Barbara Jordan

So you’ve been promoted to Clinical Supervisor. You received some training and passed the certification test. You've been a counselor/therapist for years. However, you've never held a Clinical Supervision meeting. So now what? How do you conduct these meetings? How often should you meet with your counselors for supervision?

Recently, an organization I work with experienced tremendous rapid business growth. Along with the typical “growing pains”, employees were over-extended because programs were under-staffed. Therefore, I stepped in to help counselors. Now, realize this: as a supervisor and counselor educator, it had been years since I was “in the trenches”. So you can imagine my surprise. Wow, was that an eye-opening experience! The most painful part of it was struggling with the record-keeping and paperwork. But, of course, as any great leader handles difficult times, I asked myself what I could learn from the experience. Supervisors: What can you learn from doing your counselors’ work?

Because life is complicated, your mind's job is to filter out all information that’s considered irrelevant to the task at hand. Your conscious mind represses, suppresses, ignores, or forgets any irrelevant data. It protects us from change, the unfamiliar, or anything that threatens status quo. For example, some of my clients step back from coaching because they get too close to something that may take them out of their comfort zone. Change is scary. As you know, change and continuous improvement is crucial for us because nothing stays the same. If you avoid change, you will not be successful. You are either green and growing or dead and dying. And, it is impossible to improve unless we change.

Last month, I gave you several tips on listening to improve your relationships. As you may recall, I said you could avoid "going upcreek without a paddle" by using your O.A.R.S., in which OARS was an acronym representing four active listening skills. In this blog post, I will give you tools to help people navigate tough waters once you've deployed your OARS.

One way, as counsleors, we can inspire, motivate, and reduce so-called "resistance" to change is to employ the principles of Motivational Interviewing (MI). My last blog post introduced MI. This post continues my discussion of that approach by detailing some of it's principles.