Shadow Tracking for Coaches: Post-Session Reflections for Coach Growth
The key to showing up more fully in your client work.
The coaching presence is one in which we as coaches try to be as empty of personality as possible so that we can be fully in the here and now for our client work and what may be showing up and emergent in a session. Yet as a coach, often the stuff that happens in a client session stirs up parts of your inner world. Being able to identify that you’re rattled, what’s been rattled, and what did the rattling can help you track what’s coming up for you and may also give insight to aspects of the client’s state or situation.
Often, what can be rattled in us as coaches may lead to our own shadow at play. As part of an ethical practice to further one’s growth and development as a coach, tracking what surfaces in you and applying radical self-inquiry can help you suss out what is showing up so that you can show up more fully for your client work.
Below is a set of inquiries to add to your coaching practice toolkit and use as a review at the end of each session. This line of inquiry can help in developing your ‘inner supervisor’ and gather questions, experiences, and data to unpack with your coaching supervisor.
The resources below come from In Love With Supervision: Creating Transformative Conversations, by Robin and Joan Shohet. It is a treasure trove of a book. I highly recommend all of their books — and a supervisor — if you want to deepen your practice as a coach.
Do a Self Assessment.
Before reaching out for feedback from others, begin by checking in with yourself: How’d that session go? After each session, ask yourself these three questions:
- What do I think worked?
- Where did I feel stuck?
- What might I do differently next time?
Develop an Inner Supervisor.
Developing an inner supervisor can help you track shadow aspects that may surface in sessions. A keen inner supervisor, like a good journaling practice for reflection, can help you see what was triggered in you and where your work might be to resolve that. The sharper this inner part of you, the more refined you will become as a coach in sussing out what’s yours and what is ‘theirs’ (the client’s) during and after a session. Use these questions to help you reflect and track themes that you may want to bring into formal supervision or work with your therapist:
- What would I least like my supervisor to know about my work with this client?
- How do I want to change this client?
- Why did I make the intervention I made?
- What might have I held back in any way during the session?
- On a scale of 0 to 10, how well did the session go?
- What might have made it a higher score?
- What score might the client give?
- What residues from the session do I experience in my body/thoughts?
- What is an image for the session?
Name the Dynamics in the Coach-Client Relationship.
The feeling tone of the session or the coach-client relationship as a whole can reveal what the named or unnamed dynamics are in the relationship. Inquiring down this path can also reveal the reasons why you are showing up in the relationship in the way that you may be. Gaining awareness of tensions, power dynamics, and transference will open up an exploration for your work to do in shifting the dynamic, or how to show up more clearly for the client’s work.
- If you and your client were on a desert island together, what would be happening?
- If you and the client were animals, what would each of you be?
Check in on Countertransference.
Transference is always present in the room. (For more on the various types of Countertransference, check out this redux by John Rowan: Identify Types of Countertransference.) “How we work with it as practitioners affects the impact of our role as coach in our client sessions,” notes coaching supervisor Liz Stewart. “Understanding and feeling transference is what can guide us in how we respond. We are responding to a developmental need in the client. Feelings and sensations can impact our bodies, as well as our clients, so tuning into verbal and nonverbal cues both in ourselves and our clients also informs how we respond.”
A few clues that countertransference may be present include: dreaming about a client, wishing you had met a client in other circumstances, dreading or looking forward to a session, overrunning on time, bending or changing your rules, not bringing the client into formal supervision sessions, strong feelings (positive or negative), or behaving in a way that is atypical for you.
The following questions are designed to help you track how or where countertransference may be present in sessions.
- What would you least like your supervisor to know about you and your client?
- How do you want the client to change?
- What have you not been able to say to the client?
- Who do they remind you of?
At Reboot, we believe that better humans make better coaches and better coaches do better work in the world.
Coaching supervision functions to develop the coach’s competence and capability, provide a supportive space to process the experiences that arise in client sessions and encourage a professional practice based on standards and ethics. In an unregulated industry that feels at times like the Wild West, it’s up to the coaches to keep our standards and ethics high.
For more information on our offerings for coaches, check out Reboot Supervision — rebootsupervision.io.
