Considering Supervision
The questions coaches bring to supervision – including the ones that are harder to ask aloud.
If you've found your way here, you're probably already considering supervision – whether it's for you, and what it might be like. And even if you've tried it before, something here might prompt a second look. Here are a few of the questions coaches I've met arrive with, including the ones that are harder to ask out loud.
In this piece:
What supervision actually is — and why you might never have felt the need
How it differs from being coached
The approaches I work with
Whether I'll try to change your blended practice
How it's different from therapy
What to look for in a supervisor
Working well across difference
Bringing the things you feel ashamed of
Worrying you won't have enough to bring
Whether you can leave
What is supervision, really – and why might I never have felt the need for it?
Working alongside many seasoned practitioners, as I do, I've found this to be a surprisingly common question. Plenty of capable coaches, years into strong practices, have never had supervision and wonder whether they've missed something – or whether it's simply a nice-to-have for the less confident. I understand the doubt. You invest in your development; you do the reading, the CPD, the training. Isn't that enough? And to be fair, for many of us who trained in the noughties, coaching supervision just wasn't talked about.
I've since learned that supervision does something CPD can't, because it points in a different direction. CPD adds to what you know. Supervision attends to what's happening in you, and between you and the people you work with.
There's also a misconception that supervision is for crises, which assumes we're otherwise sorted, managing well enough through peer groups or our own reflective practice. Those are valuable, and they're not the same thing. A peer group often shares many of your blind spots, rather than seeing them; your own reflection can only work with what you're already able to notice. Most of us can't see our own blind spots alone. That isn't a failing; it's how blind spots work.
In a professional field that's more demanding than it used to be, clients arrive carrying more complexity, more systemic pressure, more of the kind of challenge that nudges the limits of what coaching can hold. The stakes of not seeing clearly have risen with it – not only for you, but for your clients and the people and organisations who depend on them.
Supervision is the space to bring the client who unsettles you, the session that didn't land, the pattern you've half-noticed but had nowhere to take. Not to be corrected, but to think alongside someone whose attention is on your work, on your wellbeing in it, and on the welfare of those at the other end of it.
How does it feel – is it like being coached by someone more experienced?
A reasonable question. In my early days, I sought support from more experienced coaches. It often helped, though it wasn't always what I needed. There's a key distinction between the two: while a coach focuses primarily on serving you, their coachee, a supervisor's lens is wider. It takes in not only you, but your client, the relationship between you, the stakeholders around the work, and the wider system it all sits within. As a custodian of the profession, the supervisor holds a stake in everyone being well served.
Supervision also shifts the balance toward something more collegial than you usually find in coaching. Think of it as two peers in a shared piece of work, together looking in on one partner's practice. Something about that more evenly shared approach creates the conditions in which people can reach their growth edges – mine included. The supervision work usually has something to teach me, too, and the relationship asks something of us both.
That said, the supervisor role brings an additional layer to the relationship. There are moments – particularly in the normative dimension of the work, where we attend to ethics, standards and the safety of clients – when I'll move into a more informative, more directive mode, and offer a clear view, a framework, or a steer. I bring the training and experience of a reasonably seasoned practitioner, and I'll use it when the work calls for it.
What approaches do you use?
I work from the International Centre for Coaching Supervision (ICCS) concentric-circles model, which holds together the supportive, developmental and ethical dimensions of supervision, and lean often on the seven-eyed model – a framework that lets us look at your client, your relationship with them, what's happening in you, what's happening between us, and the wider system as one connected field. Underneath that sits systemic thinking, attention to parallel process – the way a dynamic in your client work has a habit of turning up, uninvited, in ours – and an interest in not only what's said, but what the body and the wider context are registering.
I also work outdoors, and it's worth explaining what that means, because it's easily misconstrued due to the myriad outdoor-based methods being used out there. It isn't walking to clear your head, with nature as a pleasant backdrop or metaphorical resource. It's about reflecting in real relationship with the living world around you, which cultivates the very qualities supervision asks for: grounded presence, holding complexity without rushing to tidy it, tolerating not-knowing, receiving what arises rather than directing it. It's an invitation rather than a requirement, and it works as readily through a window, or in the reflections on either side of an online session, as on a hillside.
I don't really do "pure" coaching – I blend methods. Will you try to change that?
I won't. The coaches I'm drawn to working with are often those whose practice doesn't sit neatly inside a single model – experienced people who've woven approaches together in ways that are uniquely theirs. My role isn't to reshape that into something more conventional; it's to help you inhabit your way of working with more confidence and more discernment, and to know clearly what's yours to hold and what belongs to the client.
Having said that, as a credentialed supervisor, I also carry a responsibility to the wider profession and to the clients experiencing your work – a duty of care beyond the person in front of me. So while I'll wholly support your blended practice, I may also invite you to look closely at the places where the edges blur – where a modality is carrying you past the boundary of coaching into territory that asks for a different contract, a referral, or simply clearer signposting for what you're doing. That isn't policing your style. It's helping you stand in it with integrity and protecting the people who trust you with their development.
