Get the Best Out of Supervision

Clinical or Practice Supervision for Social Workers and Welfare Workers is critical to ensure fidelity of practice, providing support in work that is often tough and challenging, as well as, engaging in self-care.

So how can you ensure you get the most out of your supervision?

· Come prepared. Make sure you have spent some time before supervision, noting what you want to talk about: a client interaction, exploring theory in your practice, understanding the personal in the professional space, understanding self, etc.

· Take a curious stance. Try to enter supervision with a curiosity; enter the space with a view that new connections, feelings, and thoughts might be made if we let go of the knowing and having to prove ourselves.

· Reduce the ego. Our self-worth is often caught up with a reliance on a sense of competence- or at least demonstrating competence. Supervision is a space for sitting outside of our sense of competence and sitting in the messiness/complexity/humanness of our practice.

· Reflect and reflect more. Keep asking yourself “why” as a way of digging into your assumptions and drives. Effective reflection is one of the best ways to improve our work.

I have tried to make an acronym out of the above but have failed miserably- perhaps this is a theme for another Blog from SOYP.