By Michelle Lucas (United Kingdom)
In our last issue Michelle Lucas shared her thoughts on how reflecting with peers can help generate fresh perspectives and allow us to benchmark our work in the marketplace. Reflection can come in many forms and in this third and final part of this series we will take a look at reflection with the help of a supervisor.
Supervision is often poorly misunderstood – the word itself doesnot help as it gives the impression of someone who is looking over your shoulder and telling you what to do. However a properly trained coach supervisor will typically take a much more collaborative approach. There are three primary functions of supervision.
The first is known as “restorative” and gives us a clue to the origins of supervision from therapy and counselling. It is still pertinent to coaches because our clients issues can often have an impact on us – hasn’t everyone had a nightmare boss at some point, who still makes our hackles rise at the thought of how we were treated ? The restorative function of supervision helps us “vent” in a safe space. Importantly where a client issue raises some unfinished business for a coach there needs to be an opportunity to work this through and on occasions identify that further work (coaching or counselling) might be beneficial.
Source: iCN Issue 4 (NLP in Coaching); pages 26-28
About Michelle Lucas
Michelle Lucas is a practicing Executive and Career Coach as well as a Coach Supervisor. She has a background in Psychology and Commercial HR and was trained as both a coach and a coach supervisor at Oxford Brookes University. She is an Accredited Coach with the Association for Coaching and also works for them in a voluntary capacity as the AC Supervision Lead. She began her coaching business “greenfields” in 2003.
