Do you have coaching supervision? Or if you are a coach supervisor, supervision of your supervision? It’s becoming far more prevalent here in the UK…but some of my coaching contacts in the US look at me blankly when I talk about coaching supervision. As if we stop learning as soon as we get that certificate or accreditation; or as if we stop needing support to figure out how to be the best coach we can be.
Well, I can safely say that the investment that I am making is really worth it. And I think my coachees and coach supervisees would say the same, as they get the benefit of this “sharp edge” that I am able to keep honed.
Here’s something I’m learning currently. It’s a question that I keep asking myself.
“What is the shift that needs to happen in me that will enable the shift in the coach, or coachee?”
I’m also learning that this is not something you can answer with your logical brain. Nor something you can plan for ahead of coaching. It’s the limbic brain that really feels it, so it cannot necessarily be named.
For example, I got a sense the other day that standing up would make a difference. Bear in mind that I coach virtually, so the coachee could not see me. But this simple shift made a shift in them too.
That sounds a bit like intuition, right? And I think it is intuition at work. But it’s intuition about shifting specifically that I am talking about here. That might be shifting location, shifting the length of the session, shifting the place of the session – going outside mid-way through for example.
I had been looking for something big to shift. But these are all small, easy to carry out shifts. But with a potentially big impact, as the coach or coachee makes some kind of shift too. Maybe sub-conscious, or maybe we make it conscious by saying it out loud – “I sense that we need to dance right now”, I said to a coachee the other day, who was at the other end of the phone. He said it wasn’t dancing we needed, but at least moving around, as that’s the time he feels more confident to express himself, when he’s moving.
Some of these shifts in me might have nothing to do with the shift that the coach or coachee wants/needs to make. But they might be a metaphor for that shift, such as going somewhere more spacious when the coachee/coach feels constrained in some way.
Or the shift might be a mirror image of what the coachee/coach needs to do, like a parallel process. For example, in a session today, we worked really deeply to examine assumptions in order to shift those assumptions of the coach. Applying this same process could in turn help his coachee to examine his assumptions and decide whether they suited the life he wanted to lead. So the shift for me here was to go deep.
Back to you though…what are you learning from your coach supervision and supervision of your supervision.
