Cleaning Off the Mud: Supervision as the Space Between

In Supervision in Action, Erik de Haan offers a beautifully grounded metaphor for coaching supervision. He likens it to the utility room or boot room of a family home—the transitional space you pass through when coming in from the garden, muddy boots and gloves still on, dirt under your fingernails, soaked from the rain or perhaps exhilarated by the work you’ve been doing.

Before you can step into the heart of the house—into connection, rest, and the next part of life—you pause. You take off the boots. You shake off the mud. You might wash your hands, hang up your jacket, and give yourself a moment to adjust.

This is supervision.

Not the coaching itself, nor the rest of life—but the space in between. A place of transition, reflection, and reset.

Why Coaches Need a Utility Room

Coaching is intimate work. We step into our clients’ worlds, hold their stories, absorb their energy, and try—day after day—to be fully present and helpful.

But that presence comes at a cost. Like gardeners, we dig deep. We get dirt under our nails. We weather storms and bask in breakthroughs. And often, we carry the traces of that work with us—emotionally, psychologically, even somatically.

Without a space to pause and clean off the residue, we risk tracking mud through the rest of our professional and personal lives. We might:

• Carry unresolved frustration or emotional residue into our next session.
• Bring a sense of stuckness or failure home at the end of the day.
• Lose clarity about what’s ours and what’s the client’s.
• Feel emotionally cluttered, reactive, or fatigued without knowing why.

Supervision offers a place to put all of that down.

Supervision as a Threshold Space

The utility room metaphor reminds us that supervision isn’t just about solving problems or analysing performance—it’s a threshold.

It’s the space where we move from the doing of coaching to the being of reflection. A place that sits between roles, between moments, between selves.

In that space, we get to:

• Pause and breathe.
• Wash off the emotional residue of a difficult session.
• Name the things we’d never say in the coaching room.
• Reclaim our professional identity after a moment of uncertainty or challenge.
• Decide what to carry forward, and what to leave behind.

It’s less about answers and more about integration—of experience, feeling, identity, and insight.

Removing the Boots

Some aspects of the utility room are physical—removing the mud-covered boots, the soaked gloves, the worn-down layers of protection. In supervision, this might be:

• Naming the irritation or helplessness we felt with a client.
• Admitting the session where we felt lost or disengaged.
• Saying the thing we’ve been afraid to say out loud: “I don’t know if I helped.”
• Exploring the session that stayed with us long after it ended.

This is where catharsis and reflection meet. Where the very act of taking off the boots and sitting down offers relief.

And just as importantly, it’s where we give ourselves permission not to take everything with us.

Not the Front Room—And That’s the Point

Supervision is not the polished space we show clients. It’s not where we’re trying to impress, or be useful, or hold someone else’s process. It’s more raw than that. More personal.

It’s where the coach gets to be just that—a human being who’s been working hard, who has things to clean off, and who needs a moment to catch their breath.

It’s not always pretty. But it is honest. And in that honesty, growth happens.

Leaving the Room Lighter

What happens after the utility room? You don’t stay there forever. Once the boots are off and the jacket’s hung up, you step into the rest of the house—cleaner, clearer, more at ease.

In the same way, supervision prepares the coach to:

• Re-enter the coaching space with greater clarity.
• Return to life with a lighter emotional load.
• Approach their next client with renewed presence and intention.

It doesn’t fix everything. But it allows space to process and prepare, so that coaching can be done with integrity, energy, and care.

Conclusion: Honouring the Messiness of the Work

Coaching isn’t clean work. It’s messy, human, relational. And that’s part of what makes it so powerful. But the more deeply we go, the more we need a space to clean off and come back to ourselves.

Supervision is that space. Not a front room. Not a boardroom. A utility room. A place of transition, humility, and renewal.

So when you next walk through the door of supervision, ask yourself:

“What mud am I carrying in today? And what might I leave behind before I go?”

Because every coach needs a place to take off their boots.