CCI is completing its 6th year this year.
That’s something I’m proud of. In a country where coaching was nonexistent, we built something real and had huge tangible impact. We didn't only design and run a training program. We built communities. We shifted how people think about leadership, responsibility, and mental health. We created a shared language. We created a safe and courageous space for people to slow down, see themselves and be seen, for who they are and for who they can be.
A lot worked. Some things didn't.
As CCI enters a new chapter, I wanted to pause and reflect on the major learnings from these years — what building this institution has taught me, and what I’m taking forward as we step into what comes next.
1. Community First Was the Right Approach
One thing I'm really proud of is how we put community first. I believe we wouldn't have been half as impactful without it.
Coaching is not just a skillset. It’s a different way of being. A different way of listening, relating, taking responsibility, and holding complexity. A more human one, we claim. Unfortunately, people don’t learn this in isolation. They learn it inside a wider system that often still operates in old ways — hierarchy, deference, conflict avoidance, saving face.
Without community, it’s easy to fall back into those habits.
This is why communities of practice mattered so much. People needed somewhere to return to. Somewhere they could practice being different, not just understand it intellectually. Growth didn’t depend on one workshop or one relationship, but on being embedded in a group that was growing alongside them.
When CCI was thriving, the sense of community was strong. When CCI felt more stagnant or stuck, that sense had thinned. That wasn’t coincidence.
Between 2022 and 2024, we operated CCI out of the living room of my apartment. The office had an open-door policy. People dropped in. Conversations happened without agenda. Community had a physical place to exist. Those were some of our strongest years.
Of course, there are natural fluctuations that happen over time. Things shift. One huge shift was moving out of that old office / apartment and no longer having a permanent base where people could just drop by. There was less informal presence. Less everyday relational contact. No one hosting gatherings and inviting the whole community to come hang out. This weakened the fabric that had been supporting growth in the background.
This sense of community is something I intend to protect as CCI evolves. Not by recreating my living room, but by being deliberate about how community is built and held. By involving the community itself in shaping the spaces, rhythms, and practices that allow connection to keep happening. By teaching our members what real community is.
People don’t transform in isolation. They transform in relationship. Community isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s part of the work.
2. Quality Doesn't Need Lipstick
For the first three years, we ran training out of my apartment.
Most students chose to sit on the floor on cushions, even when we bought new comfortable chairs. It felt informal, a contrast from more corporate training spaces. More like a home than a training room (well, it was a home).
Some worried this made us look unprofessional. That people wouldn’t take us seriously without better optics.
They did.
People recognise quality when they experience it. Our curriculum is excellent, and I'm a top trainer. Actually, the absence of fluff lowered defences. Coaching didn’t feel foreign and corporate. It felt accessible.
At our best over the last five years, we held this down-to-earth vibe and professional visibility together. Events like Thrive and the Coaching Community Events showed that clearly. When we brought the right people together intentionally, we consistently punched above our weight.
We had a minister attend Thrive Conference. One of the most well-known monks in Cambodia joined to speak about the role of religion in the healing of the country. Through this event, coaching, which is not a mental health modality, became a way into public conversations about mental health and trauma.
We were invited into rooms we had no business being in on paper. Think tanks. Closed-door groups with PhDs and senior government officials. Not because we held big titles (we didn't), but because we were trusted.
That trust didn’t come from polish. It came from sincerity. We cared. We had a strong vision that we were passionate about. We treated the work seriously without treating ourselves as important.
3. Personal Calling Doesn't Automatically Translate to an Effective System
CCI began from a calling, not strategy.
I held coaching as serious work. A means by which Cambodia will experience deep healing and freedom from the generational trauma that haunts its systems and people to this day. It wasn't a technique or a set of productivity tools. I wanted people’s first experience of coaching in Cambodia to be a a deep and transformational one.
What I didn’t realise was the unintended impact of how much my own journey shaped the system I designed.
By the time I trained as a coach, I had already spent years in introspection, study, faith, grief, and personal work. Depth wasn’t something I was aiming for. It was the water in which I lived. So depth became the baseline. Long training hours. Extended coursework. Significant time commitment.
It felt principled and responsible.
What is clear now is that I had designed a system where the entry point sat very close to the founder’s (my) level of readiness. I wrote about this in a previous blog post.
4. Systemic Awareness - We Are All Impacted by the System
For a long time, I assumed shared values would be sufficient to hold the space for effective coach development. At the beginning of each course we take time to design and agree confidentiality, non-judgement, awareness of assumptions etc. I believed that because people were coaches, or training to be coaches, safety would follow.
It did, and it didn't.
