This week marked a milestone.
We welcomed our first group into The Arena with an onboarding session.
It wasn’t a presentation. It wasn’t about information. It was about connection.
This is the same kind of process we use in team coaching and group coaching. The most important part? Creating the conditions for open, honest, raw, real, courageous conversations.
That’s how people learn more about themselves and from each other. That’s how trust and community get built.
I learned plenty too.
Each group that joins The Arena, as the community grows and scales, needs to go through this onboarding process. It’s about contracting. It’s about creating psychological safety.
Even though I’ve been at this work for years, and planning around The Arena for over six months, I hadn’t factored in the importance of the smaller group-size onboarding as a critical first step. Yesterday we went ahead with those who could make it at relatively short notice, around 50% of those who had signed up.
We just wanted to get up and running. Find your wings on the way down as the saying goes. And it worked.
Lesson learned.
When you’re building something new, it’s easy to wait until everything feels perfect.
We had focused on the customer profile and the needs of future members for six months before launch. Still, we could have delayed further. We could have waited until more things were in place. But we didn’t. We went ahead.
And because of that, we’ve already learned a huge amount. We’ve already added value to the community.
That’s what excites me most about the next group coming in. Their onboarding will be even clearer, and when they join the larger community, the culture will already be strong – grounded in what members expect of each other and of themselves.
That foundation is what will make The Arena a success.
The same process applies in the team coaching initiatives we’re running with ELTs and senior leaders SLTs across all different sectors and company sizes. The work always starts the same way: contracting, psychological safety, and courageous conversations.
It always works.
So here’s the question for you this week:
Where in your work or life are you waiting until things are perfect before you start?
What would happen if you just began – and learned by doing?