In my end is my beginning...

This week I had my final supervision session with Jan, with whom I have had a peer- co-supervisory relationship, focused on our respective coaching work, for six years.  It was, as ever, a very rich and fruitful session, and I reached some conclusions about questions that had been live for me for some time, about my coaching identity and my coaching philosophy, which felt particularly timely in a final session. And naturally, we included a retrospective, looking at what we had learned together, and how we had worked together.

That was all very positive; we were both able to identify for ourselves and each other, significant learning and development over the years, arising from our work together; and that included, of course, our supervisory, as well as our coaching, skills.  In part that was because we had both undertaken supervisory training a few years back, so had been particularly attending to that - reading the literature, discussing with colleagues at workshops, and so on. We wrote a blog post on some of our reflections on that learning on the CSP blog, here.

And as I wrote up my notes for the session for the last time, I went back to my notes from our very first session, back in 2015.  And guess what, some of the issues that were alive then have only just been resolved; and some that reared their head in this final session, and felt new, were also foreshadowed in that very first session. 

We shall not cease from exploration. 

And the end of all our exploring.  

Will be to arrive where we started. 

And know the place for the first time.  

T S Eliot knew a thing or two, didn't he...