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Supervision can take place either one-to-one or with two or more trainees. Resources permitting, my preference, especially when trainees start seeing clients, is for individual supervision. Advantages of individual supervision include providing you with adequate time to be supervised thoroughly and the fact that you are more likely to discuss sensitive issues regarding clients and yourself than if supervised with others. Small group supervision also has some advantages: for example, it gives you exposure to a greater range of clients and enables you to develop skills of discussing and receiving feedback on your work from peers as well as from your supervisor. A combination of individual supervision and trainees participating in counselling-skills training groups has much to recommend it. Trainers can continue teaching assessment skills and different interventions in a training group. Furthermore, you can share your experiences of working with clients in ways that may be beneficial for all concerned.

In addition, there are forms of consultative supervision. One format is that of one-to-one peer consultative supervision in which two counsellors provide support and supervision for one another by alternating the roles of supervisor and supervisee. In peer-group consultative supervision, three or more counsellors share the responsibility of providing one another with support and supervision. Trainee and trainee counsellors require training supervision prior to becoming accredited. However, you can also provide one another with consultative supervision. In reality, much consultative supervision takes place informally, with counsellors discussing clients and their reactions to them with trusted colleagues and those who have specialist knowledge.

The overriding goal of supervision is to aid trainees to think and communicate as effective counsellors and, in so doing, to develop the skills of being your own ‘internal’ supervisor. Box 30.1 lists some of the functions of supervision (Bond, 2010; Carroll, 1996; Fortune and Watts, 2000; Geldard and Geldard, 2005, King, 2008; McCann, 2011; Milne and James, 2000). I start the list by stressing the importance of thinking scientifically about your clients. Counsellors as practitioner-researchers search for evidence to support their work. Supervisors can encourage you as trainees to create hypotheses about what you do in counselling and then to monitor and evaluate the outcomes of your decisions. The process of supervision involves helping you, within a safe emotional climate, to question the adequacy of your performance and the thinking that precedes, accompanies and follows what you do. Such questioning attitude requires humility and a reasonable absence of defensiveness for you to be able to identify, explore and own genuine strengths and also to be honest about the skills you need to improve. Supervisors can also encourage you to examine the research and professional literature for suggestions as to what interventions to use with which clients, under what circumstances. Needless to say, such literature should be examined critically rather than unquestioningly and you should never attempt any intervention for which you are inadequately prepared.

When you start counselling clients on placements and being supervised, you are at the exciting stage of putting into real-life practice the skills and learnings that you have acquired so far. This is the moment of truth towards which you and your trainers have been working. For many trainees, eager anticipation is tinged with apprehension that you are not good enough. Though some level of performance anxiety is realistic in beginning counsellors, those of your who have demanding and perfectionist rules create unhelpful levels of anxiety that can interfere with performance. Early on, supervisors may have to do some ‘hand holding’ as they help you to break the ice with real clients. Supervisors may need to assist you to examine insufficiently strong mind skills contributing to performance anxiety. Throughout supervision, supervisors should provide emotional support in ways that encourage self-reliance and honest self-appraisal rather than dependence and a need for supervisor approval.

Supervisors can assist you to perform the joint tasks of providing good client services and improving your essential counselling skills by helping you to explore how well you are conducting each stage and phase of the lifeskills counselling model. To some extent the supervision process parallels the counselling process, in that your supervisor should develop a good collaborative working relationship with you to provide a fertile context in which to monitor and improve your skills. In supervision, however, the main emphasis is on improving the mind skills and the communication skills required for effective counselling rather than on managing personal problems.

Helping trainees to offer clients high-quality counselling relationships is the primary task of supervision’s early stages. Supervisors who model good relationship skills are invaluable sources of learning. It is critically important that your supervisor assists you to develop a comfortable interviewing style that forms a sound base both for varying the nature of the counselling relationship (for instance by using skills such as questioning or challenging) and for using more technical skills and interventions.

Supervision should back up counselling skills training groups in teaching you about the important aspects of practice. You may wrongly think you are not up to handling some of the clients you counsel on your placements. In many instances, placement agencies will screen clients before referring them to you. However, this is not always the case and Mearns (1997), based on experience at the University of Strathclyde’s free public Counselling Clinic, argues that resources spent on screening would be better diverted to supporting trainees as they work with challenging clients.

Supervisors should help you to gain a realistic acknowledgement of your strengths and limitations. You can develop knowledge and confidence about when you may take on difficult clients, provided you have access to adequate support and supervision. Supervisors can also assist you to realize the importance of acknowledging other professionals’ strengths. There is nothing shameful about referring clients to colleagues who have special areas of expertise – for instance, in pain management or in overcoming drug addiction. Supervision can help you realize the value of arranging in advance good support systems for such purposes as dealing with emergencies, medical considerations, clients with special problems, and your own levels of stress and burnout.

Supervisors can also help trainees to understand the ethical dimensions of counselling, including issues connected with seeing clients in placement agencies and on counsellor training courses. Supervisors can address issues of diversity in supervisor-trainee relationships and assist you in gaining awareness and skills for dealing with clients whose personal characteristics differ from your own.

While supervision should have as its focus improving the trainees’ counselling skills, the dividing line between supervision and personal counselling is not clear-cut. As the Geldards write: ‘unless a counsellor owns and deals with their own issues, these issues are quite likely to interfere with the counselling process to the detriment of the client’ (Geldard and Geldard, 2005: 271-2).

You may bring past patterns of unhelpful thinking and communicating to both your counselling and your supervision relationships. Earlier I mentioned trainees whose demanding rules create their own performance anxiety, which in turn makes them less effective with clients. Assisting trainees to identify, challenge and restate such demanding rules might be perceived as performing aspects of personal counselling within the supervisory relationships. Similarly, if supervisors and trainees become aware of sexism or cultural prejudice, such issues require addressing in supervision as well as, possibly in personal counselling.

The supervision literature is full of references to counter-transference, the process by which counsellors and trainees distort how they perceive and behave towards clients to meet their own needs. For instance, you may at varying levels of awareness be encouraging dependency, sexual interest or even distance in some clients. Effective supervision helps you to identify, explore and address such distortions, at least in so far as they affect your work with clients. Supervisors should also identify and address their own counter-transference distortions towards their supervisees (Ladany et al., 2000).

Supervisors who adopt the lifeskills counselling model should, as part of supervision, be assisting you to monitor the insufficiently strong mind skills that you may bring to and exhibit when counselling, and not just allow you to focus on the insufficiently strong mind and communication skills of clients. Some trainees require further personal counselling, a possibility that can also be explored within supervision.

You need to learn how to get the most out of supervision, both when on a training course and afterwards. You need pointers to how you can improve your skills once supervision and the training course end. Supervision should help smooth out administrative aspects related to your seeing clients in placement agencies and provide appropriate feedback about your progress to your training course.