What are some best practices for preparing and reflecting on your supervision sessions?
If you are a life coach, you know how important supervision is for your professional development and ethical practice. Supervision is a collaborative process where you discuss your coaching cases, challenges, and learnings with a qualified supervisor who can offer you feedback, guidance, and support. However, supervision is not just a passive activity where you show up and expect your supervisor to solve your problems. To get the most out of your supervision sessions, you need to prepare and reflect on them in a systematic and intentional way. Here are some best practices for doing so.
Before each supervision session, you should have a clear idea of what you want to achieve from it. What are the specific areas or skills that you want to improve or develop? What are the questions or dilemmas that you want to explore or resolve? What are the outcomes or actions that you want to take away from the session? Having clear goals will help you focus your attention, prioritize your topics, and communicate your expectations to your supervisor.
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Having a clear goal for supervision is a good idea on paper - however after years of having supervised I can say that a more organic approach to supervision aims is necessary. Supervised hours should never be stand alone. Instead, I suggest having a on opening supervision session where the coach and the supervisor simply discuss how the experience was for the coach. What went well and what does the coach feel could be better next time. Based on this - targets can then be set for future supervised hours. This works really well to ensure the coach and supervisor are clear on the coach’s developing needs and progress.
To support your goals, you should also gather relevant data that can inform your supervision session. This may include your coaching notes, recordings, transcripts, feedback, or assessments from your clients, as well as any self-observations or reflections that you have made. Data can help you provide concrete examples, illustrate your points, and validate your claims. It can also help your supervisor understand your context, style, and approach, and offer you more specific and relevant feedback.
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Data gathering is not essential for successful supervision sessions. Reflective processes like supervision benefit from being more organic in nature. A pure coach cannot and should not be stewing coaching sessions along a desired path - and therefore any need to assess data should be irrelevant. If working as a supervisor or mentor, perhaps this is different. But coaching from data driven resources is perfunctory at best.
During the supervision session, you should be open and curious to learn from your supervisor and yourself. This means being willing to share your successes and challenges, listen to feedback and suggestions, ask questions and clarifications, and explore different perspectives and possibilities. Being open and curious also means being honest and respectful, acknowledging your strengths and areas of improvement, and accepting responsibility and accountability for your actions and decisions.
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It is absolutely critical to remain open, responsive and reflective during your supervised sessions. Recording and watching your session back after having heard your supervisor’s comments is excellent practice. Learning from those reflections and demonstrating growth can be illuminating when watching back your sessions. Video recordings are best. This will help you to address your body language and facial expressions as well as simply the words you say.
After the supervision session, you should apply and experiment with what you have learned and agreed upon. This may involve implementing new strategies, techniques, or tools in your coaching practice, or making changes to your mindset, attitude, or behavior. Applying and experimenting will help you test your assumptions, evaluate your results, and consolidate your learnings. It will also help you identify new areas or questions for further supervision.
Finally, you should review and celebrate your supervision sessions and their outcomes. This means reflecting on what worked well and what did not, what you learned and what you still need to learn, and how you have grown and improved as a coach. Reviewing will help you recognize your progress, identify your gaps, and plan your next steps. Celebrating will help you appreciate your efforts, achievements, and feedback, and boost your confidence, motivation, and satisfaction.
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