Isn't this just therapy by another name?
No, it isn't therapy, though I understand why the line can look blurred – especially if, like me, you work somatically or with parts, where the practice territories can feel close. The distinction I hold is around focus. Supervision keeps returning to your whole practice – your client, your work with them, what's stirred in you that bears on how you show up for them.
Supervision does attend to you; there's a restorative thread running through it, a real care for how you're holding up in demanding work. And the results can feel therapeutic. That's part of why the line with therapy can blur. The difference here is intention: tending to you here is always finally in service of your practice and the people you serve, rather than an end in itself.
If something surfaces that really belongs in therapy – and it does happen – part of my role is to notice that with you and help you find a more fitting place for it, rather than drift into being your therapist. As a certified trauma-informed practitioner, I'm trained to recognise when something therapeutic is surfacing and to hold it with care – neither shrinking from it nor mistaking it for mine to treat. That itself is part of holding the work safely, for you and for your clients.
What should I look for in a supervisor?
Look for relational fit above credentials: someone you can imagine being honest with, even about the things that don't show you at your best. Notice whether they make room for challenge as well as comfort; supervision that only ever soothes isn't serving your development or your clients. Notice whether they think with you rather than at you.
Think carefully, too, about whether what's on offer is what you actually need. If you come for help with a thorny boundary issue, notice whether your supervisor meets you there – or steers you somewhere of their own choosing. Notice whether the shape of what's offered serves you or them: whether a one-to-one drifts into a pitch for something larger. If your agendas don't match, or something feels plain 'off', you're allowed to walk away.
And here's something I discovered in my own journey with supervision: the relationship is unusually hard to judge from the inside, because the person you'd naturally talk to about whether it's working is the supervisor. It can be an awkward bind – unless you're with someone who deliberately makes space for that conversation, who treats "is this working for you?" as a legitimate question rather than a threat, and can hear that it isn't without needing you to manage their response.
What if we're very different – in background, in identity, in how we see the world?
It would be wrong to suggest supervision happens on entirely neutral ground. We each bring our histories, our cultures, our assumptions, and the places we're privileged or unsighted – into the room, whether or not we've put words to them. Difference between us isn't an obstacle to the work; it's often where some of the most useful seeing happens, provided it can be spoken about.
What I'd want is for you to feel able to tell me when something in my frame doesn't fit yours, or when I've missed something your experience makes obvious. I won't always get it right. But I'd far rather we could talk about it than have it sit unspoken between us, shaping the work from the shadows.
I've sometimes said or done things in my practice that, in hindsight, were poorly judged – things I'd feel embarrassed, even ashamed, to bring. Could I?
Yes. Although please watch out. Anyone can promise safety, and many do. But the promise on its own is worth very little, so the question worth asking is really: how would I know I was safe to bring these things?
You'd know not because I'd told you so, but by how it felt when tested – whether a small disclosure was met without judgment, whether you left more able to look at the thing rather than more exposed. Safety is something you get to verify, not something you take on trust. And it's helped by the collegial footing: I'm not positioned above you, marking your work. The work stretches me too, and I'll be honest with you about that.
There's a further reason to bring these things, beyond your own comfort. The struggles we can't look at tend to be the ones that shape our work unseen – the client we over-accommodate, the dynamic we can't quite speak to, the thing we skip past. When you can bring those into the open here, something eases there, in the room with your client. The work you do on yourself in supervision is, in the end, work done on behalf of the people you coach.
We're not in the business of becoming flawless practitioners; there's no such thing. It's one of the things I love about this work, how often it returns us to our own humanity – flawed, vulnerable, complex. We're in the business of becoming more honest, more present, more able to meet our own limits without turning away from them. The room where you can bring the thing you're ashamed of is, often, the same room where you become a little more whole.
I'm worried I won't have enough to bring.
This is one I hear often, and almost always from people who turn out to have no shortage at all. It usually rests on the belief I spoke of earlier, that supervision is for crises – that you should arrive with a thorny ethical dilemma or a relationship in trouble, and that ordinary practice doesn't warrant the space.
But supervision isn't only for the hard cases. Some of the richest sessions begin with "I don't really have anything today," and within minutes something surfaces – a client who's been faintly on your mind, a small unease you hadn't stopped to look at, a pattern you half-see across your work. The space itself tends to bring things up. You don't need to arrive with a problem worthy of it. You only need to arrive.
And what if it isn't working – can I leave?
Yes, and the freedom to leave is part of what makes it safe to stay. You shouldn't have to construct an acceptable account of why you're going, or be made to doubt yourself for an ending.
A supervisor worth working with can let you go cleanly, treat an ending as part of the work rather than a rejection to defend against, and help you find someone better suited if that serves you. A relationship you can't leave honestly is one within which you can never be fully honest.
So that's how I hold it. Supervision, at its best, is a reflective space for complex lives – room to think clearly in the middle of real multiplicity, to notice what's actually happening in your work, and to find your own authority within it. Relationship is where that work happens. If something here speaks to what you've been turning over, you're welcome to get in touch, and we can think together about what might serve you.