How do supervisors achieve “ahas”? Hawkins’ research gave us a broad overview of the state of supervision, but stopped short at the supervisor’s door. My research set out to explore what goes on behind the door, to discover what supervisors understand by “coaching supervision”, and the issues coaches have to address to make the transition to an effective supervisor.
The lack of research into “ahas” is surprising, given that the ability to achieve them is a key criterion of supervisory effectiveness, something that is currently a hot issue for the coaching profession. My research suggests that supervision is not “one size fits all”. The case study illustrates the variations I have found in supervisory practice. Coaches need to be aware of this so they are clear about what they are getting when buying in supervision. And it makes it even more important that we understand how supervisors who achieve “ahas” actually do so.
Multiple meanings
I interviewed 12 supervisors as part of my research. How they operated depended on what they saw as the functions of supervision. They cited the coach’s development, giving coaches support and reassurance, quality assurance regarding individual coaches’ standards and ethics, quality assurance for the profession as a whole, and helping to achieve the client’s organisation’s objectives. All saw developing the coach as the major function. But even this meant different things to different supervisors. Meanings included:
- developing skills;
- helping the coach to “be” in a different way with the client;
- gaining insight;
- providing options.
These meanings have led to some quite different supervisory practices:
- developing skills: role play and analysis of tapes of sessions;
- gaining insight, and helping the coach to “be” in a different way: Hawkins’ and Shohet’s
- seven-eyed model3 and other therapeutic concepts;
- providing options: the supervisor suggests different approaches and says what they have done in similar situations.
With the exception of the “providing options” approach, all the methods the supervisors described could lead to an “aha” moment. These can be split into two groups: mental and body. Mental “ahas” concern knowledge that is explicit, conscious and spoken. They might use imagery, and are typically achieved through an interpretation. Body “ahas” relate to a different kind of knowing, of how to “be” with someone. They are felt in the body and achieved through “a moment of meeting” that the supervisor and coach both sense. This meeting provides a new context for the relationship. Mental and body “ahas” both achieve change, but it is body “ahas” that always result in transformational change.
Most of the illuminating moments the supervisors described were mental “ahas”. At the simplest level, these could be achieved by creating space for self-reflection to develop different perspectives. If coach and client were stuck in a conversation going round the same loop, simply prompting different perspectives by asking, “Have you looked at this?” could break the loop.
A different take
Reframing, or helping someone to “get a different take on it”, was a common way of finding a different perspective. One technique was to encourage coaches to get into clients’ thoughts and feelings to understand what they wanted. Interrupting a habituated thinking pattern in this way constituted a crucial step towards triggering a mental “aha”. Imagery provided another popular method. One supervisor, Sarah, described using a metaphor based on her intuition with a client she experienced as “on the edge”. The image that came to her was the Grand Canyon.
Sarah blurted out what she saw, checked it out with the coach, and then asked her: “Tell me what you see, what you feel, what you hear.” “We followed the trail where it took us,” she says. “It might have taken 20 minutes. I just got her to stay there on the edge of the Grand Canyon. I asked her, “What does that feel like? Really explore that messy place.” The supervisor expanded the coach’s range. Through exploring this image, the coach increased her capacity, presence and confidence, enabling her to have a greater impact with her client.
This process is similar to the one De Haan and Blass found in coaching: “Positive change appears to occur when there is sufficient trust to allow intuition to do its work, and such intuition generates fresh observations that help put things into perspective.” Sarah had the courage to reflect her observations back in such a way that the coach could hear them. It worked because their relationship was both well defined and “provided space to explore”. Another supervisor, Mark, achieved an “aha” moment using rapid guided imagery in an attempt to reach the coach’s subconscious.
Feeling hot
Perhaps not surprisingly, transformational body “ahas” are much rarer. But just as in coaching with clients, their power and impact can be tremendous. Cathy, a supervisor, recalls her supervisee as being “all over the place”, with no clear presenting issue or objectives. To compensate, Cathy was trying to keep the session as grounded as possible. She told the coach: ‘‘I’m really aware that I’m working hard to be ‘in my feet’. This isn’t a judgment.”
When Cathy said this, she noted, “something shifted in him. I don’t really know why it had that impact. It wouldn’t have been appropriate to ask him why he thought it had. So sometimes that’s the process, and you don’t know what’s going on. That was scary, not knowing where we were going.”
Cathy was clear that her most powerful intervention had been to tune into and express her own bodily awareness. This had a huge impact for both supervisor and coach. The supervisor felt the coach “needed someone who could meet him”. Describing this, she said, “Whoosh!”, indicating a great rush of energy. This rush of energy is typical of body “ahas”, and is an example of what Longhurst calls “reconnecting clients with their bodies and exploring feelings and sensations, often in metaphorical terms”.
It was interesting that Cathy used the word “meet”. Stern describes how this meeting feels like a sudden qualitative change, and stresses the joint nature of the experience. At certain times, a moment becomes “hot”, which is what seems to have happened in this example. This moment allows for a “disjoin” between supervisor and coach, an opening where something new can be created.
Cathy triggered the “aha” moment by her ability to develop the relationship as a container, use her intuition and seize the moment with what Stern calls “an authentic, specific, personal response”. The meeting is a process conducted largely out of awareness. These unfamiliar and unexpected moments usually last only a few seconds, but they force the supervisor to act: either to go on as normal, or behave differently.
