021 The Value of Coaching Supervision

[Music] The coaching crowd podcast is for compassionate, courageous leaders, HR professionals and high achievers. People who are passionate about helping others to find alignment in their lives through coaching and do a thinking of training and developing as a coach. [Music] Hello everybody and welcome to the coaching crowd podcast with me, Jay Wheatley and my friend and co-host Zoe Hawkins. Hi everybody, great to back for another episode. This week we are talking about the value of supervision and that's coaching supervision. The reason we want to bring that to you today is because I think supervision is largely a misunderstood concept in the coaching industry. To be honest, I think carries a little bit of a flavor of thought. It's about big brother watching you. We want to spend some time on this because there is real value in gems that comes from supervision. It's also something we get a lot of feedback from on our programme. It's a really enjoyable and valuable part of the coaching training experience. We thought we'd bring that for you to exploring conversation today. Yeah, so supervision is an essential part of being an ethical coach and it is also a requirement when you become an accredited coach to keep up your supervision. There are certain levels of supervision required for the number of hours of coaching practice that you have. On our course, if you study for the level 7 with us, you get access to eight hours of group supervision and we structure that as two hours every other month whilst you're doing your coaching practice. So you initially come and you complete the facilitated training sessions with us. And when you complete those, you've got all of the theory, you've done some practice. It's now about how you put that together into a coaching programme with your real-life coaching practice clients. And so we support you through that phase of your coaching qualification with small group supervision. So there'll be group sizes of about five people. And it's a really intimate space and supervision is essentially about giving you that kind of helicopter view on your coaching practice. It enables you to get support. It enables you to develop as a coach. It is a space for you to be challenged in order to grow and it's also a place where we help to support and uphold the standards of the coaching profession. And supervision is an experience that you have both as a new coach and also continuing right through your coaching careers of both Joe and I engage in supervision. As we work with clients, we take different things to supervision to explore because it's such a rich learning ground to be able to extend our skills as practitioners and also just gain, you know, super vision, that helicopter view of what is going on between you and the coachy and the system that you're working in. And it's a way to really extend that learning experience beyond your coaching training into a very different environment. And of course, as you're working with a supervisor, just as you develop close relationships with your clients as a coach and coachy, the relationship between supervisor and coach is also a really deep rooted relationship which is created in psychological safety and is a container for you to bring all sorts of things to supervision which might be about you as the coach and how you're feeling and how you're experiencing your client work. It could be about clients themselves. It might be about the context of which you're working questions and concerns you might have around different topics that are being bought up. It's a really vast container and it's a place where you go to be supported and resource yourself to do the work with the clients that you're serving. And it's certainly not a place for you to be judged. So as with all coaching relationships, it's an equal synergistic relationship. So it's one where you're okay and also the supervisor is okay. And you know, if you haven't done coaching training yet, your only experience of supervision is likely to have been in the workplace. And I think there's still cultural issues around supervision within many organizations where supervision is still experienced as the manager is in that I'm okay and the team member perhaps that's you feeling like I'm not okay. That one up one down kind of a dynamic and that absolutely is not the dynamic of coaching supervision. It is a meeting of equals and as Zoe said, it is a container to be held. I think supervision is also a journey. So I think in those early days when you come out of coaching training, you're using supervision perhaps as a bit of mental coaching. So like, am I, you know, I didn't quite understand this. Have I done it right? You know, how can I build my knowledge? But you'd be surprised at how fast that actually progresses into exploring the psychodynamics between you and your client and there are terms like transfer and some parallel process which you'll come to learn and understand on your coaching training. And as you develop your reflective practice skills and you engage in supervision, you start to see these, you know, strange occurrences between you and your client. So an example of that might be where you're going into your coaching session with a client and you're feeling really anxious and you're not usually an anxious person. And so you start to question, what is this feeling of anxiety and what you start to notice is that you're actually experiencing some of your client's anxiety. So in supervision, you help to understand that and then think about now that I know that how can I use that in service of my client to develop and deepen the work that we're doing together. So your supervisor's almost like an extension of the client relationships that you have and it's a place where your supervisor is working in service of you as the coach, but also in service of your clients, they're holding the agenda for your clients as well. So that you're almost like a team together working on your client problems. And of course, you can do that anonymously with a supervisor. Your supervisor doesn't need to know the names, organizations, details of anything. They just need to know what your questions are and what your experiences and what you're seeking to learn. And great supervision really requires you as the coach to be able to access your reflective practitioner skills. And that's a really core coaching competency. So as you develop as a coach, what you'll be doing is delving deeper and deeper, peeling back more and more layers of internal reflections, reflections about your actions, reflections about your interactions. And with other people, individuals and also those wider systems. And we work very hard on that in our coaching programmes. And we find that that often is one of the biggest challenge that people face because it requires you to confront yourself both your strengths and also your areas for development. But the biggest opportunities for growth are when we as coaches or