Series 6, Episode Four, Liminality and Work Cultures; From The Police to Gymnastics

Join Dr Lisa Cherry in conversation with Geraldine Costello, Director of Governance and Safe Sport at British Gymnastics, where we look at the liminal space between work cultures; the police and gymnastics. What happens when a career built on command and certainty collides with a mission that depends on trust, listening and repair? We explore how safeguarding shifts from policy to lived practice when survivors are heard and institutions choose to change.

Geraldine traces her path from the police cadets to child protection and multi-agency hubs, where she discovered that careful interviewing, cross-sector teamwork, and dignity-centred practice could change lives. She unpacks the contradictions of tackling domestic abuse and safeguarding in a culture still wrestling with misogyny and the allies and mentors who helped her stand firm. Then we follow her leap into youth guiding and sport, where volunteers, community and equity reshape how influence works. No badges. No warrants. Just persuasion, clarity and relationships that make safety possible.

Inside British Gymnastics, a newly created safe sport role emerged in the wake of the White Review and a surge of testimonies. Geraldine explains how governance, complaint handling and trauma-informed processes are being rebuilt to protect athletes, support coaches and clubs and restore trust through transparency and consistent apology. 

She shares the personal scaffolding behind resilience, counselling, coaching, reflection, and how leaders can navigate the long middle of change without losing heart.

If you value thoughtful leadership, safe sport and trauma-informed practice, this conversation offers a grounded playbook for culture change. Subscribe, share with a colleague who works in safeguarding or youth sport and leave a review to tell us what resonated most.

You can connect with Geraldine on LinkedIn here: www.linkedin.com/in/geraldinecostello

Transcript

Welcome And Liminality Frame

SPEAKER_01 0:03

This is the Trauma Resonance Resilience Podcast. This is for you if you are interested in compassion, connection, and relationships and how we can all work together creating services that do not add to harm but rather seek to support recovery from it. I'm your host, Lisa Cherry, and this is your time to sit back and listen in on conversations that make a difference.

SPEAKER_02 0:30

So for today's podcast in this liminality series, I'm with Geraldine Costello, who I actually met over breakfast at a conference. She's the director of governance and safe sport at British Gymnastics, leading a dedicated team. She's focused on creating an uplifting gymnastics experience that is safe, enjoyable, and accessible to all, driven by a deep commitment to safeguarding and ensuring zero tolerance for abuse. Her passion for safeguarding is rooted in lived experience, motivating her to ensure that people are heard, believed, and cared for. She strives to create environments where compassion and safety are paramount and equitable experiences are promoted for all, understanding that gymnastics can profoundly impact lives, particularly for children and young people. I was particularly intrigued when we met over breakfast, Geraldine, by you once working for the police and then moving into gymnastics, which we can explore a little more. So good morning, Geraldine.

SPEAKER_00 1:44

Good morning, Lisa, and thank you so much for having me today. I I've been both excited and slightly worried, but um I'm here, so it's good.

Geraldine’s Path Into Policing

SPEAKER_02 1:54

Well, it's a really interesting leap, and this series is about liminality, so it's about those in-between spaces. And I'm always fascinated anyway, because I work across all the sectors, and I have to say that police is a very particular sector with a very particular culture and very particular ways of doing things. So I found myself having breakfast with you before I was keynoting at a lovely conference in Hull. Did you enjoy that conference, by the way?

SPEAKER_00 2:31

I really enjoyed it. It was a totally different space for me, as we'll explore. I've come from the police and then youth girl guiding and then to gymnastics. And I'm not often in an NHS space. However, when I was in the police, I used to work in a multi-agency um safeguarding hub, and there were people from the NHS, and there were we did have representation there. So that was a an enjoyable space for me to work, but then it was really enjoyable to actually hear and listen that we're not alone in sport, trying to be trauma-informed, trying to do our best to actually hear the people who've actually experienced harm and abuse within our sport. So yeah, I did enjoy it. It's always additional learning for me and developing always.

SPEAKER_02 3:18

Yeah. And I was just talking about that culture that's very specific to the police. I wonder if you could just kind of explain to people what that looks like, what that felt like. You're a woman of a certain age, if I'm allowed to say, as am I. Um, you know, you will have seen a lot of changes, you'll have seen no changes. Just speak to that for for for the people who are listening.

