I shared an article with you last week – Stay Sharp, Stay Safe. So in the interests of staying sharp, I took a recording of my coaching to supervision a couple of weeks ago. So enlightening, listening to my coaching through someone else’s ear!
You might remember the coaching session in question, as I posted it here. (Scroll down to see it again). I share my post-supervision reflections here to demonstrate that no matter how much experience we have as coaches, we can always sharpen our saw even more, to be bolder, more challenging, using their time wisely and for greater value. Supervision helps us to see what we are blind to ourselves, and to hear things we are deaf to.
Here’s what I learned about myself and my coaching when I re-listened to the session in my supervision session:
- I matched his pace, and the amount of words he used. That’s good for building rapport, but it ceases to be good when there is a higher need to mismatch for change! Had I got more pithy, and speedier, that could have got him to new thinking much earlier. I did try this later on, but it seems that the mismatch needed was much bigger than I had modelled and it didn’t challenge him out of it enough
- James’ way of processing is quite long-winded…since he states that he wants to be succinct in his conversation with his peer, I could have observed that data in the room to encourage him to change his habit right here, right now, rather than simply talking about how he would be succinct in his conversation outside the coaching room. I might have said something like, “you’re doing to me what you want to work on; I challenge you to be more succinct here as well “
- I said “I get what we’re doing” when in fact this is not about me getting it, it’s about him getting it, so I could have said instead, “are we clear what we’re doing?” and I could have said this much earlier to get us into the exploration phase sooner
- In retrospect, I suspect that James knew all of his answers to my contracting questions before he even came to the session, so we needn’t have spent nearly as long (12 minutes) pondering the contract; still saying it out loud, but much more succinctly
- I finally interrupted him at 15 minutes, in a very present, trust-based, but challenging way
- The real-play was really useful…and it would have been even better had I asked him to move his chair or some other movement to get him into a different place, out of his pondering and into succinct
- The coaching was rather transactional. I realised when watching it again that I do my best coaching when I am invisible, that is using audio only. I can move around more, which makes for transformational conversations (trust me, movement creates breakthroughs; I’ve seen it many times)
Perhaps you noticed some of these things as you watched the session.
My challenge to you is to make time for supervision; and to take a recording to your supervisor so that you can reflect together on your practice and what you can do better to serve your clients and their world.