you as coaches are really able to lean into vulnerability and the possibility that there are other approaches or that your own values and beliefs are perhaps influencing the way that you are showing up for your client. Perhaps you you're in a session where you've been triggered by something that your coach has said, maybe you find yourself colluding with them sometimes or desperate to share your own personal experience. With a view to helping your client, but actually with the realisation or reflecting on that, I think it actually I think there was more about my need to share rather than it being fully in service of my client. And I think reflective practice is such a critical life skill. So it's really important for coaching, obviously as you outline really well there, Joe. And also I think we're all reflective practitioners. We all walk out of those meetings, don't we start questioning, oh my gosh, did I say the right thing? What were people thinking of me? Like your inner critic is essentially your inner reflective practitioner, but it doesn't always work in service of you. And I believe coaching really helps you to tame that inner critic to become your inner champion because it helps you to reflect on your work that you're doing. Also, you know, your life in the relationships you have, but in a really constructive and positive way that supports your growth mindset rather than a fixed mindset. And so as you develop those reflective practitioner skills, you're also just training your mind to reflect in a way that's in support of you, your values, your goals, and how you want to be both in relationship and in the world. Yeah. And I mean, we could talk endlessly about reflective practice. I think my experience of supervision is about it's kind of suspending all judgment and really just being able to go off and explore different aspects and supervision is also about helping to lift you out of the like you might have started to get a bit obsessive maybe around a particular session that you've had with the client. It might be going round and round in your head. This happens particularly for like new coaches starting out where they can find it difficult to leave a coaching session. Perhaps one that's been particularly emotional and they're not sure what to do with the feelings and the thoughts that they're having. So supervision is that place to be able to come and the supervisor will be able to lift you out of the detail of what happens and the replay of it and lift you off and out of it and be able to just look at it and think has it influenced any other relationships in your life? Does what's happening in your relationship with this particular coach reflect any other relationships you have in your life or any other relationships that the coach has in their life and all of a sudden the coach who's having supervision can just go oh my goodness. And so I think supervision provides as many questions as it does answers and that's okay because coaching really is all about curiosity. So what are you required to bring? the KG to supervision is courage and it's no secret that I really dislike the term supervision. I really dislike it. I feel it's very outdated and we'd love to see it updated. For me, I much prefer terms like courage hour or courage sessions or fireside chats or something else that captures the actual essence of the real special relationship that there is between coach and supervise and really you want that relationship where you can share absolutely anything. I remember a couple of supervision sessions that really stick in my mind and I think the first one I had this session booked in for the morning, it was during lockdown and I was so stressed at this particular period of my life and I remember thinking, oh my gosh, I've got supervision, what am I going to bring, what am I going to talk about, like going through all of that. And so I arrived at the supervision session and I said, you know, Elaine, it's my supervisor, I've been thinking about this all morning, I know I want the supervision session with you, I don't know what to bring, you know, my mind's all over the place. She says, why don't we start there? And I immediately, like, I just breathe and she just took like almost like control and she did a grounding activity with me, some breathing and kind of centered me for the session. And then instantly I could think clearly, and of course we went on and we had a great session that encapsulated much of the, you know, situation that I was in and also some client work that I was doing and how those two things were, were kind of dancing together. And then there was another one that would different supervise this time, Lady Cordillo and not you, another Joe of another Joe in my life at that time. And I went into the supervision session and feeling an overwhelming need for reassurance about a client that I was working with. And I remember just saying to her, like, I don't know why I feel like I need your reassurance because usually I'm feeling really decisive and that would have been really easy for her to give me the reassurance. And just say, that's fine, like, you know, sounds like you've got it all sorted, but instead she was like, why don't we explore that? And so we had this amazing conversation around the need for reassurance and where was it coming from and how was that rooted kind of in the coaching relationship? They're just such fascinating and enriching conversations that really take you outside of the problem to be able to think differently. Yeah, so I have a love for supervision now that I definitely didn't have when I was coming in to my coaching journey. And then the course that I did, I mean, bearing in mind now, this was over 10 years ago, didn't have supervision, didn't talk about supervision. There was no supervision, you know, it was a very different experience back then, whereas now it's an integral part of, you know, training and being a coach. So I hope that the coach has entered the industry now actually develop a really positive view of what supervision is and budget for that to be part of their profession as they move forward beyond their coach and training into the practice, be it as an internal coach or working with clients independently. And I've just realised we should probably mention that we are qualified super coaching supervisors. And what brought that to mind is I really just wanted to share how much I love facilitating supervision. So there are different types of supervision, which is also important for us to mention. So you can access, you know, out there one to one supervision, you can access group supervision, which is usually cheaper because you're one of many. And also peer supervision, they all can be really effective and can play different roles. Some coaches work with a number of supervisors at the same time because it gives them different lenses, different challenge, different support from different people, keeps them fresh. And coaching supervision is also about