What is the Internal Supervisor? The term is used to describe perspectives and skills that are available to a capable practitioner as they work with clients. In essence, the practitioner will be tuned to the entire range of their body/mind information during each coaching moment; they can then respond to what they ‘pick up’ internally. Paying attention to the Internal Supervisor provides important data, which in turn informs interventions.
The Internal Supervisor offers:
Cognitive information
Intuitive information
Somatic information
This range of information about a coaching situation or relationship becomes available to the coach’s analytical/processing mind, which in turn decides interventions and strategies. Coaches can then choose interventions that are genuinely laser-like and perfectly timed. With a well-developed Internal Supervisor, comes a major increase in Coaching Presence and powerful, impactful coaching.
Coaching Supervision greatly accelerates the development of the Internal Supervisor by working directly with the coach’s internal system: intuition, body responses, hunches, thinking and awareness of the energetic exchange between client and coach. This ‘energetic exchange’ can also be understood as transference/counter-transference and is explored as part of the dance between coach and coachee. By paying attention to these various types of information, and to how the coach uses them or might use them in their work, a coach begins to have much greater access to subtle aspects of their own system and of the coaching process – where the main insights and shifts often occur.
Using the data provided by the internal supervisor ensures that coaching is not merely task focussed, but can become more reflective and the coach will be more alive to all parts of the dance. Listening becomes much more than hearing words/stories/goals; it also becomes diffuse, allowing the coach to listen at several levels simultaneously, to see patterns in the material presented by the client and to be both engaged in the coaching dialogue and also observing the process as it unfolds. This conscious flexibility within the coach ensures optimum effectiveness and a powerful process for the coachee.
Through Coaching Supervision, coaches build their Internal Supervisor, by repeated attention to their internal processes and by learning through experiments and games – such as the very practical Body/Feelings/Mind exercise – see CSA website. Data from the Internal supervisor can make imaginative and thoughtful contributions to coaching conversations; it quickly enables the coach to make real strides in Personal/Professional Awareness and gifts them a truer understanding of their clients.
Edna Murdoch CEO CSA.