Culture Shock And Gender Dynamics

SPEAKER_00 3:45

So I am of a a certain age. I um born in 1967, and I joined the police in 1986 into the cadets, and it was very much uh going into the cadets in London. My very first time interviewing for becoming a cadet in London was the very first time I'd ever visited London. I'd come from the Southwest. Um I was a country girl, albeit in a city, but I was a country girl, really very little experience, and I wanted to leave home and I wanted to to join the police to change what the world and to make a difference. And and I I say that, and I I don't mean to say that glibly, because when I left the police in 1917, they gave me all my papers back. And on my application for joining cadets, was I wanted to make a difference and I wanted to change and make the world a better place. And you know, I I think I did in places. So I joined 18, but I'd say a false environment initially, um, going into a space with um 25 other 18-year-olds, all aspiring to be police officers, not really knowing what we're going to be doing, but wanting to be in a uniformed statutory service. And um, I'd say it was a bit boot campish when I got there, living in dormitories, alongside at that stage, four other girls and 20 other um men, young men. And it was great fun because it was away from home and I was getting paid, and but really didn't have a very I wasn't very exposed to what it was actually going to be like in the police. And then actually, after doing a year there, you then get sent out after another 20 weeks training to a police station, and and that's where you belong. And and and I look back very fondly on my first police station that I went to, and but I also realized that I was a naive 18-year-old, by this stage, probably 19-year-old, going out into a world, and it was just totally alien to me. Very few women in the in the job, um, and it I call it the job because it was called the job. Very few women. I was very well looked after by a lot of the men on my team, my immediate team, but very much saw, I felt a little bit like I was an add-on rather than included, um, night and nice to have rather than necessary. And I know that um there were very many women that went um before me. Um my ward number at that particular time of joining was in the 7000s. So there had been 7,000, probably approximately 7,600 women that had gone before me. So I wasn't new as a woman, in but I was relatively, and then and then things changed. So they must have walked a very difficult and different path to me. And I and I thanked them for that. And I would say that I then walked a very difficult and complex path. I witnessed and saw misogyny, sexism, all sorts of unfairness, and and and which I didn't like, but you're a part of. Um, I look back on my time in the police and I've definitely grown. Would I, if I was to join the police now and um join the same circumstance, operate in the way that I did then? I absolutely would not. Um as I grew and as I went into domestic abuse teams, monitoring sex offenders, training unit, and then into child protection teams and then a multi-agency safeguarding hub, my practice grew. My multi-agency cross-team working really improved. Uh and that's a part of why I'm where I am now, because that experience of working with education and health and use of vending service and actually and social services was was huge, a huge impact on me interviewing children when we were achieving best evidence, going out and doing visits. That that work was where I belonged, not not necessarily in the responding to calls and crimes and victims of crimes was hugely important, but that's why I found my niche of actually listening, caring, connecting with people with compassion. But it was hard, Lisa.

SPEAKER_02 8:20

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm before I move on to a more kind of liminality question, I'm just interested in the experience of working with domestic violence. You did you talked about child protection, you talked about safeguarding, you know, you talked about all of those areas when the backdrop is misogynistic. I'm quite interested in that that intersection. What does that feel like? And how do you how do you actually do that?

Finding Purpose In Safeguarding

SPEAKER_00 8:57

I did it well and I did it better. So that's that's you have to to to actually break through some of that difficult unwillingness to change. I will say that, you know, it it wasn't a totally misogynistic. I had some fantastic colleagues who who got it and who had a very diverse way of thinking. And, you know, there were pockets of toxic behaviour, individuals' toxic behaviour, but there were also places where I was allowed to be a very caring, compassionate Geraldine who was really good at doing certain things. And I I've had some amazing bosses who've actually given me that space to do that. How did it feel? Initially, when you're going into those new spaces, you have very experienced people. I in I don't know why, but it used to be that when I went into the child protection team, it used to be relatively younger service women. I think I was 26 at the time that I went into child protection in particular, and much older men, much older detectives. Although I know that when I had my children in my 30s, I would not have wanted to go back into the child protection team space. So I'd say that you I felt supported in places within those smaller environments, and yeah, there's a real mix of how you're how you feel you belong and how you are accepted, but always having to be better to make a difference. I say better than your colleagues, better than men and women, because you're, you know, within the space of in within policing, you'll have a lot of my female colleagues found, I'd say found it very difficult to stand alone and stand proud. Um Sam very much went um very into that male space uh and and that I don't quite know how to describe it, but very that testosterone-filled space, they they became that, and and and others um didn't. And I I'd very much say I walked my own path. Um, and it's not always a very popular place to be walking that path, but I've had some amazing allies within my policing career. But again, I know it's not easy, but it's an exciting one. I've got um a relative who's just joined the police, and their experience is going to be very different because it's he's a man, but indeed um, but but also I have two daughters, and I don't think it's a space I would have wanted my daughters to go into.

