A Supervision Case Study: 3 Coaches

What would you have done?

A client came to me for a supervision/‘extra-vision’ session. They work as a coach themselves and had previously sought help from another coach to focus on their career. They came to me however after working with this coach left them feeling disappointed and angry.

I felt some trepidation and asked what they wanted from our time together. What was the subject for supervision? Did they want me to give a view on another practitioner’s work? Did they want me to have a go at the original brief? Did they want to explore why this disappointing experience happened? Or why it’s hard to get the help they ask for? They weren’t sure, but agreed we would come back to the question.

I shared that there was a risk I might be disappointing too and join the other coach as a ‘bad helper’. Or perhaps worse, split us off and see me as the ‘good helper’ and the saviour of the day. A tempting but deeply unsatisfying role.

The context they shared with the coach was that a personal issue was so emotionally overwhelming it eclipsed other areas of their life. They insisted they needed the coaching to focus on a career dilemma as they found it hard to create space for this themselves.

Now the coach - as my client reported it - said they disagreed. They said that in their experience it was important to deal with what was presenting as most figural in that moment. The coach dug deeper into the personal issue and my client got more overwhelmed and angry. They concluded the session by agreeing they weren’t ready to address the work dilemma, and needed more focussed help with the personal issue. However my client didn’t really believe that, so here we were.

They were clearly overloaded with emotion about the personal issue in our session too as they relayed the experience to me; it was distracting and challenging to move away from it.

So I agreed with the coach as I too couldn’t deny the emotion that was desperate to come out. I also disagreed with coach: follow the brief! I agreed with the emotion pouring out of the client that was begging for…something, the part of the client that wanted a moment of respite to focus on their career…the part of the client that felt both hope and despair as a practitioner working with a fellow practitioner…there were a lot of parts.

What did I do? I reflected back all of the parts I could grasp from the story. I asked my client what they thought we should focus on, perhaps the part that felt the least heard?

In that moment, working with an outpouring of emotion and feeling wobbly, I wanted to see if they could regain their authority for themselves. And they could. It was just below the surface, hidden beneath a desperation and a plea to be saved.

We came to the hypothesis that it didn’t matter what they worked on, what mattered was that it was their choice. And it turned out that this idea had strong resonance across both the work and personal domains for them.

We sat with the sadness of disappointments past and present, the pride of owning one’s own capacity to rescue oneself, and the temptation but utter uselessness of trying to save another.

My client left feeling more grounded.

And I’m left wondering…did I collude with my client or did I help them?

Did the right part receive the extra-vision required?

Which part would you have listened to?

Image by Jovis Aloor