Keep it real
The personal nature of the engagement (the “authentic meeting”) between the two is critical. Stern found that it is only when the therapist steps outside their professional role, and responds in a personal way to the other person, that transformational shifts can occur. This highlights two issues.
First, it points to a paradox in coaching supervision. My research showed how supervisors have to embrace the role fully to discharge it effectively. But it seems that once they embrace the role, they have to be able to step outside it (be themselves) in order to achieve transformational “aha” moments.
Second, it could suggest one of the differences and potential advantages supervision has over therapeutic relationships. Therapists have traditionally been trained to maintain a professional distance, and are discouraged from revealing much of themselves. Giving an authentic, personal response to a sudden “hot” moment might not come easily to them.
In contrast, the supervisors I interviewed all said they felt able to “bring themselves” into their work, more so than they did with coaching. They argued that this was what coaches wanted or needed, if they were inexperienced.
This more open approach might well pave the way for supervisors to take advantage of “hot” moments by making just the sort of personal and genuine response that enables an “aha” moment to occur. ”
I interviewed 12 supervisors using a semi-structured questionnaire. Six supervisors also provided diaries of sessions. To analyse the data I used a data reduction approach to assemble key chunks in charts and grids, which enabled me to make links and draw conclusions. Coding was necessarily subjective, but the grounded theory approach I adopted is regarded as a respectable way of theorising about fieldwork.
Case study: guided imagery
A coach was worried that she had not helped her client to gain promotion, did this mean she was a bad coach? Her supervisor, Mark, observed that she was not talking about her relationship with the client, which he deemed central to achieving change.
Mark asked the coach to think about what she and the client would go as if they were invited to a fancy dress party. A tree and Snow White was the answer. Asked to describe the tree, the coach said it was “constrained, I’m not really a tree, my face is poking out; ’m a pantomime tree. I’m trying to walk but it’s hard.”
“What’s Snow White like?”
“Snow White is very beautiful, flirtatious.”
“What are you both like at the party?”
“I’m just standing at the edge. Snow White is sad that no one is talking to her. I feel frustrated, I really want her to get out and about. She hides behind the tree until Prince Charming comes to take her away.”
Mark asked, “What would have to be different between the tree and Snow White to get Prince Charming to appear more quickly?”
It was this question that prompted the “aha” moment, Mark said: “The coach realised she felt responsibility for the client; her ego was linked to the client’s success or failure.”
Mark sensed the coach had had a breakthrough because her body language changed. She changed from using hand gestures to becoming very still. “You could see how things were coming to the conscious level: she began to see patterns. There was a wry smile. She turned towards me so she was face to face. Then she started talking about the relationship.”
The realisation led the coach to alter the way she conducted the next coaching session.
The subconscious element and the body changes suggest that this was an example of the “moment of meeting” associated with a body “aha”. However, it was still based on language and visual imagery, characteristics of the mental or interpretation “aha”. As Stern found, sometimes it can be hard to distinguish one from the other.
Learning points
- Coaching supervisors’ willingness to “bring themselves” into the relationship may be a key difference between coaching and therapeutic supervision, thus enabling transformational “aha” moments.
- Supervisory practice varies widely so coaches need to be careful when investing in it.
- Supervisors’ views of the function of supervision vary, especially in developing the coach, giving support and reassurance, assuring quality regarding individuals’ standards and ethics and helping to achieve the client’s organisation’s objectives.
- Supervisors have different ideas about what developing the coach means.
About the author
Barbara Moyes recently left the Department of Health, where she was head of leadership and learning and development, to work as an independent coach, supervisor and consultant. She is currently working with the National School of Government. A qualified therapeutic supervisor, she has supervised internal coaches across government. She is a member of the Association of Coaching. 07818 458359 barbaramoyes@btinternet.com
References
- P Hawkins and N Smith, Coaching, Mentoring and Organisational Consultancy, Supervision and Development, Open University Press, Maidenhead, 2006.
- P Hawkins, Coaching Supervision: Maximising the Potential of Coaching, Change Agenda report, CIPD, London, 2006.
- P Hawkins and R Shohet, Supervision in the Helping Professions, Open University Press, 2006.
- D Stern, L Sandler, J Nahum, A Harrison, K Lyons-Ruth, A Morgan,
- N Bruschweiler-Stern and E Tronick, “Non-interpretive mechanisms in psychoanalytic therapy”, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol 79, pp903-21, 1998.
- L Longhurst, “The ‘aha’ moment in co-active coaching and its effects on belief and behavioural change”, International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring, vol 4 (2), pp61-73, autumn 2006.
- E de Haan and E Blass, “Using critical moments to learn about coaching”, Training Journal, pp54-8, April 2007.
- E Turner, “Picture perfect”, Coaching at Work, vol 3, issue 1, pp36-9, 2008.
- D W Winnicott, The Child and the Family, Tavistock, London, 1957.
- B Moyes, “Supervision matters: what goes on in coaching supervision?”, unpublished MSc dissertation, Portsmouth University/Performance Consultants and The Performance Coach, 2007.
- D Silverman, Doing Qualitative Research, Sage, London, 2005.
For “aha” moments in coaching, see Erik de Haan’s “Magic moments” (2006), “Point of impact” (2007) and “Second thoughts” (2007), Coaching at Work.
Volume 3, Issue 2