Deepening Your Practice – What Does This Mean?

On the supervision certificate at Henley Business School we include a day with Dr Alison Hodge titled “deepening your practice”, and Alison always challenges our students to think about what “deepening your practice” means? I have also been known to talk about “deepening” in my work and in planning future development work; but what does deepening your practice mean; and, what do you need to do to deepen; and what’s the benefit?

Let’s start with the meaning of ‘deepen’ – the dictionary defines it as: “to become more strongly felt or experienced”. This offers an interesting perspective to coaching because this meaning suggests that the coaches’ presence is having more impact and/or influence on the coaching. However, if we are honouring the humanistic philosophy that the ‘coachee is a whole, resourceful being, that does not need us to fix them’, we want our presence to be there in terms of attention, but not to bring in our ego and shape or influence the outcome of the coaching.

Having looked at what’s on offer to coaches to “deepen their practice” there seems to be much around moving towards “Mastery” and “Master Coach Status”. Those of you that have worked with me or heard me speak know that I dislike the terms “Mastery”, because to me it implies, we are somehow ‘superior’, ‘done’, ‘sorted’ etc. I recently led a session on the MSc Advanced Coaching Practice module, and, with that in mind you might link deepening your practice and being an advanced coach. And of course, anything we do to develop ourselves as coaches can advance ourselves as coaches – but is that deepening?

When I think about “deepening my practice” it is not about coaching skills or coach development. Instead, for me it is about the self-work I need to do to show up in the coaching relationship as an equally vulnerable human being, who is still developing as a person; a focus on how I can bring my whole self. I have realised that the more work I do on myself, the greater extent I can hold and contain whatever arises in a session, the more I can sit with discomfort and be comfortable with “not knowing”. Therefore, the work is mine to do on self. This is very much aligned to the writing Elizabeth Crosse, and I have been doing around Continuing PERSONAL and Professional Development – with a greater emphasis on the personal. As we highlight, the personal development is what develops our capacity as coaches. Therefore, the deepening is focused on who we are becoming and a focus on expanding our capacity to contain whatever arises, because as Laske (1999) highlights we can only take our clients as deep as we have taken ourselves.

With that in mind I offer the following for reflection:

• What does deepening mean to you? How will you know you have deepened your practice?
• What work do you need to do to expand your capacity and deepen?
• What might you be avoiding in yourself which may get in the way of deepening?

With that in mind, I am embracing this in my own development and have just started doing some painting classes – I have always told myself that I am not creative and rubbish at art! However, I am embracing conscious incompetence, letting go of any sense of perfection, and not comparing my work to the others in the class. You might be asking ‘how will that deepen your practice’ – being in the learning space and being vulnerable in terms of outcome is undoubtedly going to further develop my capacity to hold, contain and work with uncertainty.