Working Domestic Abuse And Child Protection

SPEAKER_02 11:37

Yeah. You've described actually lots of different liminal spaces just in that career alone. And for listeners who want to understand more what liminality is, if you haven't listened to episode one with Bjorn Thomason, please go back and listen to episode one in this series. So thinking about that in-between space between policing and that culture you describe, I'm guessing that you arrived into a gymnastics culture and you actually were a bit 18 again. You didn't know what you were landing into, you didn't know what that culture looked like. I've not worked in that environment, that's not a sector I've worked in. I would have no idea what that culture brought with it. So we've got the sense of the culture in the police. What was the culture that you landed in? What was that liminal space that you arrived into something? What did it look like?

SPEAKER_00 12:43

The position that I'm in now didn't exist. So it's a new role that I was going into. And it was very much a new role that had been created as a result of very brave, courageous individuals speaking up and saying, this has happened within a gymnastics environment and it wasn't right. And the response to that through the White Review, but also through dealing with complaints, had impacted on many individuals and it hadn't necessarily been done as well as it could. A number of factors, um not defending that, but a number of factors played into that, a deluge of complaints and issues that had actually come to the fore because of athlete in America, um, because of the White Review, because of the harm that had actually come to light, and spaces being made available to people to speak up. So um I'd gone into this space that the culture had already started changing, it already started to improve. I think they were very brave, Bush Gymnastics, to take somebody that wasn't from a gymnastics environment or a sporting environment. Um I I was uh outside. Um, it's taken me a little while to belong. I've worked very hard at that. It's interesting that in in um the way you speak and introduce these subjects, you talk about connection and compassion. My strategy talks, my British gymnastics safe sports strategy speaks about connection, compassion, communication, and and and those are things that are really, really very important to me. And I'd say culturally, there are and were many people that are ready for change. And and I was fortunate to join at that particular time. I think a lot of the hard graft had been done before I got there, and it was my place to continue with it. However, moving from the police where I think I spoke about going to girl guiding as well, but going from the police into girl guiding after 31 years of being in the police into a youth organization, I had a six months, you've really got to just chill out a bit here, Geraldine. Because I, you know, you're in the police, it's very compliance-based. It's very, I ask you to do this, you do that. Um, you know, you arrest for some wrongdoing, you interview, you, there's a start, there's a middle, there's an end.

SPEAKER_02 15:22

And there is having a vision of you with the girl guides. Be it be it being the police in the in girl guiding, that must have just been like such a shock for you and for them. I mean, they must have just been like, what is happening? Who is this person?

Crossing Into Sport And Safe Sport

SPEAKER_00 15:40

I I had a wonderful, very patient manager there who recruited me, but also um managed me, which is um quite incredible. And yeah, she she tried to soften my emails in that first six, six months and softened that because of course I was very um want to do a good job, want to make things safer, want to make a difference. And going in there, I'm dealing with volunteers. You're not dealing with paid employees, you're dealing with volunteers who are passionate and committed to making spaces for um girls and young women, and they that they have full-time roles within society, and then they're doing this on a voluntary basis. And yeah, I it I'd say it was a really steeply learning curve for me because I had to use my influence and my negotiation skills rather than the uniform or the the warrant card to say this is what we do because it's the law. It was a very different space, and I was able to use that then to come to British gymnastics. And I already knew how there, that liminality, that in-between space of them getting used to me and me getting used to them was a very important time to understand who I was, but also understand who the gymnastics community is. You know, there are so many amazing coaches, so many amazing gymnastics clubs, giving access to people from all walks of life, and it is it's an incredible space, and it's joyful when it's done well. Yeah, I I I I don't think well it's not finished yet. I've got more to do, um, I've got more to impact on that culture. So I don't I I think that liminality is ongoing.

SPEAKER_02 17:37

Yeah, I was going to say, how did your sense of who you are shift as you crossed into the the new as you're crossing, you're describing it as you're still actually crossing into the new I really want to just highlight again that you're talking about a shift from people having to do what you say, they just do have to do what you say, or there are very severe consequences, moving right through to actually and you had these skills already, fortunately, but really digging into those skills that draw people to you, that draw people into a connection and being comfortable communicating, and they're quite nuanced skills, aren't they, to be able to do that?

