I’ve been thinking about why we do what we do and how we do it, a lot recently. I blame Tatiana Bachkirova.
In the first term of her postgraduate supervision course at Oxford Brookes, we had to write about our model, demonstrating that we understood why we worked the way we did. We had to show congruence between our personal philosophy (values, beliefs, assumptions, perceived purpose for supervision), desired outcomes and the processes we used when supervising.
It was a time for burning the midnight oil and searching the soul – 78 books and articles later, I began to understand how it all fitted together for me.
I was reminded of this, reading Aboodi Shabi’s words in ‘We’re only human’ (Mythbuster, Coaching at Work, Vol 7, Issue 1). I take comfort in the fact that there’s no need to be ‘sorted’ – both for me and my clients or supervisees!
And in the first of Neil Scotton and Alister Scott’s series (‘Making Good’, Vol 7, Issue 1), the same questions on philosophy and purpose came through around personal views and our social and ethical considerations. It reminded me of something Sir John Whitmore said – if we had time to do only one piece of development, we should concentrate on ourselves, not training.
I worked with a supervisee, I will call Ben, who had trained as a cognitive behavioural coach, with a strong emphasis on goals. He was planning detailed questionnaires for some new clients and asked me to look over them. My heart sank. The questionnaires were very long. What did this say about his views of other people, what was the questionnaires’ real purpose and how would it support the coaching?
I worked with him to explore who it was for. We stripped back to fundamentals to answer the question: ‘Are we living our values with congruence and coherence (in our coaching or supervision and in our lives)?’ We all have beliefs and views about other human beings; how do we bring these into our work – and are we aware that we do and how it affects us and our clients?
Ben realised that he was only thinking about process. He had not made a link with why he did what he did. That connection helped him develop his own congruence.
Some of my beliefs are in people’s ability to change, to grow, to develop, to do good in the world, to work in partnership with clients and supervisees in equality and mutual respect. Given that this is my view, do I demonstrate it when I explain what I see as the purpose of coaching and supervision? And do I then use processes that allow people to flourish? These are questions I always come back to, with thanks to Tatiana for that fantastic, if challenging, first term.
Eve Turner, coach, supervisor and facilitator (eve@eve-turner.com)