Do you have to be a super hero to be able to provide supervision?
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Another guest post from Su Fowler-Johnson (find out more about Su here):
Since July I have been embarking on the journey of becoming a supervisor for coaches. You may ask yourselves do coaches need supervision? I think the resounding position is YES.
For 3 reasons:
- Coaches need to review what they do, what they do well, where they need to improve (Formative)
- Coaches need to embed standards, ground their practice, celebrate what they do well (Normative)
- Coaches need to develop and grow, raise self awareness, seek support and take issues of their practice to somewhere and someone who is objective (Restorative)
I had one of those ‘aha’ moments recently when I was having some supervision for my own coaching practice. As it turns out, my supervisor and I ended up talking about supervision.
- What’s its purpose?
- How does it help?
- Who has it? Who doesn’t?
- What do I have in place that works?
- What do I want?
- What do I need?
- Who will I supervise?
- What’s my approach?
- How will I contract with clients?
- What’s in? What’s out?
- Individual/group/peer
Interestingly enough, it was the ‘what do I want?’ that was probably the most compelling question. It surfaced for me a deep-rooted desire to:
- Be collaborative
- Be Inclusive
- Grow and learn
- Move on… quickly
- Have my needs met – congruence with ethics, values and professional standards
What became clear is that there is a degree of polarity in this (somewhat) edited list.
- How do you collaborate and move on…. quickly?
- How do you satisfy your needs, the desire to be inclusive, meet the needs of others and move on ….. quickly?
I think it’s the ‘quickly’ bit. It can get you into ‘hot water’. It’s great to do things at pace especially when you learn a new skill. This is something that deserves thought and consideration. Supervision in itself requires deep reflection, spotting patterns and themes, errors of judgment and to be able to pay attention to what you become aware of, in the moment and on the periphery.
So, I am taking my time, thinking things through and hopefully managing my own personal ‘hurry up’ driver. And perhaps supervision is not so much needing x-ray specs to scrutinize, but using super self-awareness…… another super hero trait.