When the client gets under your skin

There are coaching sessions that stay with you for all the right reasons. Something shifts. The client sees something differently. You leave the conversation curious about what happened and perhaps even slightly surprised by it.

And then there are the other ones.

The sessions you continue having long after the client has gone. You replay a question you asked, wonder why you didn’t challenge something, think about the moment you held back or find yourself becoming unusually preoccupied with whether the coaching was actually any good.

I have them too.

One particular client gets under my skin in a way I don’t immediately understand. There is resistance in our conversations — or at least that’s how I experience it — and I find myself becoming increasingly cautious. I’m normally comfortable challenging clients, naming what I’m noticing and occasionally being a little disruptive when I think the conversation needs it. Here, I hesitate.

And then, of course, I start making that mean something about me.

Am I doing something wrong? Why can’t I get this conversation moving? Why am I holding back? Am I actually helping?

There is a temptation at this point to look exclusively at the coaching. Perhaps I need a better question. Perhaps there is a technique I could use. Perhaps I need to be more confident, more challenging, more something.

But the most useful question turns out not to be about what I should do differently with the client.

It is about what is happening to me when I’m with them.

When the work follows you out of the room

Coaching asks us to pay a great deal of attention to the person in front of us. Their words, their assumptions, their emotions, what they’re moving towards and what they might be avoiding.

What is remarkably easy to overlook is that there is another human being in the conversation.

The coach.

We react. We become impatient. Protective. Bored. Excited. Intimidated. Rescuing. Competitive. Overly careful. We like some clients enormously and find others considerably more difficult. A story reminds us of our own. A particular behaviour irritates us for reasons we don’t immediately understand. Sometimes we desperately want a client to succeed. Sometimes, if we’re paying attention, we notice that we want their success rather more than they appear to.

None of this necessarily means something has gone wrong.

But it is information.

The difficulty is that when you’re inside the relationship, it can be remarkably hard to see what belongs to the client, what belongs to you and what is being created somewhere between the two of you.

That’s one of the places supervision becomes interesting.

A wider view

When I take the client who is troubling me into supervision, I begin by talking about them.

What they’re doing. Where they’re getting stuck. How they’re responding to me. Why I think the coaching isn’t moving.

Except supervision has an inconvenient habit of widening the frame.

As we explore the work, I begin to recognise something I haven’t properly seen. The client and I are living through circumstances with some striking similarities. Their story isn’t simply something I’m listening to; parts of it are resonating with my own experience.

Suddenly my caution makes rather more sense.

I am not simply responding to the client. I am responding to myself responding to the client.

That distinction changes the conversation.

The purpose isn’t to diagnose what has happened or produce a clever explanation for my behaviour. Nor does my supervisor tell me how to coach the client next time. What supervision gives me is enough distance from the work to become curious about something that is almost impossible to see while I’m standing in the middle of it.

Sometimes the thing we need to see in supervision isn’t the client. It’s ourselves in relationship with the client.

Once I can see that, I have choices again.

Supervision isn’t about fixing the coach either

I think this is an important distinction because supervision can easily be misunderstood as the place coaches go when something has gone wrong.

Bring the difficult client. Bring the ethical dilemma. Bring the session that went spectacularly off the rails and perhaps avoid mentioning the one you’re secretly hoping nobody ever asks about.

Those things absolutely belong in supervision.

But so does the work that’s going well.

The client you enjoy working with so much that you become curious about why. The conversation that felt effortless. The intervention that seemed to change something. The client whose progress makes you disproportionately delighted. The recurring pattern you begin to notice across several pieces of work.

Supervision isn’t simply remedial. It is reflective.

For me, that distinction matters because the question shifts from “How do I fix this?” towards something much richer:

“What is happening here?”

And here includes the client, the coach, the relationship between them, the wider system around the work and sometimes things none of us have noticed yet.

Support, development and something more disruptive

There are established ways of describing the functions of coaching supervision. One framework I find useful distinguishes between the normative, formative and restorative dimensions of supervision: attending to standards and ethical practice, developing the coach’s capacity, and providing somewhere for the practitioner to process and be supported in the work.

I recognise all three.

Sometimes I arrive in supervision needing to think carefully about an ethical boundary. Sometimes I’m interested in my coaching practice and want another perspective on what I’m doing. Sometimes I’m simply carrying too much of the work and need somewhere appropriate to put it down.

But there is another quality of supervision that particularly interests me.

Disruption.

Not disruption for its own sake, and certainly not a supervisor attempting to be clever at the coach’s expense. I mean the disruption that happens when somebody helps us look at something we’ve become too accustomed to seeing in one particular way.

A client is “resistant”.

A session “didn’t work”.

I “should have challenged more”.

They “need to take responsibility”.

Perhaps.

Or perhaps those are simply the stories I’ve constructed to make sense of something more complicated.

Good supervision doesn’t necessarily replace them with better stories. Sometimes it simply makes them available for examination.

And once a story becomes something we can examine rather than something we automatically believe, the work opens up again.

The coach needs somewhere to go too

There is a peculiar feature of coaching work: we ask coaches to create thoughtful, reflective spaces for other people while sometimes paying remarkably little attention to where the coach takes everything that happens inside those spaces.

Confidentiality means I can’t go home and casually unpack a client’s story over dinner. Professional boundaries matter. Some experiences from the work inevitably resonate with my own life, while others leave emotional traces I don’t immediately understand.

And occasionally a client simply gets under my skin.

Supervision gives that experience somewhere appropriate to go.

Not so that the supervisor can take it away, and not so that I can return to the next session perfectly cleansed of every human reaction. I’m not sure that would even be desirable.

The point is to become more aware of what I’m carrying and how it might be shaping the work.

For me, this is one of the reasons supervision has become such an important part of coaching practice. It doesn’t remove uncertainty. It gives me somewhere to think from within it.

And there is something rather reassuring about that.

Not because somebody else has the answer.

But because I don’t have to pretend that I do.