How do you evaluate your evaluation?
How do you evaluate your work? This question was asked to me by my therapy tutor a couple of weeks ago. I was in a practice supervision session - we did a practice counselling session with a peer, then we took an issue from that session to supervision.
The BACP mandates supervision for its accredited members. Supervision is defined as a specialised form of mentoring for those undertaking challenging work with people.
It’s space for you to reflect. If something came up in a session that triggered you, or there’s something that doesn’t feel quite right, taking it to supervision is a good first step. Then you reflect and explore it with your supervisor, and take any learnings back to sessions.
I had a moment where I completely went blank in one of my practice counselling sessions. I couldn’t think of something to ask or reflect back to the client. All my skills went out the window and I panicked.
After a couple of seconds I grounded myself and came back to the session, and it ended up being a really good session. Nothing triggered it as such, I just felt like I was failing in some way, so I panicked.
I took this to supervision to discuss what happened, explore why, and come up with ways to prevent this from happening in the future.
One of the things that came out of my supervision was that I can be harsh on myself, and feel pressure to perform, which, yeah. This can have a detrimental effect on sessions as I’ll be focused on my performance, not the client’s needs.
My homework was to evaluate the session, then evaluate my evaluation, then evaluate that evaluation.
I’ve not really reflected or evaluated my evaluation of my work before. It’s an interesting exercise to think about how good or realistic my evaluation is.
I found it difficult, mostly because I wanted to dive deeper into my actual performance, rather than my evaluation.
Here’s a quote from my last evaluation:
I need to be more comfortable in ambiguity. It’s interesting that, despite being in PCC for years now, I still feel like I have to bring something to the session I can point to objectively, outside of the core conditions.
I’ve seen how powerful PCC and the core conditions are, so I need to trust my own ability to bring these core conditions and give the client space and time.
The issue is I don’t fully trust myself yet.
I trust the process of person centred counselling, I know that I can have the core conditions (empathy, unconditional positive regard, congruence), but I don’t fully trust myself to let the sessions happen as they need to. And not having that trust, and putting pressure on myself to ‘perform’ makes being a person-centred counsellor more difficult.
Person centred counselling is all about trust. We trust that our clients are the experts in their lives and what they need to do, and we have to trust in ourselves to be the counsellor they need us to be in the moment.
The process isn’t directive, I don’t advise or diagnose. I give space to the client, and my job is to be with them, however that looks. I felt like I needed to manage the session, when the only thing I really need to manage is making sure I don’t run over the time.
This is getting easier as I practise more, and keep that in mind, but it took really sitting down and not only evaluating my performance, but evaluating how I evaluate myself to see where the issue really was.
This is something I want to bring into my regular reflection work. Going deeper into what I was thinking and saying about myself, rather than the performance itself gave me a great insight.