About the author

Natascha Speets has been coaching, teaching, and quietly getting better at both for long enough to have logged more than 4,500 coaching hours and helped train over 3,000 people in foundational and advanced coaching skills. She’s coached managers, leaders, agile teams, career-changers, CEOs and the C-suite teams around them, and the occasional friend over coffee, though she’d be the first to tell you that coaching is coaching, whatever you put in front of the word. The job is the same every time: to serve the person in front of you as a facilitator of their own thinking, holding the structure lightly so they can work their own things out and transform their lives and careers in ways they’d never have imagined alone.

She is a Professional Certified Coach with the International Coaching Federation, and she takes the certification seriously without taking it solemnly.

Her work has taken her across the pharmaceutical, tech, finance, food, and automotive industries, into companies navigating agile and cultural transformations, into the boardrooms and team rooms of organizations of every shape, and into long-standing partnerships with some of the world’s larger consultancy firms, who bring her in when their clients need the kind of coaching that changes how people work together. She is the founder of The Agile Company, which helps people learn agile frameworks and how to coach the teams and leaders implementing them across organizations, and The Coaching Company, which exists to do something she cares about more than almost anything else: to take coaching skills out of the executive suite and put them within reach of anyone, in any profession, anywhere in the world, because the world of work can get better, certainly, but so can the rest of our lives, one conversation at a time.

Natascha also hosts the Questions Asked podcast, where she interviews people about how they use conversation, and the small skills inside it, to improve real things in the world.

Natascha is Dutch by birth and Marseillaise by choice, having moved to the south of France in 2005 and never quite found a reason to leave. She has traveled widely enough that answering “where are you from” takes longer than it used to, and she speaks three languages fluently, though, depending on the hour and the company, she has been known to mix them up mid-sentence without noticing.

She is a mother of two beautifully curious young people who, between them, have taught her more about staying present than any training she ever paid for.

This is her first book. It is small on purpose.