Supervision: Where Coaches Do Their Own Work

Better humans make better coaches, and better coaches make better humans. Yes, this means even coaches need coaches. The need for radical self-inquiry isn’t limited to those who hold organizational power. It is an essential step in becoming the adults we were born to be. When coaches coach from a place of inadequate self-development, they run the risk of a kind of malpractice. They run the risk of using the coaching session to work out their unconscious challenges, turning the client into an object of their own unprocessed needs and incomplete adulthood. Reboot Supervision provides coaches with the ability to use radical self-inquiry to grow as coaches (and as adult humans).

Radical self-inquiry is the process by which the masks we wear are slowly, skillfully, and compassionately removed so that there’s no place left to hide—even from ourselves. Coaching can be transformative for the client, but only if the coach is able to soothe their own fears and do their own work.

Coaching requires courage—the courage to do or say something which the client may not like. Coaches must give the clients what they need and not necessarily what they say they want. Radical self-inquiry through supervision is a way to ensure that the coach isn’t deluding themself, telling themself they are giving, responding to, holding themself in such a way as it meets the client’s needs and not merely their wants.

Supervision allows coaches to practice the practical skills of coaching—skills such as understanding and using counter-transference and induced feelings—to better assess what the client’s transformational agenda is (and not merely responding to their presenting agenda).

Coaching takes courage. In coach training, it is often said that the coach’s challenge to a client, the challenge that unlocks transformation, should take the client’s breath away. It should be so audacious and more than a little scary as to unlock the client’s potential. Similarly, coaching should take the coach’s breath away. Every session should be approached as an opportunity to not only hone the skills needed to be the best coach one can be but to do the radical self-inquiry necessary to be in service to the client. The shared experience of a supervisory group is an opportunity to have your breath taken as you see the ways your own limiting beliefs (and subroutines) may be getting in the way of your service to your clients.

Coaching requires the courage to hold the client’s big, uncomfortable feelings. Not just their tears and fears but their anger and hurt as well, even if—indeed, especially if—it triggers the coach’s fears, tears, anger, and hurt.

Mastery in coaching is the ability to leave behind the fears of doing things incorrectly to trust your intuition (while having the courage to use radical self-inquiry to check one’s own intuition) to be in maximum service to the client. It’s where you develop the courage and confidence to challenge your clients, to rise above your own fears, to give them what they need and not necessarily what they ask for. Too often, coaches respond to the client’s presenting agenda (where they communicate what they want), leaving behind the opportunity to support the transformational agenda.

Great coaches have the courage to meet their clients in such a way that the client continues in the work because of its value and not because they depend on the coach.