Coaching Has a Blind Spot

Coaching is a profession that talks a great deal about development.

About growth. About becoming more capable. About building the kind of self-awareness that changes how people work and live. Coaches believe in this for their clients. It’s the whole point of the work.

And yet — most coaches have no formal space dedicated to reflecting on their own practice.

No place to bring the client who has been sitting in their head between sessions. The one they’re not quite sure about. No space to notice that the same pattern has appeared in three different engagements and ask what that might mean. No space to sit down with another professional and ask, honestly: is what I’m doing actually working?

As they say, you cannot read the label from inside the jar.

The space I’m describing has a name. It’s called coaching supervision. And the majority of coaches either don’t know it exists, or have decided — without quite looking at it — that it’s designed for people who are having difficulties. People who need fixing.

It isn’t.

Supervision is for everyone who is practicing. It is the professional discipline that keeps coaching honest. Not honest in the sense of catching people out — honest in the sense that someone is actually looking at what’s happening. Not assuming it’s fine because the client keeps coming back. Not assuming the work is good because nobody has complained.

A coach can work for years with a particular kind of client and develop very strong instincts about that work. Those instincts are genuinely valuable. But instincts that have never been examined are also instincts that can calcify. The approach that worked well five years ago may be running on without the coach noticing that the context has changed. The blind spot that was small at the beginning may have quietly grown.

This is not a failure of character. It is a structural problem. And structural problems require structural solutions.

Supervision is that solution. It is the place where the coach steps outside the work long enough to look at it. Where patterns get named. Where the case that has been quietly taking up too much space gets brought into the room. Where the question — am I actually helping here, or am I just comfortable with this client — can be asked properly, with someone else in the room to help think it through.

The profession has been slow to make this case clearly. Supervision has often been positioned as something for trainees, or for coaches in difficulty, or for people who want to go deeper as a kind of optional extra. This has done real damage. It has meant that coaches who would benefit most — experienced practitioners with complex caseloads — are often the ones least likely to seek it out. Because they’ve concluded, reasonably but incorrectly, that it isn’t for them.

It is for them. It is for anyone who is doing this work and wants to do it well.

Supervision doesn’t tell you that your practice is good or bad. It doesn’t reassure you that you’re on the right track or tell you you’re not. What it does is give you a proper place to explore your work — with rigour, with a skilled other, and with enough distance from the work to actually see it.

That is not a luxury. That is a professional discipline.