ABSTRACT
In human service work, the ideal partner to compassion is courage. This is followed by the ability to endure adversity through grit, and adapt to it through resilience. These concepts are defined and applied in this chapter, drawing on the author’s doctoral research undertaken with older adults and social workers who experienced the Canterbury Earthquakes in New Zealand in 2010, and 2011.
Supporting courage, grit, and resilience in supervision, contributes to managing adversity and encouraging a supervisee to work their way through this. When facing adversity, a supervisee may feel out of their depth, with fear, doubt, vulnerability, and uncertainty, flooding in. Having space to name and make sense of these feelings helps a supervisee find a new way forward. If the situation has passed, a supervisor can explore how the supervisee applied courage and grit, and through this, build a picture of their resilience with them. This helps a supervisee strengthen their skills, knowledge, and confidence for future adversity, by intentionally filling their resource pool of strengths and capacities. Articulating and affirming courage, grit and resilience in supervision is another way of providing the therapeutic function.
