them, and crucially what they object to or what doesn't sit right. This openness to dissent models the differentiation work they've explored throughout the series.
Mastery as Path, Not Destination
When discussing what lies ahead, Allard reframes mastery: "Is it a destination that at one point we reach where we can say now I'm really masterful at this? Or is it a path that we follow?" For them, it's clearly the latter.
Georgina states plainly: "I will never be a master team coach because it's an ongoing quest. There's no point of arrival."
This is evidenced in how their Diploma programme has evolved over the years: not by adding more tools and frameworks, but by removing them. They've "paired it down to the minimum viable concepts, framework structures" to privilege time for practice and being team coaches rather than just thinking about team coaching.
Finding Your Own Way
A powerful theme emerges about individualised practice. Just as there are no two executive coaches who are truly the same, effective team coaches discover who they are and how to make best use of themselves as an instrument in service of clients.
The hosts notice repeatedly how participants in their training desire to codify the work into easily identifiable, repeatable steps. Their response is clear: that doesn't exist. T
Community as Essential Companion
Allard introduces the vital role of community in sustaining this work. Solo practitioners can find coaching "such a lonely business," yet peer networks provide crucial support. Through Team Coaching Studio, they've built a community that gathers for practice, webinars, annual retreats, and ongoing peer support throughout the year. The mission is clear: empower everyone to go out and do great work with teams.
The Willingness to Begin
The episode concludes with Allard's powerful reframing of readiness: "We are never ready. You don't have to be ready. You just have to be willing.
Georgina adds her own examples: "Was I ready when I coached my first team? Was I ready when I took my first job? Was I ready when I became a mom?" The answer is always no, yet we take these steps anyway. As Allard beautifully concludes: "We keep jumping off cliffs together and we grow the wings in the process."
Key takeaways
🌱 Family Origins Shape Us: Our first team experience is our family of origin. Understanding the roles we played and strategies we developed as children is essential to understanding our coaching presence.
🧘 Inner Work is Non-Negotiable: Most coach training requires little work on self, yet development as a team coach is fundamentally about ongoing self-discovery, therapy, supervision, and personal growth.
👶 Growing Up Matters: Moving beyond childhood patterns like people pleasing, invisibility, or peacekeeping allows us to stand in the heat of difficult moments with teams.
🎯 Mastery is a Path: There is no point of arrival, no moment when you become a "master." Mastery is the ongoing quest of becoming, learning, and encountering yourself in relationship with others.
🪞 Individualised Practice: The world needs many different kinds of team coaches. Find your own way rather than following cookie-cutter approaches or toolkit methodologies.
💪 Vulnerability, Humility, Courage: These inner capacities matter more than new concepts or frameworks. The work is about who you're becoming, not what you're doing.
🤝 Community Sustains Us: This work can be lonely. Peer networks, supervision groups, and practitioner communities provide essential support for the journey.
🦅 Willing, Not Ready: We're never ready for the important steps in life or work. Readiness isn't required. Willingness is enough. We grow the wings as we jump.
Why listen?
Listen to this episode for an honest, vulnerable conversation about what it really takes to develop as a team coach beyond the surface level of tools and techniques. This podcast:
Offers rare transparency about the personal work, family patterns, and inner development that underpins effective coaching practice, going far beyond what's typically discussed in coach training.
Reframes mastery not as expertise or arrival but as an ongoing quest of becoming, inviting practitioners to embrace the discomfort of continuous growth.
Challenges the profession to require more rigorous inner work, supervision focused on self-development, and commitment to personal therapy alongside technical skills.
Provides a comprehensive retrospective of the entire series, weaving together the themes of emergence, uncertainty, contact, meta skills, and team development into a coherent philosophy.
Gives permission to begin even when you don't feel ready, replacing the pressure of readiness with the courage of willingness.
The episode concludes with an invitation: What questions do you have? What's shifted in you? What surprised you? And most importantly, are you willing to jump off the cliff and grow your wings on the way down?
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.
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