Every group creates a unique field. Gender, cultural background, language, confidence levels, introversion and extroversion, norms of emotional expression... these all impact the "field" - the system's energy. This has an impact on the individuals within it - how well they shine, how they feel at home, how they grow and develop.
We did a lot of things right. We missed a few things. There were times when the few men that joined our training courses were made to feel excluded because of their gender and gender norms (coaching is a largely female dominated field).
As we enter CCI 3.0, I want me, my team and our students to have greater systems awareness. To not treat it as a problem to be solved but to be aware of the unintended impacts that this might have on the group and the individuals within it (e.g. if we have too few/many men in a group, or if we have too few Khmer or all Khmer, this shifts the tone and energy of the group).
5. Be Kind, Not Nice. If In Doubt, Choose Clarity
This is possibly one of the biggest lessons for me personally and for the wider coaching community. There were conversations I didn’t have when I should have had them.
I didn’t want to step into what the conversations would require of me. I didn’t want to hurt feelings. I didn’t want to risk having people feel alientated and losing them. I didn’t want to fully occupy my seniority, at the risk of making someone feel not respected, when this was a sensitive issue. I was loose with some boundaries.
I softened and said things in a roundabout way (as Koreans do well) when I should have been more direct. I told truths but not the whole truth. I convinced myself that time would handle what I was avoiding, and that people would get the message. That people would know I cared for them. That people would realise where they were falling short.
This was a mistake. In this lack of clear conversations, resentment grew, assumptions were made and feelings were hurt. Perhaps much more than they would have been had I had difficult conversations sooner.
6. Leadership Creates Distance
This took me a long time to accept. I wanted closeness. I wanted community. I wanted to be inside what we were building, not above it. I stayed generous, available, and relational.
But positional leadership creates distance. Because authority, responsibility, different access to information and the confidentiality that is required with this access to information - they all create asymmetry.
What I realised this past year was that when this distance isn’t acknowledged and explained, it opens up room for assumptions. And people make a lot of assumptions all the time. Silence without framing creates confusion. Not explaining anything doesn’t stop stories forming. It just means you’re not part of how meaning gets made.
One part of leadership, I learned, is that is requires naming the realities of assyasymmetrymetry and the inevitable distance that forms with it.
7. Shielding an Institution from Financial Reality Delays its Maturity
For a long time, I prioritised accessibility over structure.
I didn’t want money to be a barrier. I wanted people to come to our trainings. Throughout the past 6 years, I personally absorbed CCI's financial strain so the institution could operate. My personal coaching income supported CCI for many years.
It took me a long time to see the unintented impact of my good intentions. Without this financial pressure, CCI didn’t need to make hard choices. We didn't have consequences when targets weren't hit. Pricing stayed soft and loose. Exceptions grew. Emotional discounts became expected. The organisation never had to bear its own weight.
I realise that the flip side of generosity is insulation. That said, through our previous approach, we brought people to coaching that could not have come otherwise. They are continuing to have an impact in their communities. I don't regret our approach the past few years, but we're shifting to a new chapter now.
8. Letting Go of Being the Vision-Holder
For longer than I realised, CCI carried my own personal sense of meaning. I gave CCI its sense of direction. As it should - I am the Founder and vision-holder, after all. This though had its limits.
Scalability is only possible when the vision holder loosens their grip. In order for us to grow and scale, the people that will help us grow this next chapter don't need my vision. They need permission. A spreading of responsibility. A vision-holder, the leader-in-front, points the way and enrolls people to have their own vision and to build a shared vision together.
An institution can’t run on one person’s vision.
9. Designing for More Continuity Instead of Sharp Peaks and Troughs
I work best in bursts. I'm a sprinter not a marathan runner. I have intense periods of focus and hard work, followed by long recovery. Nady was simlar in this way.
So the organisation mirrored this rhythm. Energy surged, then stalled. The issue wasn’t about commitment or laziness. It was design and structure.
I realised that for CCI to go to the next level, we cannot operate on such sharp peaks and troughs. We need more stability. Repetition. Follow-through. Maintenance. People who can hold the boring, necessary work.
Sustainable leadership meant designing for continuity, not only peaks. (I say "not only peaks" because I still believe in sprints - just perhaps a bit less intense).
Closing
Five and a half years in, CCI has come a long way. We've built communities that have lasted. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people have been directly and indirectly impacted by the concepts that we've taught them - theoretically and experientially in our communities. Leaders have learned to listen differently. Coaching has entered classrooms, organisations, and relationships in a way that didn’t exist before.
As we grow into our new chapter, we do so on the foundations we've built the past five and a half years. We will apply the lessons learned with more clarity, more shared responsibility, and a deeper respect for what it actually takes to build something that lasts and scales. Thanks for being with us on this journey.