This past weekend marked a milestone for our Transformative Coaching Essentials (TCE) community: Weekend 12 — the final gathering of our 2024-2025 class (the 5th cohort of TCE!). After a full year of learning, stretching, practicing, and growing together, our cohort crossed the finish line with testing, certification, and a heartfelt graduation ceremony.
A Weekend of Integration and Demonstration
Weekend 12 is about more than completing assignments. It’s about demonstrating the skills, presence, and mindset of being a coach. Each participant stepped into formal testing — a chance to integrate everything they’ve learned over the past year. Testing is never just about technique; it’s about showing the ability to listen deeply, ask powerful questions, and hold space for transformation. Watching each student rise to that challenge was a testament to their commitment and growth.
Certification as a Marker of Mastery
Certification is not the end, but a recognition: a recognition that these individuals have walked through a rigorous, experiential training process and emerged as coaches ready to serve. Certification acknowledges the hours of practice, the vulnerability of learning in community, and the courage to embody a coaching mindset in every aspect of life.
Certification is just the beginning.
A Ceremony of Gratitude and Possibility
We closed the weekend — and the program — with acknowledgements and a graduation ceremony, with coaches’ family and friends. There were tears, laughter, and many moments of awe as we honored the transformation that had unfolded for each person, and as each person got to experience what they have meant to each other. As graduates shared what this journey has meant to them, one theme came through again and again: this program isn’t just about learning how to coach. It’s about discovering who you are, what you’re capable of, and how you want to serve the world.
Just the Beginning
Weekend 12 is the end of this chapter, but the beginning of many new ones. Our graduates are stepping forward as certified coaches, carrying flashlights of their own to help illuminate the paths of others. The coaching journey is one of lifelong growth and practice, and it’s thrilling to imagine the ripples this group will create in their families, communities, and beyond.
To our newest graduates: Congratulations. You’ve done the work, you’ve held each other up, and you’ve shown what it means to be coach. I’m so honored to know you and to see the difference you are making in the world.
And to those who are curious about this journey: this is the transformation that awaits when you step into the practice of coaching (www.mclarencoaching.com/coach-training).
