55 A Journey into Person-Centered Supervision: Redefining Success for Struggling Supervisees

Ready to transform your mental health counseling career? How about busting those fears about starting a private practice, running out of money, or facing licensing board issues? As a seasoned marriage and family therapist, practice owner, and educator, I am here to reveal the secrets. You'll learn about person-centered supervision, a concept that can revolutionize your practice by bridging the gap between counseling and supervision. We'll explore the dynamics of the counselor-client relationship, the role of the counselor, and how to use person-centered counseling techniques to their fullest potential.

I'm thrilled to acknowledge the 236 graduates of my 40-hour LPC LMFT supervisor course - a record-breaking achievement in Texas. And it's not just about training, we also provide financial assistance to counselors in need. If you're looking forward to enhancing your skills, apply for the 2023 Practice Grant Giveaway at katewalkertraining.com/grant. The episode also gives you a peek into the Step It Up membership, Badass Basics, and exclusive mastermind groups, designed to help you unlock your potential and build a thriving counseling practice. Join me in this enlightening journey and redefine what it means to be a successful counselor.

Get your step by step guide to private practice. Because you are too important to lose to not knowing the rules, going broke, burning out, and giving up. #counselorsdontquit.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

I encourage you to begin to trust more your own internal direction, even though you're saying you really don't know how to proceed. If you did know, what actions might you take? Hi, I'm Dr Kate Walker. I'm a marriage and family therapist practice owner and professor of counselor education who took a passion for training the next generation of mental health providers and turned it into a multi six figure business that designs the courses that teach mental health providers how to be clinical supervisors, teaching graduate students and seasoned counselors. I learned about the fears Fears about failing quitting toxic work environments where you're seeing 80 clients a week. Fears about starting a private practice running out of money, getting in trouble by the licensing board, the IRS, you name it. I created the Texas counselors creating badass businesses community so mental health providers like you could have a step by step guide and learn actionable steps to achieve the security, freedom and satisfaction of a counseling career you'll love. Look, you had the dream to become a mental health professional. You got the degree, you took the exams, you put in the time. Whatever your business is A private practice. Maybe you want to sell courses, like I do. You're adding clinical supervision. You want to write a book or get paid to speak, whatever it is. You are too important to your community to lose, to getting in trouble, giving up, going broke and burning out. Are you ready to break through those fears once and for all? I thought so. Let's get to work. Welcome to Texas. Counselors creating badass businesses where it's all about working smarter, not harder. And here's your host, dr Kate Walker, who plays gigs in her time off.

Speaker 1: 2:02

Happy November, it's finally chilly in Texas. At last I can cuddle my hot chai oat milk lattes without sending myself into a full on hot flash. I've got big news about the only online 40 hour LPC LMFT supervisor course in Texas. We have officially graduated more new supervisors to be than any other course in Texas 236 graduates in 2023 alone, and the number just keeps climbing. We all know that counselors need quality continuing education courses full of great information that will help them build their career, protect their license, grow a practice and stay out of trouble. And bonus points at the course is not boring and outdated, but the real barrier to finishing a course that could lead to your supervisor designation Well, sometimes it's cold hard cash. Let me make it easy for you. I host the only online 40 hour LPC LMFT supervisor training that can lead to the supervisor designation in Texas, and in the month of November we're accepting applications for the December practice grant giveaway. I'm looking for counselor badasses just like you who share my mission to fill the gaps in access to affordable mental health services in rural and underserved Texas. Applications will be reviewed by a panel and will announce grant winners in December. You, my bad ass, are too important to your community to not take the supervisor training because you didn't have the cash to make it happen. Fill out the application today for the 2023 practice grant giveaway. It's easy. Just go to katewalkertrainingcom forward slash grant. That's katewalkertrainingcom forward slash G-R-A-N-T. Welcome to.

