Spring forward

Signs of Spring

I am writing this after hosting a week of quarterly Supervision group sessions and 1-1. In all of the sessions we reflected on our coaching practice over the last quarter and prepared ourselves for what to take into the Spring.

A key theme has been creating space in our lives to stay strong in the face of change and the impact of geopolitical change on the clients who are leading change in their organisations. The need for an increase in resilience for restructuring and coping with pressure in the workplace has been a key objective for many who want to use the coaching conversations to reflect and move forward. This was already enough to work with before a second theme appeared around the clients needing to express and share more about how they had been triggered recently to explore the role of trauma in their leadership patterns or how they need a plan to cope with difficult life events they are facing.

Coaching has always been a place for combination of the inner work of personal development and the outer work of professional development and yet it is clear to me that the marketplace needs us to be more prepared to add trauma sensitivity techniques to our skillset and to be prepared to explore the boundaries of therapy and coaching more keenly. Whilst we should never replace the conversation around our clients getting the appropriate support for their wellbeing, I believe that with additional training we can explore how we might work with how our clients’ past life events are showing up in their fears and limiting their beliefs. I am also learning how to work with what is unfinished from these life events and what emotions linger that need to be voiced in both of us if parallels exist. How we do this safely and with skill and in a competency rich way is now the challenge when clients are presenting themselves as under-resourced and not whole, which has always been the underpinning of a non-directive coaching conversation.

So, I will be honest here. I have been questioning what the world needs me to be as a coach and a supervisor for when I am feeling the need to express that I am further down the road this quarter in losing the love for the 100% non-directive approach. I am definitely learning to be happier with more attuned attention to my clients and my needs for a conversation that also shares our thinking, experiences and observations and now labels which support more trauma supportive techniques. This may mean that less of my work can be badged as ICF, but I am ok with that. My resilience to keep coaching is driven by my responsibility to deliver on what work I am contracted to and work out my ethics accordingly. In declaring my thoughts, it is helping me to be more resilient in the delivery of my work.

The parallel process is therefore easy to see in the need for coaches to work on their resilience and the pressure of being present with the stories told by our clients and then to re-explore their reactions and actions. I will continue to support coaches exploring the traditional boundaries of coach training to discover other ways of coaching to respond to the market. Clarity for my own work will be offered in my chemistry meetings and in my contracts and maybe it also means a look at which ethical code to follow to suit what the world needs right now. This is my intention for my spring forward – what is yours? Kate