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’ how is it different for you?

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 as well as returning to this form of growth as their career develops. We also touch on things to be mindful of, if you find yourself working with a client who isn't yet an adult. Charlotte shares her own journey and the important part supervision has played, then and now.

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 wouldn’t be without supervision (of course we do, that’s what this podcast series is all about!)

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 we can't sell ourselves, or we can’t say a certain thing for fear of putting people off, or we haven’t figured out what we don’t want by way of clients. It’s this work that you might bring to supervision: what is it in you that gets in your way of writing a high impact bio?


And if you ever want to bring this or anything else to supervision, please do get in contact with one or both of us. You can find out more about our supervision services on our websites:

Steve: https://idcoach.co.uk/supervision/

Clare: https://www.clarenormancoachingassociates.com/

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 posture. Our podcasters conclude that coaches should be reflecting on their work and any propensity to get this balance out of kilter is probably a trip to supervision.

https://www.animascoaching.com/blog/separating-empathy-and-collusion-in-coaching/

Clare and Steve play in the somatic sandbox with experienced somatic coach Caroline Quaiffe. Derived from Soma (Grk), somatic refers to the body in all its intelligences - including emotional intellect, moral intellect as well physical/body intellect. We also explore the field - the 'intelligence of the system' (Hellinger - family systems). Working this way is a more spacious approach which honours what is, as well as the client's desire to grow and to shift something.

Caroline's website https://coach.quaifeassociates.com/

Somatic Coaching Programme – leaflet and link https://quaifeassociates.vipmembervault.com/products/courses/view/1126998. With the code somaticcoaching it's £199 down from £360 - for one month from the podcast release date.