Through skilled dialogue, creative interventions and collaborative learning, coaches, mentors and supervisors in supervision, have a space in which to reflect on and deepen all areas of their practice. Supervision may for example, focus on tough ethical dilemmas, boundary management, and contractual issues - or on how to work better with ‘difficult’ coachees or resolve a ‘critical incident’ with a coachee.
In other sessions, supervisees explore aspects of personal development so as to deepen and extend their range – eg supervisees become less entangled with coachees’ ‘games’ or to deal more quickly and effectively with the impact of challenging behaviour. In all of this, supervision will be enabling the coach to become more self-aware (‘the lens through which they look’) and to learn how to use that awareness in service of their work. Key to this process, is supporting coaches to value and use their own Internal Supervisor – the ‘one’ who gets immediate cognitive, somatic and intuitive data and who is often under used.
Supervision sessions will offer creative experiments to enhance learning – eg using role-play, cards or Gestalt exercises to illuminate significant unconscious processes or systemic factors. Always, there will be new learning – new perspectives, interventions and skills.
Coach supervisors work with and in, complex conversations all the time. They are trained to notice and work with subtle influences in dialogue, both conscious and unconscious. In short, they have excellent relational skills.
