Barbara Jordan

Many people fail to reach their potential because they look only at their behavior and their conditions or results. They only scratch the surface. But, again, picture life as a tree. The roots and seeds are your thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, assumptions, and conclusions as well as your conditioning. The fruits on that tree represent your behaviors, results, and conditions. People often ignore the seeds and roots, and address only the fruits.

According to William Hewitt, “the subconscious mind is like an obedient servant—it just does what it is told to do. The subconscious mind doesn’t think, reason, or rationalize. It only adheres to instructions. Conversely, you conscious mind does think, reason, and rationalize—and often argues against what you want. This is why the conscious mind needs to be relaxed and quieted so it won’t counter what you are instructing your subconscious mind to do.”

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.