Why coaching supervision?

Supervision resources you as a coach, helps you work through challenging coaching cases, supports you to align with ethics and best practice, and is a great part of your learning and development and your career journey as a coach.

As I see it, the intention of coaching supervision is to resource you, the supervisee, to be even more effective and fulfilled in your role as a coach.

It also supports you to grow and develop your coaching practice, how you work, where you work, and the quality of those relationships.

Sometimes you might be in a dilemma, and leaning into a conversation in which you explore ethics or values can really help to unravel the challenge.

Supervision can feel like spacious discovery. It usually leads to you being clearer and more able to work effectively with your clients.

An analogy

If your coaching practice was a garden, the supervisor is a collaborative gardening expert who helps you and your garden to flourish, grow the fruits and vegetables that you want, as well as reach for other new and wonderful varieties. They also support you to garden in ways that support your body and your mind. Your supervisor helps you and your garden to flourish all through the seasons, the year, and decades. As you learn more and discover more about gardening, supervision helps your plants and you to be healthy, and your relationship with your garden to be positive, joyful, and beneficial.

When you face a challenge with a plant, you might worry about what you have done wrong or how to resolve it. If it becomes diseased, the supervisor/co-gardening expert would assist you to see more clearly how you are contributing to its health and help you to discover how to do even better in the future so your plants/supervision practice flourishes.

People say coaching with me feels like: developing new, more advanced, and deeper coaching skills; experiencing a journey of confusion to clarity around client work; moving from lack of confidence to confidence in a coaching case; and experiencing a spacious, professionally held space.

Here’s Andry’s philosophy and approach

I’m an individual and group supervisor. With a background in both coaching and teaching, I love working one-to-one and with groups.

My relationship and work with supervisees is based on these four elements:

– our relationship and human interconnectedness,
– lifelong learning cycles (we all go through them!),
– raising awareness of the context (or system) that we live and work in,
– in terms of approaches or tools, for me the ‘whole supervisor’—including their insights, somatic responses, curiosity, empathy, etc.—is the biggest ‘tool’ that there is in supervision.

A little bit about these four areas above:

Human interconnectedness

By giving you space to reflect and co-explore your experience with your coachees—perhaps there is a challenge, you feel bored, disconnected, annoyed, or triggered by the relationship—you may discover what the quality of the connection is like. You may experience it shifting, and that you have more clarity about what you need to do moving forward with your coachee and how you might be in the relationship in an easier way.

Learning cycles

I love to think about life as a series of learning spirals, consciously and unconsciously (or less consciously), acting, reflecting on our learning, and then re-experiencing life again and again. In supervision, we can bring awareness and reflection to our intentions, thoughts, and actions. We can reflect on our work with clients. This awareness-raising exercise is something that supervisees say they find really powerful. This might include solution-focused, ecosystem thinking.

Systemic awareness

Of course, supervision is always relational. It’s about the person that we are in relationship with—the coachee—and ourselves. Then there’s also the relationship that you have with me, your supervisor, and perhaps the relationship that you have with your coach’s organisation. As we work together, we will think about the relationships within the system: the context, the organisation, the culture, maybe even the country and the globe. This systemic awareness can give you insight into how you are coaching and what factors are impacting the coaching and how to have even greater impact through your work.

(In groups, the dynamics can really show up what’s happening in the system. The interaction between different coaches and the coaches and the supervisor can highlight information about the system we all work in and live in too.)

Whole supervisor including somatic

Like a spacious moment of detective work, in supervision, we are alert to clues about the coach-coachee relationship and alert to your development as a coach.

For example, you might be looking for options or to make a decision about learning and development or being accredited. Or perhaps you might be hoping to unravel tension that you are experiencing when you are working with a client.

One of the ways I like to work—if it suits my supervisees—is using somatic enquiry and awareness. This gives us additional information for the process of exploring your work with a coachee.

You might notice, for example, how a coaching relationship is experienced in your body: loose and relaxed in your shoulders, or, for example, tense and tight in your head.

I feel like our instinct and intuition speak to us all day long about our lives through our bodies… much of this is less conscious. I know that when we pay attention to the somatic, it gives me clues about my direction—about the actions that I can take.

For some people, the somatic experience doesn’t work or doesn’t reveal information… it’s not for everyone. It’s a skill to learn to use if you want to. So it’s up to you, the supervisee, to decide if that route is of interest to you. We can experiment and find out.

Beginning the relationship

I would always begin a supervision relationship with a chemistry call. We can get to know each other and discover what you would like as a supervisor and how we might work together. Supervision is a relationship of equals—we are both coaches in a co-created relationship for your development and growth, although of course I am also always learning and growing.

Experience and qualifications

I’ve been supervising intermittently for over 10 years. I trained in supervision with Oxford Brookes University on the Advanced Certificate in Coach Supervision – Part 1 and 2. I’m currently completing Part 3.

Connecting

If you’re interested in coach or mentor supervision with me, Andry McFarlane, please reach out for a chat on WhatsApp: 07984 107728 or email me: andry@thelearningmoment.org