Reflection - a space of development

“Very great change starts from very small conversations, held among people who care”

Margaret Wheatley

Catalysing Awareness means to have open sharing on important topics - that in itself has the power to raise awareness. Each conversation and each person that engages into a dialogue about social justice, environmental concerns, or human rights, they contribute to spreading knowledge and understanding. In supervision, we expand the field of the awareness with reflective practice, and that is a bit part of the heart of coaching supervision, as I see it. That is why I recommend to coaches to start working with a supervisor from the beginning of their practice. It will help on the long run with the Imposter Syndrome, biases, patterns, social and cultural awareness and with their development. In the supervision space I invite coaches to slow down, revisit an encounter and notice what happened beneath the first account of it. What did they think? What did they feel? What did they do? What might they choose differently?

These are valuable questions. Reflection, by itself, does not guarantee that we will see all of what matters. It offers a great opportunity to harvest topics that stay lingering it and bring them into supervision. We can reflect carefully and still remain inside our usual explanation of the world. We can become more aware of our feelings without questioning the conditions that shaped the encounter. We can examine our response to a client while leaving the client’s organisational position, cultural context or relative power almost untouched.

Reflection can deepen self-awareness and still protect our blind spots.

Imagine that a coach brings into supervision the topic of a client - a senior leader who repeatedly avoids taking responsibility. The coach feels frustrated and notices an impulse to confront the client more strongly. A reflective conversation might explore the coach’s emotional response, their assumptions about responsibility, power dynamics of the conversation and the topics and how they used challenge in their practice. On top of that supervision adds another layer that the coach can take into reflection: Who has the authority to define responsible behaviour in the client’s organisation? What pressures surround the leader? Which voices can challenge this person safely, and which cannot? Is the coach being recruited into an organisational story about the client? How do the coach’s own rank, identity and relationship with the sponsor shape what feels possible?

The purpose is not to explain everything through power. It is to stop behaving as if power were absent. Charmaine Roche’s work on decolonising reflective practice deserves attention. She invites coaches and supervisors to distinguish reflection from critical reflection. The distinction is not about becoming more intellectual or turning every conversation into social analysis. It is about asking what becomes visible when power enters the inquiry and reflection.

Something similar to the case above happens with cultural assumptions. Many established coaching and supervision models emerged within Western psychological traditions. They often place considerable emphasis on the autonomous individual: their awareness, choices, responsibility and action.

That orientation can be helpful, but it is not culturally neutral, and I loved that in CSA we had this as part of our training - taking into consideration layers of the client and of the coach. In some contexts, identity is understood more relationally. Obligations to family, community or hierarchy may not be experienced as barriers to individual agency. They may be part of how agency itself is understood.

If we interpret every hesitation as a limiting belief, we may miss loyalty. If we interpret deference only as avoidance, we may miss culture, safety or realistic awareness of rank. If we celebrate direct challenge without examining its consequences, we may ask another person to take a risk we do not have to carry.

Supervision offers a place where these possibilities can remain open long enough to be examined.

This requires more than adding a question about diversity to the end of a familiar model. It requires the supervisor to consider their own location in the work. What do I regard as healthy independence? Which communication styles do I trust most quickly? Whose behaviour do I interpret as confident, resistant, emotional or professional? What becomes easier for me to notice because of my experience - and what becomes harder? Do I tend to look at the reactive tendencies more than the creative ones?

These questions are not an accusation. They are part of professional responsibility.

We have the responsibility to create supervision spaces that are not a limited set of geographical and professional contexts. A model may travel widely, but that does not mean it arrives without cultural baggage. This matters for international practitioners. Working across countries does not automatically create intercultural capacity. Sometimes it simply gives our existing assumptions a larger stage.

A systemic supervisor therefore listens in several directions. There is the client’s story, the coach’s experience and the relationship between them. There are also the sponsor, organisation, profession, culture and wider social environment. The task is not to hold all these dimensions equally at every moment. It is to notice which ones are being excluded - and what that exclusion protects.

Critical reflection also changes how we understand neutrality. A supervisor does not need to impose a political position on the supervisee. Equally, pretending to have no values, assumptions or social location does not create neutrality. It makes those influences harder to examine. The more honest position may be: I am part of this inquiry too. My interpretations are situated. Let us test them together.

Reflective practice helps us look again. Critical reflection asks whether we are looking from the same place, through the same lens, at the same part of the picture. Mature supervision needs both, so take your reflective practice into the supervision space.

Photo by Hunter Scott