Speaker 1: 4:11

What person centered supervision is and what person centered supervision is not. Now I've realized I'm talking to a very narrow niche here, a very narrow slice of people, and you know what. That's okay because even if you are not a supervisor, you might be curious about theories in general for supervision. The thing is, supervision is its own intervention. It's going to use the same terms, of course, because they're related, but in supervision you take on different roles. I just look like I was putting on a hat. Right, I'm putting on the hat of a teacher, or I might put on the hat of a counselor, or I might put on the hat of a consultant or even a coach. You know we also talk about levels. So you have a beginning supervisee, you have a middle stage supervisee, and then you have this supervisee that's about to become your colleague, and so with the developmental models, we just kind of refer to them as level one, level two, level three. So you can imagine how different this is for counseling, right? Because if your person that you're counseling comes in to see you today is they will come to see me in about an hour, I'll start my counseling day. I'm going to meet them where they are. If they are in a space where they are rocking that treatment plan and they are goal focused and they know exactly what they want to do, and I'm just there to kind of observe the magic, wonderful. If they're not and we end up talking about something that happened this week, or perhaps they are just in a space where they are not able to really work on anything, I'm going to stay right with them.

Speaker 1: 5:59

So the difference between supervising and counseling is this goal oriented thing with supervision. Because supervision, I have one goal and that is to get them to a fully licensed professional. That's my goal, hopefully that's their goal, hopefully we're meeting and we're doing this thing together. But there's a hierarchy in supervision where sometimes we're not on the same page, sometimes maybe my head's not in the right place or their head's not in the right place, and so my stance is much more assertive. My stance is a much more goal directed one and, lucky for us, supervision has theories and it has particular interventions to get your supervisee to where they need to be.

Speaker 1: 6:54

Now, that's language I would never use in counseling. Right, like, okay, I'm going to be a counselor and get my person to where they need to be. Who am I to say where they need to be? Right, that's the whole beauty of being a counselor. It's the I-Vow relationship, it's the one down and that's what we're going to talk about today with person-centered supervision, because there are elements of the counseling person-centered that we will bring into the supervision person-centered, but for supervisors, we can never, ever forget that we're Jkeepers. We're always going to be in a one-up position, we are always going to be aware of that hierarchy and you know, I've had a lot of person-centered folks come through my 40-hour supervisor training to become an LPC or an LMFT supervisor in Texas and I think they struggle with this idea of gatekeeper and evaluator. And we talk about the core structure, right. The contract orientation, evaluation, remediation, this core framework of helping our supervisors get from point A to point D right, Whatever that is, but it's full licensure for the sake of our purposes today, right.

Speaker 1: 8:19

Or if you're in another state and you're listening to me and you have been elected or nominated or hired as supervisor for a mental health professional in training, right. You hope that your goal is their goal. You hope that both of you are working together to meet the goal of becoming fully licensed in your field. And if it's not, you still must be the gatekeeper, you must be the evaluator, you must be the remediator and ultimately you're the one who signs off on whether or not this person is capable to practice if they have met the criteria to become a fully licensed mental health professional. And if you're listening to me and you are maybe having a different career than counseling, you may find a few nuggets here as well. So I'm going to go over what person-centered counseling is, what person-centered supervision is, and then you're going to get some examples of what person-centered supervision might sound like and the circumstances in which you might use it. Okay, you're learning new stuff to become a better supervisor, because we have one goal and that is to fill the gaps in access to care in mental health services in rural and underserved Texas. More supervisors means more care, more access. So go you All right. And also, you know I'm going to be referring to screen shares, so I will talk you through it as I'm going through it. So here go the glasses.

Speaker 1: 9:58

Let's talk about person-centered counseling. So the key idea with person-centered counseling is that your client has immense resources. You, the counselor, are not viewed as the expert. Your client is taking an active role in the process of collaborator and the quality of the counseling depends on the relationship. Person-centered is all about relationship. Your role as a counselor doing person-centered counseling is to provide that atmosphere of empathy and warmth and genuineness and unconditional positive regard. You're going to facilitate your client's ability to be open to their experience so that can become fully present and engaged in the relationship and you trust your client's ability to grow. Well, if I just plug in the word supervisor, it's pretty much the same for supervision. The supervisor has immense resources. You believe that you are not the expert. Your supervisor is expected to take an active role in the process as collaborator. The quality of supervision hinges on that relationship. Your job as a person's center supervisor is to provide an atmosphere of empathy, warmth and unconditional positive regard. You facilitate your supervisor's ability to be open to their experience so they can become fully engaged in the relationship and you trust the supervisor's potential for growth.

