#128 How does it feel to be in supervision?

It is 2010. The room is filled with novice coaches. There is chatter, brief laughter, the sound of coffee cups being lifted, sipped and replaced on the shiny boardroom table, and chairs scrape as people shuffle themselves into place. The coaching supervisor enters the room and quietly takes a seat. The hubbub continues for a short while. The supervisor stays silent, head and eyes slightly lowered. Slowly, the noise subsides over what seems like an age. A cough. The nervous rattle of a pen. A sniff. Then silence. The clock on the wall ticks loudly. A minute passes. The supervisor is unmoved. Attendees nervously eye each other but say nothing for another minute. It has been seven full minutes since the supervisor entered the room.

‘Erm,’ begins one of the coaches, ‘I’m just wondering when we are going to make a start.’ The supervisor looks up, ‘What makes you think we haven’t started?’

So begins the relationship with my first supervisor. In contracting, he says he has my back. No matter what happens in my coaching sessions, he expects me to bring the challenges that arise to supervision, and he is there to support me to coach safely and become a better coach without judgment. Having said that, he also tells me to expect him to be very, very challenging.

And he was.

The coaching assignment involved several of us coaching several senior executive directors and their director teams across a large, diversified organisation. We had hired a supervisor for the engagement. In our group supervision sessions, he had us practising our coaching with each other, observing and giving feedback, discussing the challenges we faced and exploring coaching themes. He had us attempt new coaching techniques, including tag coaching, where multiple coaches coached one person in rapid-fire rotation, and silent coaching, where the coachee could say nothing at all, and the coach had only their body language to infer what was going on for them. He gave us very direct feedback on his experience of us and of our coaching.

I experienced deep learning, and my confidence to coach senior executives grew immeasurably. Full disclosure: at the time, I had no coach training, and I had never been employed at the executive director level I was coaching. I hadn’t heard of the term imposter syndrome back then, which is perhaps a good thing. With hindsight, this is exactly what I was experiencing.

Most coaches feel anxious when they are early in their coaching career, and when they come to group supervision for the first time. They are concerned about being compared to each other, dislike being in groups with other coaches, or perhaps have had a different experience of supervision (or something akin to it) while they were training. Some coaches even say their first experience of supervision was a bad thing, where they felt neither heard nor seen. Shockingly, up to 30% of coaches report a bad early supervisory experience.

Yet, many coaches report that they feel love, warmth and calm, and find the experience refreshing, challenging, enjoyable and a great source of reflection and learning. I just started with a new supervision group this week, and the reflections at the end of our first session reflected the usefulness, reassurance and coaching confidence that was co-created through everyone present being open, honest and well-prepared to offer their vulnerability into the space. ‘I feel like we’ve known you for a long time,’ said one participant.

Do you remember your first time engaging in group supervision? What feelings did it evoke in you?