resourcing you because as a coach, you're holding space and holding the energy of different energy of spaces for people several days a week, if not five days a week. And you need somewhere objective and supportive to be able to resource you. And, you know, that particular aspect of supervision is just so important. And, you know, people will leave supervision with different emotions at different times. Sometimes people will leave supervision disappointed because they didn't get what they kind of thought that they wanted to get from it. They've got something different and they're still processing that. Sometimes people are going to leave supervision relieved or excited or feeling really connected, feeling that great sense of belonging. And all of those things are okay. All of those things are useful. It's about what you do with that. So a bit like coaching, all of the learning related to supervision doesn't happen in the supervision session. There's a lot of learning from supervision that takes place outside of that. And so what you need to work out is moving forward. How often would you want to have supervision to support your practice? And that will depend on the number of kts you've got. It'll depend on your budget. It depends on what's required for accreditation. But as you said, so people need to be conscious of the fact that becoming a coach, a professional ethical accredited coach does also require you to invest in an ongoing basis in supervision. And there's lots of different supervisors. So it's useful to actually experience supervision with different people to be able to find somebody that you like and you might stick with that person or you might choose to continue to work with different supervisors during your coaching career. Probably another thing we should have spoke about right at the start was the difference between like coaching and supervision because they do sound quite similar. And in many ways they are, but I think the main difference in a coaching relationship, it's goal orientated. So you go in with a really clear goal around what you want to achieve or your coach helps you to define a goal. And then you work towards in a future orientated way. Whereas in supervision, it's a little bit more like where are we right now? And you sort of walk together side by side exploring the different things that come up. So there's no agenda to have to get to a particular outcome. And in, you know, I have the succession packages with my supervisor as I go along. And there's no necessarily one theme. There's no one thing I'm aiming for across those succession. It's each session is like a new session. I could start with whatever is relevant. But at the same time, my supervisor will hold an agenda and share with me different insights and themes that she is seeing coming up from, you know, across the board of the coaching that I'm doing. And sort of shining a light, if you like, on things that maybe I haven't seen that she is seeing we can explore together. And obviously some of the differences we've shared around the different style of supervision, making ethical decisions and resourcing yourself. So hopefully you can start to see the differences between the two. And ultimately supervision is what you need it to be in that moment as a practitioner. Yeah, I think it's really difficult to define the difference. And I understand people's confusion around it. Because for me, my style of coaching is so similar to the way that, you know, that people describe supervision. But so I think the best way is the way you just describe is what you need it to be as a coaching practitioner. Yeah. And do you know what on, on that, I think when you get into the realms of working with kind of executives and senior leaders, like you, I think my coaching has become more like supervision, you know, more about creating and holding space for whatever is emerging in that moment, which you find people with really large roles and big remits of responsibility. They have the action orientation, they have the capacity to make decisions, you know, they have the strategic thinking. There aren't really any goals that they're working on. They just need to breathe and need space to kind of processing, have a clear mind and have a thought partner and be able to see, you know, different themes and patterns that maybe are working through in their leadership that they haven't been able to see. So there's definite crossovers, particularly as you move more into that. What we now call, I suppose, executive supervision. Then you've got the coach supervision and obviously you've got coaching. So really it's a co-created relationship, isn't it? It's fascinating though, because I think I still find myself saying to my supervisor, can I bring this to supervision? Like, there'll be something on my mind. I'm still saying like a child, can I bring this to supervision? And then of course we explore it. So, you know, we all step through different roles. You know, I'm a supervisor myself, I'm a coach myself, you know, I'm a learner myself, you know, what a lifelong learner but undertaking different trainings. I think another thing I'd like to share about supervision is that it is a possible future CPD for you. So even if you haven't decided to train as a coach, but you think, you know, it really appeals to me to have this role, to help to uphold the standards of the profession, to support coaches with their wellbeing, to help them to develop. Then, you know, you can start looking into that at the same time as you're looking at coaching training if you want to. So it is a possible future career pathway for you. I think some people are purely coaching supervisors, but a lot of supervisors are also practicing coaches themselves because they then still have that real life example and it can help them to relate to other coaches. So, you know, you might just be listening and think, yeah, that I think that's something I might like to do in the future. And of course, you get to experience coaching supervision as you set on the coaching training program. And if you're a coach already and you're not in supervision, then do reach out, get yourself a supervisor, you know, contact Joe and I if you want to because to experience really positive supervision, I just think it's a really empowering thing to be able to do. So if you listening to this and you're thinking, yeah, now's the time I'd like to join the coaching training. If you're listening in real time, this is around February and we take intakes in in March and September for our coaching training programs. So you can come and join us on our March intake, but you can book onto our programs anytime by visiting our website, IGCompany.co.uk. Thank you for listening to the coaching crowd podcast with so We're Zoe Hawkins and Joe Wheatley. We'd love for you to join our inclusive community to learn and grow in the coaching space. Go over to Facebook and search for the coaching crowd to be in good company with other aspiring coaches.