Speaker 1: 11:41

Now, if I am counseling someone and I'm doing person-centered counseling, there are a few key elements. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to share my screen and just show you a couple of common actually one's more common than the other evaluation instruments. So I'm going to share the screen and show you the CCSR that was developed and created by Dr Landy and you can see this is just a very basic. We use it with our intern students at university. We use it I hope a lot of you use it with your associates postgraduate who are working on their hours toward licensure, and you can see that person-centered and that's very small, isn't it? All right, if you're listening to me, I'm now screen sharing the CCSR and you can Google that CCSR by Glenn Landy and there are lots of PDFs online where you can find and even follow along with me if you want to pause and follow along so you'll see down here.

Speaker 1: 12:50

I'm pointing at the bottom three elements reflecting, paraphrasing, reflecting feelings and reflecting summarizing. This is a basic tenant-person-centered counseling. So you can see, on a scale of 1 to 5, 5 being the best. Let's just look at reflecting paraphrasing the student or the supervisee demonstrates appropriate use of paraphrasing as a primary therapeutic approach. That's awesome, harbful or very poor. The supervisee demonstrates poor ability to paraphrase, such as being judgmental or dismissive. So if I'm supervising and I'm teaching my supervisee to do or be person-centered, then I'm going to pay attention to these things and these things are actually poor, fundamental, key elements to what we do in counseling. So if you're a non-counselor and you're listening to this podcast or this training or watching it on YouTube, here's a little peek behind the curtain. This is a huge fundamental part of what we as counselors do to help our clients feel better, accomplish their goals, make their way through our treatment plans. The next part is reflecting of feelings. So a little, I'm sorry. 5, which is the best on this instrument your counselor is demonstrating appropriate use of reflection of feeling as a primary approach, and I'll just keep going. Reflecting or summarizing 5 out of 5 demonstrates consistent ability to use summarization to include content, feelings, behaviors and future plans. So if you are going to teach your supervisee or a student how to be person-centered, to reflect content, reflect meaning, to summarize back to the client, this would be a great instrument. You could make sure they were doing those things.

Speaker 1: 14:58

I'm going to show you another instrument. This is not quite as common. It's called the Carcuff Scale and you can see this is let me make that go away. So what I'm looking at is actually PDF. I don't know if you can find this one. It's C-A-R-K-H-U-F-F and it also helps supervisors, professors teach person-centered supervision. So there's a level one, there's a level two, level three and level four and level five. So when I was learning how to supervise in my doctoral program, we were learning how to find level five carcuff interventions in our internship students. So we were grading them on their ability to deliver a level five carcuff.

Speaker 1: 15:52

So let's see, here's an example. It seems that your present situation is really of longstanding and goes back a long series of difficulties in your developmental process compared to, although you say you don't know what's wrong, and although you say your parents like you, they never seem to have given any specific evidence of love or affection, so you can see if you're a supervisor or a professor who has taught this people. Those two statements are different because they have different levels of extending that content and meaning, extending that reflection in that summary. Ok, so here we go. That was person-centered counseling, teaching person-centered concepts. Now we're going to switch it to hey, that's what the title of this podcast or this training is right how to do person-centered supervision. Hey, badass, I know you don't have time to sit in on another boring, outdated webinar for your counseling continuing education, so I wanted to make sure you know about the best deal going in Texas counselor continuing education Free webinars at Kate Walker Training.

Speaker 1: 17:14

Best of all, every webinar is presented after 5 pm. It's completely free and every webinar meets the new Texas rule mandating that 50% of CEs come from a designated provider. The free webinars are presented by real people, facilitated by yours truly, and there is always an opportunity for questions and answers. Here's what we have coming up in the next four months October 25th, I'm presenting a webinar for the supervisor. Curious, scared of becoming a clinical supervisor, attend this webinar and help me get you over your fears and out into the field where you can multiply the difference you make in underserved Texas communities. November 30th, dr Lisa Wines will present Bridging the Gap from Grad School to LPC Associate. This is one of our most popular webinars and I invite professors to tune in with your entire classroom of counseling students. December 22nd isn't exactly a webinar, but we are announcing the winners of the 2023 Practice Grant giveaway. January 25th 2024 will be the exception to our five o'clock rule because our speaker will be the fabulous and knowledgeable Christina DeLuna, board Administrator for the Texas LPC Board. She'll tell us what's new at the board and, of course, answer your questions. Get in on all the fun by going to wwwkatewalkertrainingcom.

