How to make the most of supervision
You’ve got 90 minutes to make the most of the previous month’s dilemmas. How do you make the most out of the time you have and ensure you get what you need to support you and your clients for the coming month before you get the opportunity to do it again?
How much time do you spend preparing for supervision? Do you break down the session into manageable chunks? How do you decide which clients to take and whether they are more of a priority than your own wellness in your work? How do you show up?
As a supervisor and supervisee, I get to see lots of therapists who approach their supervision very differently to me and, having a terrible memory and needing a pad and pen everywhere I go, I find it frustrating when a supervisee turns up notebook-less. How will they remember what they wanted to bring? How will they remember what they’re taking away? Are they taking their supervision seriously? Maybe that’s just my own stuff?
Consider the impression you’re making on your supervisor. They are there to ensure you are working professionally and ethically with your clients. Your clients are their responsibility as much as yours. What would you want your supervisor to know about how you work with your clients? Can you recreate this in the supervision sessions? These are the basics you could be covering:
Committing to your appointment i.e. making it an important priority. You’d hope your clients would prioritise their appointments and wellbeing, and your needs are just as important.
Arriving on time – making the most of every minute, reflecting your time management skills that are all-important in our client work.
Having an idea of what you want to discuss – don’t we ask this of our clients?
Making prompt payment, displaying the value you put on your supervision in the same way you would hope clients put value on their therapy and pay you on time.
Explore yourself as well as your clients. This shows a commitment to personal growth as well as professional development, the learning you are taking away from your work, the impact it is having on you as a human being. If you can do it for yourself, you can do it for others. A self-reflective therapist is a good therapist.
Just a quick note here that if your supervisor isn’t displaying the same time-management skills and commitment to your sessions, it’s time to find a new supervisor, or if being overly-flexible is working for the two of you, consider whether this is a healthy professional relationship. How does it translate outside of the supervision sessions? Could you both use some structure?
Supervision is never just about client work, talking through the struggles you are having with individual clients. It is your opportunity to consider where you are working, how you are working, how you are experiencing your work, how you are feeling about particular clients, whether you’ve recognised any patterns or behaviours in yourself, and of course, how you feel about your supervision – just as we would hope our clients can be honest with us, we must be as honest with our supervisor. When we find the right supervisor for us, they are usually in place for quite some time and we need to ensure we work on the relationship as we would with any of our other relationships in other areas of our lives. I expect to develop a deeper level understanding of my supervisees than simply how they work with their clients. I base my own supervision and my support of supervisees on Hawkins & Shohet’s 7-eyed model of supervision (2006) encompassing all of the above.
This said, the supervisory relationship will never be equal, in the same way our therapy relationships aren’t meant to be equal. It isn’t necessary for us to know our supervisor to any real depth, just as our clients wouldn’t need to know very much about us to benefit from a counselling session. Our supervision should, to a great extent, parallel our client work, we’re just on the receiving end in this situation. After all, is it really all about what the client brings, how they present themselves, how they behave in the sessions? Or is it also our response to it, our feelings about it, our thoughts about the part we are playing? We are bringing ourselves to supervision, not our clients. We are walking in their shoes in the counselling room, and we walk them straight into supervision for our supervisor to take a look at what we see through their eyes and what we experience in our work with them.
We must be open and honest and vulnerable with our supervisor if we are to find the full depth of support they can offer. It is here we can discuss our self-doubt, our lack of confidence, our perceived mistakes, our assumed failures and of course our successes, just as we would hope our clients are able to do. And although our supervision is not therapy, there is a need to discuss the things we are struggling with in our personal lives so our supervisor can identify when this may be surfacing in our work.
Our work is not a stand-alone process separate from who we are as individuals. Our biases, our core beliefs, our unconscious processes, our health, our mood etc, will all play a part in our work and our supervisor will usually only see us once per month so it’s going to be a slow process getting to know us in all our wonderfulness. We need to make it easier for them by offering them our understanding of who we are so they are more easily able to identify any discrepancies that need bringing into our conscious awareness so we can ensure we are working to the best of our ability. The best way to do this is to bring our true selves to supervision, explore our very being, and replicate our work with clients in our supervision sessions.
If your supervisor believes you to be a competent, caring, professional, respectful individual with a desire to pick yourself apart for the benefit of others, they will not necessarily need to know anything at all about your work with clients! They will be able to simply trust that you are doing the best you can and that you will bring what you need to bring.
Although our goal of supervision will be pretty much the same across all therapists – i.e. that we want to ensure we are being the best therapist we can be to ensure clients get the best outcomes - our processes, our strengths, and our needs, will be very different from the other therapists our supervisor will have on their books.
Have you ever asked your supervisor how they experience you? And if the thought of asking that question fills you with dread, have you considered exploring that in supervision?! Again, these are questions and conversations we would hope to have in our client work so let’s practice this for ourselves. What a wonderful way to fully appreciate what the client might experience in their therapy with us.
Of course our balance needs to be right, when we consider we give each client a 50 minute window each week to focus on themselves, 90 minutes per month is not a great deal of time to explore the intricacies of our clients’ lives and our own thoughts, feelings and behaviours, and the more clients you have, the more limited you are.
If you’re finding yourself desperate to get to your next supervision appointment, it may be that you need your sessions a little more regularly for a period of time. Some clients are very challenging and our own lives can be the same. There’s no shame in needing a little more supervision than the minimum your governing body tells you that you should have.
So, how should you get the most out of your supervision session? Well, that depends on what you feel is most important at any given time. But you must consider what is important in the expanse of potential talking points. What would mean the most to you right now? What will you get the most out of? Prepare, prepare, prepare!
Oh, and please take a notebook and a pen!
