Lifting the Lid on Coaching Supervision

As coaches, we so rarely bring things to celebrate to supervision. Clare and Steve want to put that right, and they have a good giggle about it along the way. This episode is a wide-ranging exploration of what you might bring to supervision to celebrate and learn from, and how you might celebrate yourself and your peers in a supervision group. It also uncovers why we might be resistant to celebrat...

Clare and Steve share their journey to becoming supervisors and talk about the differences and similarities between being a coach and being a supervisor. They begin to unpack the role of a supervisor, and they discuss their motivations for becoming one as well as what they get from being a supervisor - what’s different and what’s the same as a coach and a supervisor.

Clare and Steve discuss this in the context of coaching and supervision. Does dependency only relate to longevity of relationship? Is dependency in fact merely fulfilling some sort of unfulfilled need? A craving? How might exploration of what draws us to be a coach, work with a coach, work with a supervisor, reveal a propensity to become dependent on that draw? Maybe dependency isn’t simply a bad...

Clare and Steve talk with Katie Friedman and Helen Frewer about neurodiversity in coaching and supervision. A fascinating exploration of the gold that neurodiversity provides, and how, as coaches and supervisors, we need to work on seeing everyone as resourceful, creative and whole as we may have some unconscious biases towards the deficit model (as Clare so deftly but inadvertently showed when sh...

Clare and Steve discuss front stage / back stage. Just like the theatre, we show up in life playing roles where our well-rehearsed selves play the part expected, whilst elements of our true selves remain undisclosed in our dressing room backstage. Clare and Steve share some examples of this from both coaching and supervision and invite listeners to consider how the set might be 'constructed' when...

Clare and Steve explore the question “Do you ever feel stale, stuck, restricted or formulaic in your coaching approach? Curious about our relationship to safety and risk, gain and loss, fear and confidence and to being professional, our podcasters share stories and raise the not knowing levels.

Clare and Steve talk to Alex Van Oostveen about his journey into coaching and then into supervision and his move from cognitive supervision to spiritual supervision, more relationally based. We discussed echoes in the system, vibrations that transcend the cognitive and draw on intuition, energy, somatics, emotions, excluding nothing.

Clare and Steve talk about the way that corporate culture shows up in the thinker’s beliefs, assumptions and values and how we might work with that to establish what and how they want to be within that culture. As the coach, how are we noticing the culture and is our own experience of corporate culture influencing our work? Oftentimes, we are not aware of the water in the fishbowl that we are swim...

Clare and Steve get caught in a metaphor that they cannot escape – that of chemistry. They take it further than you might ever have thought about it, into elements, periodic tables, test-tubes, petri-dishes and catalysts. All in service of understanding what it means to relate and how we need to step back and reflect on this third role in the coaching and/or supervision space of coach, thinker and...

Clare and Steve discuss ten different approaches to supervision, as described in Michelle Lucas’ book 101 Coaching Supervision Techniques, Approaches, Enquiries and Experiments: *Existential *Gestalt *Person-centred *Positive Psychology *Psychodyamic / TA centred *Solution-focused *Systemic *Thinking Environment *Transpersonal *Eclectic As part of the discussion, they notice their own style and ap...

Steve and Clare talk (and move) with Rowan Gray exploring movement in coaching and supervision. It seems that as children, we learned from our parents to sit down and stay still, when we were being energetic and hyper (eg, moving). So as adults, it can be hard to integrate movement into our practice as we have that parental voice still in our heads. But in this conversation, we talk about cycling...

Steve and Clare notice the imbalanced diversity in the pool of trained supervisors, which is a parallel to the lack of diversity in coaching which is also a parallel to a dearth of diversity in other parts of society. They discuss the matrix of history, skills, experience that make us each unique as coaches and as supervisors and they talk about matching and mismatching and what is most useful to...

Is supervision too expensive? Steve and Clare are obviously biased about the answer to this question. But they chew over the value you get from the investment, and how essential it is to all coaches. People who are already in supervision would not be without it, but it can feel expensive when you embark upon a coaching journey. Trust in the process is key, but how do you know how valuable that pro...

Steve and Clare are joined by Jaya Bhateja, MCC, to talk about all things metaphorical. They discuss how metaphors can break through sometimes complex stories that we tell ourselves to find a simple way of examining what we are facing. They discover how metaphor can be accessed via multiple routes, whether those are auditory, kinaesthetic or visual and can provide new thinking really quickly. They...

This short session is our gift to you as we celebrate our 52nd episode and one year of publishing our podcast. It is a centring exercise to get you ready for supervision.

This short session is our gift to you as we celebrate our 52nd episode and one year of publishing our podcast. It is a reflection exercise to help you to reflect back on what you got out of your supervision.

Steve and Clare discuss developing our reflexivity and capability to self supervise. Not as a replacement for supervision but as a way of deepening our learning. They share techniques and talk about the principles around self supervising. These allow us to explore our practice and rather than perhaps to find answers to the questions we may have, they allow us to access different questions. These c...

Clare and Steve, responding to a listener’s question, explore behaviour change. As coaches we are often hired, or asked, to help a client change a behaviour. But is that all it’s cracked up to be? Could changing a behaviour in fact be pulling a base brick from the Jenga tower? Our podcasters explore the structure of behaviour and offer numerous examples of situations where behaviour change might n...

In this episode, Clare and Steve talk to Simon Cavicchia about his work on shame. Rich with examples, we start with the idea that “shame is the entrance to the self” (Gershen Kaufman), an ever-present potential that does not dare speak its name. The reason it is so present is our human need for connection and our beliefs, perpetuated by introjects from parents, work, society, that “something we've...

Clare and Steve ponder the direction of coaching. Is the market saturated with an over-supply of coaches? Has the pandemic added further to the increased supply and a reduction in demand? Are organisations shifting what they are looking for and who they target coaching at? When will technology arrive and change the way we work? How do changes in what society is focused on impact us as coaches - th...

Clare and Steve discuss how they consider their own CPD and offer ideas about how you might too. Is CPD about skills and knowledge, or is it about personal learning - learning about yourself? Do we have a plan for our learning? How do we decide what learning we engage with? Where does supervision and mentor coaching fit alongside courses, books, training programmes, webinars etc? How do we synthes...

Clare and Steve explore how discomfort shows up in our work. We can be uncomfortable asking difficult questions, or with the response our client may have to one; we can be uncomfortable with emotions - our clients, or sharing our own. Our own values, or our personal history, can bring us discomfort when challenged in coaching or in supervision. Sometimes we can feel the discomfort from something s...

In this episode, Clare and Steve talk about harvesting the learning: understanding systemic themes in an organisation that cannot necessarily be addressed through one-to-one coaching, that instead need to be addressed through culture change across the organisation. Leadership teams often listen to what external coaches are hearing, much more than they listen to internal HR or OD practitioners. The...

In this episode, Clare and Steve talk about touch and the ethics surrounding it. They talk about anchors, holding the space, hugs as a form of closure, boundaries, humanity, cultural norms, embarrassment, embodied coaching/supervision and touch, permission to touch, releasing energy through touch, what is acceptable, contracting for touch, codes of ethics, shades of grey. They also explore persona...

In this episode, Clare and Steve explore power and the hidden dynamics of power in the coach/client and the supervisee/supervisor relationship. We can unconsciously give away our power or seek to take it. In organisations as well as in relationships, power dynamics are not always where they seem to be. Do you have power over, power with, or are you accessing power within, in your relationships? Wi...