ABSTRACT
This chapter starts with an exploration of what underpins a gestalt approach to coaching supervision. Coaching supervision is defined as a relationship facilitating supervisees and supervisors to grow their reflective practice, to extend their capabilities and expand their capacities while attending to client safety. It considers the multiple contexts and interrelated ‘systems’ surrounding or showing up through the supervisee and their client work and seeks to bring value to those relationships. It looks at the role of the coach supervisor in this context, and how the practitioner might prepare themselves to work congruently with the approach. The authors describe how the gestalt supervisor offers to become an instrument of change, with the purpose of awareness, through relationship. The lens of curiosity and enquiry, then, is not just ‘out there’ but also ‘in here’, i.e. what’s happening for me, right here, right now. In bringing that openness and contained vulnerability to the supervision process in service of supervisee growth, both parties are impacted. The chapter closes by looking at what else should be considered before working with the techniques, approaches, enquiries and experiments that follow. In this chapter there are seven techniques written by five different contributors.
