Lifting the Lid on Coaching Supervision

Clare and Steve explore how to evaluate our coaching (and also our supervision): How do we balance our needs with whether we are meeting those of our clients? How do we know? What can we pay attention to, and how can our self-awareness and self-development be used to support this process of evaluation? And what about feedback? Exploring this topic leaves our podcasters with new learning and a sens...

In today’s podcast, Steve and Clare discuss ways to start a coaching session. We’ve talked a good deal about endings, but less about beginnings. Here, we notice how the first minute in a coaching session provides rich data and that if we meet them where they are at that time, we can support the thinker to talk out loud and iterate in the moment about what’s most important to bring to this coaching...

Prompted by a supervisee, frustrated with where the coaching went after they asked a nice broad open question, Clare and Steve explore how to decide whether your next question should narrow the focus or broaden it out. Do you consciously decide and how sure are you of what your question is doing? Do you have a favourite focus; are you more comfortable going one way?

Coaches sometimes give homework to their clients. Clare and Steve discuss their own experiences of this, revealing their personal belief systems about it. But is homework just one topic which shines a light on bigger questions for us as coaches, and would exploration of your take on homework, with your supervisor, prove useful? Perhaps it would?

"How does one know to say you're not fit for a session as a coach?" This was the group supervision question raised recently that Steve and Clare explore. Maybe you are physically, mentally or emotionally not at your 'best' level, but don't want to cancel with your client as they may judge you, you may feel guilty, or maybe you simply need the money? This a great topic for group supervision because...

Clare and Steve talk with Salma Shah about how to coach under-represented and minority groups in a majority space. We can all learn to listen more intently to what is going on for the people we work with, so as not to make any assumptions about their life experience or entanglements. Salma helps us to pay more attention to the subtleties of difference, no matter whether that is about being an intr...

At some point, we will all transition to working less or not at all. This sometimes comes to supervision. Given that the word comes from the French retirer, to withdraw (back to a place of safety), Clare and Steve discuss the importance of ending well in order to make a great, safe new beginning, finding one’s (new) identity; what it takes to shut down a business safely and satisfactorily.

Clare and Steve talk with Michelle Lucas about stimulating ways to build reflective practice into your schedule. They discover that they all dislike journaling as a form of reflection, but that prompts that are auditory, visual, kinaesthetic and metaphorical approaches that can bring much more joy to reflective practice, and much more insight, compared to simply playing back what happened. Michell...

Arising from Transactional Analysis, the idea of game-play originated by Eric Berne is the subject of this episode. In any human interaction or exchange, game-play is possible. Clare and Steve explore examples they have experienced in coaching and supervision. They refer to the social and psychological messages that lie underneath games and how our need for strokes might unconsciously draw us into...

Clare and Steve wonder whether the anxiety that coaches, and clients, feel about the state of the world, leads to lower levels of courageous intervention in our coaching. This episode takes us through a model called BANI , developed by Jamais Cascio to replace VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous), which Jamais suggests is becoming obsolete as the pace of change has become even greater...

Clare and Steve welcome Georgina Woudstra to the podcast to acknowledge the growth in team coaching and to ask, what is good team coaching and how do we get good supervision for the challenges that arise for a team coach? Georgina is a leader in the development of team coaching. She leads the Team Coaching Studio - https://teamcoachingstudio.com/ Georgina's book, "Mastering The Art of Team Coachin...

Clare and Steve ponder this perhaps taboo subject. Taboo because it doesn’t rear its head in supervision very often, yet we suspect that there is more of it in the system than coaches like to admit to. We ask questions such as: What has shifted? What are you experiencing? What patterns in other parts of your life might be having an impact? What might it be like if you looked at it through a differ...

Prompted by a discussion in Steve's supervision group, Clare and Steve explore what it means to sack a client. Maybe this is more relevant to the corporate client, but maybe we can also do this with a private client? Do we cover this in our terms and conditions? Where in the lifecycle of our work might we end our arrangement? Early, part way through, before we have started even? What is our respon...

Clare and Steve talk about breaking out of our coaching comfort zone, to do and be something that we are not normally, for the benefit of our thinker. Being and doing the same old routine, holding back or playing it safe, will not serve our clients as they are all unique and deserve diverse and discrete interventions from us, to meet them where they are. But what do we risk when we stop playing it...

In this episode Clare and Steve explore disruption and interruption. Whether they be third party, client or coach interruptions, auditory or visual interruptions in the 'Zoomworld', or disruptions we plan to spark new learning for our clients; how are you impacted by disruptions and interruptions? Do you even think about your relationship to disruption and what beliefs or mindset might lie behind...

Steve and Clare are joined by Tatiana Bachkirova, academic, educator, author, coach and supervisor. They discuss Tatiana’s latest book; Coaching and Mentoring Supervision - Theory and Practice - exploring as they chat, working pluralistically, the variation that can be found in supervision, models, current research in the field of coaching and coach supervision, including the multiplicity of self...

Taking their lead from Forrest Gump’s expression “Life is like a box of chocolates”, Clare and Steve muse around the statement starter “Supervision is like…” What’s the metaphor you would use?

Steve and Clare ask, Have you ever thought about your transitions into and out of supervision? How choiceful are you about these beginnings and endings? How do you make them good for you and good for your supervisor and/or group?

Steve asks - “How is it different if we come to supervision as a coach or if we come as a supervisee?” Clare and Steve explore how changing the name of the role we hold in the coaching and supervision relationships can impact how we come. Some supervisors refer to the coaches as supervisees, some do not. How do you think of yourself as you come to supervision, and if you try on the other ‘role’ ho...

Clare and Steve talk with Charlotte Wilding, whose journey to coaching came via a career in teaching as a modern languages teacher. Charlotte now works with teachers and pupils to bring coaching skills into the local schools. We explore the undoubted merits of this, for the young people experiencing coaching as they make choices early in life and how that might lead to them extolling the virtues a...

Clare and Steve explore bringing life to supervision. We tell our clients that it's not just about work, not just about the goal; that sometimes life gets in the way and that we are working with the whole person. So why is it we, as supervisees, don't always take all of ourselves to supervision? Health, parenting, burnout, menopause, retirement...

Clare and Steve look at all of the ways that we, as coaches and as supervisors, might get stuck in an echo chamber. We encourage ourselves, and you, to spread our wings and find different viewpoints or lenses through which to see the world and coaching, all in service of being a more rounded coach.

Clare and Steve talk with John Anderson about his non-traditional route into executive coaching, from being an RAF personal trainer, through personal and pastoral development for the RAF, alongside representing GB in canoeing and then on to coaching athletes through five cycles of Olympic Games. We talk about how this journey informs his coaching beliefs and profile today. And we all agree that we...

Clare and Steve discuss bio writing and what gets in our way, whether we are writing our bio for the first time or revisiting it to test whether it still describes the coach we are becoming. We notice how important it is to differentiate ourselves in our bio to make it stand out from the crowd – and we how tricky that can be, when our mindset tells us we are not any different from anyone else, or...

Clare and Steve, inspired by the Animas blog post of Nick Bolton, explore the place where empathy meets collusion. We seek to be empathetic as coaches, but when might that cross the line and become collusion with our clients? And collusion of course doesn't have to be expressed (even inadvertently), it can be implied by what we don't say or indeed by a smile, a facial movement or a shift in our po...