The White Review And Culture Shift

SPEAKER_00 18:38

They are, and I've taken them for granted for much of my life, Lisa. Um and I don't use them lightly either, because many of the people that I've dealt with previously and I'm dealing with within the gymnastics environment, have sadly been harmed and abused, have and are living with those experiences still. And as a national governing body, we have a a duty to protect and prevent harm, not just to the gymnasts, but also to to coaches, to club owners, to committee members. And so that that's again, it's an in-between space where you're you have to be there for all and show fairness and show proportionality. And yeah, do you know it's pulled on all my skills, Lisa? Some of the conversations have been really tough because it's really tough to stand over things that have happened historically, but the impact is still so present and the impact is still so real and will never ever go away. And I'm not able to change that. But I'm also not afraid to say sorry for that. And I again um I'm lucky that our uh the CEO has already apologised for that. And I I think we will continue to apologize as we find out what has happened to people. So I don't whether I've answered the question on that one, Lisa.

SPEAKER_02 20:04

I will come back to that. I was just thinking about how sorry and consent are not one-time deals, they're continuously revisited as people move and shift and grow and transform, and I think what I was really also thinking about have there been any because liminal spaces can be very transformational. That's we can't escape them. We're going to have liminal spaces all the time. It's what we what happens in them and what what lens we're looking at things with, and what people are there to hold us, to carry us through that liminal space. So who is and has carried you through this liminal space? What rituals have you had or moments or events that have helped you move and continue to move, as you said, from one liminal space to another, so that it's been transformative rather than incredibly difficult.

From Command To Influence

SPEAKER_00 21:21

I think having worked through lots of personal things throughout my life, um, always having access to counselling, always having access to, you know, I mean I'm in a space at the moment, I'm very fortunate with British gymnastics that they provide you with um that support. And that to varying degrees, a bit like the onion being peeled back, has been helpful, unhelpful, transformative, a bit stuck. So so I I've always um I've always accessed um coaching, counseling. Um, and I'm a great advocate for that, for my well-being. My husband um has seen the uh has been there to, and he's my champion, you know, he champions what I do and how I do it, even when sometimes I'm having that self-doubt. And I've gotten much better at reflecting back to seeing the difference I have made. I I can think back to people that I dealt with in my early days within the police and knowing that not every day, but I've made a difference there. The way that contact the way that contact happened, I've made a difference. I sit in this office at home and I've got um cards from my three managers that I left at um Gil Guiding, who were very kind words that they gave me. But I actually look at those because as I progressed through my many roles, I've become a much better leader. I don't know that when I first speak got promotion within the police, whether those people there would have written the words that my girl guiding managers wrote to me about, you know, it and and and they, you know, they don't know that I'm in that in-between space of becoming a manager and then to a leader. But I would say that that's very important to me. And I can look back and reflect on making a difference in their careers and their lives for the way that I managed and interacted. Again, not always I would say not positive. I think positive interactions, but not always what they thought was best for them, but you know, stretching them and encouraging them because I really enjoy developing people. So yeah, I'd say that that counselling space, that Gary space, previous colleagues, and and knowing where, you know, I I I like this, I like start middle middle and ends. So where I started when I first joined British gymnastics to this middle piece now, it is there's so much to do, and I'm yeah, I and my team are doing so much, and I would like to get to a time, an end where I can say, yeah, I I've made a real difference there. But at the moment, that's quite that can be on some days amazing. On other days, how am I going to get through this? Or how you know, how do I have to chunk this up to actually get the thing done? That's the middle, isn't it? That's the the liminality that's but I also enjoy that hugely. But also in my, I've talked about the leadership and the development piece. I look at individuals that I deal with now and I'm enjoying watching them beginning to blossom. That keeps me going.

SPEAKER_02 24:46

Well, I guess my final question, which makes me sound like I'm asking you lots of questions, but my final question and interest is really for the reader, uh the listeners. Thinking about a liminal space that's been transformative, is there anything that you would share that would offer insights to people regarding areas of resilience, capacity, identity, or transformation?

SPEAKER_00 25:19

It's okay not to be okay. It's okay to need counselling. It's okay to need sometimes. I need to speak to uh my counsellor or my my coach uh once a month, sometimes it's once every three months, and it's okay to be vulnerable and and sharing that vulnerability in a way that doesn't drain someone else, it can radiate, it can it can help someone else, and I think as I've transformed and become more comfortable with the vulnerability and and my experiences and how they've shaped how I operate, I think that has helped other people.

Balancing Care With Fair Process

SPEAKER_02 26:07

That's lovely. Thank you so much. It has been such a pleasure speaking with you today, and I really, really appreciate you coming on the podcast and talking about liminality. Thank you so much, Lisa. It's been a pleasure.

SPEAKER_01 26:23

You've been listening to the Trauma Resonance Resilience podcast with me, your host, Lisa Cherry. Brought to you straight from the heart of the knowledge that high quality relationships are the cornerstone of learning, healing, and growing. If you've enjoyed this episode, please consider sharing or reviewing. Until next time.