Speaker 1: 18:47

Forward slash free webinar and now let's talk about why, how and what this would look like. So if I'm a supervisor and I have my supervisor in front of me, let's say they are a level one brand new supervisor and they're coming to me and they're anxious and they just want to do well and they don't want to talk about any of their faults, your problems or mistakes, and I'm just going to look at them and I'm in and on, I'm going to lean forward and I am going to engage person centered supervision and I might say you seem really anxious today. It sounds like you're really wanting to do well for me. It sounds like you're wanting to do so well. You may even be hesitant to share your problems or struggles with me, okay. So in that moment, as I'm doing person centered supervision, you hear that I'm not asking many questions. I'm doing a lot of reflecting right and so, with a level one supervisor, I'm putting on that hat of counselor and creating this huge, beautiful open space for my supervisee to process right. I'm not going to hammer them with Socratic questions. I'm not going to come at them with an agenda saying, okay, we can only talk about this for five minutes and then we got to get to this other thing. And those are all wonderful things.

Speaker 1: 20:29

If you're doing CBT supervision, right, you got some stuff you got to get through and okay, when you decide to deploy person centered theory and person centered interventions start coming out of your mouth, you are creating that safe space, for the relationship takes priority over everything. That doesn't mean you're not a gatekeeper anymore. That doesn't mean you're not going to intervene immediately If your supervisor has done something wrong. What this means is, for this moment, you have your counselor hat on and you're creating this space where your supervisee can breathe and take their time and share with you openly and honestly, and you're going to sit back and you're going to notice your feelings. You're going to notice all of the things you want to say. You're never going to check out of that role a gatekeeper and you will stay in this role as long as you need to, until that supervisee gets to where here's where the hierarchy comes in when they get to where you need them to be.

Speaker 1: 21:37

Now, if they can't get to where you need them to be, in other words, you cannot wear that counselor hat every hour of every supervision session, every day. I mean, if they're coming in over and over and over and over again and you're like well, up here goes that counselor hat again. Boy, that counselor hats getting a little worn out. There's a problem and that's why we teach the core structure contract orientation, evaluation, remediation. You must have some evaluations in place so that you can help your supramisee understand exactly how they're struggling in an observable, measurable, trackable way and if they can't make progress. This is why the remediation plan is now happening and you can even see. And when we teach person-centered counseling to our students, we have to have an evaluation right. We have to establish and recognize that there is a hierarchy there. So it's a moment, it's a hat, it's for particular situations.

Speaker 1: 22:39

Another great situation to deploy person-centered supervision is when your supramisee isn't recognizing their child or transference. They may come and be like, oh my gosh, that parent cornered me in the hallway again. I cannot stand this person, or I really understand why this kid is running away from home. Or, gosh, you know what, if my mom was like that, I would be failing all my assignments too. You're the supervisor, you're listening for that stuff, and if we tend to match or mirror anxiety in the moment, and if you're the supervisor, you're breathing, you're saying, oh, this sounds like a really good place to deploy my person-centered supervision theory. I'm going to give you some examples of some things you can say.

Speaker 1: 23:30

Person-centered supervision. Sample questions. Number one I'd like to hear you talk more about how it was for you to be with the client for that session. I encourage you to begin to trust more your own internal direction, even though you're saying you really don't know how to proceed. If you didn't know, what actions might you take? So there are a couple of questions in here. Right, tell me why you found to be important about the experience you shared with your client.

Speaker 1: 24:02

Today, I'd like to hear you talk more about the climate you're creating with your clients. To what degree do you feel you understand the world of your clients? What are your expectations for what we might do in today's supervision session? And so, in that moment, your person-centered supervision, you're not just reflecting content, you're not just reflecting feelings, you're not just extending and summarizing, you are being very, very strategic because, remember, as the person-centered supervisor, you are getting your supervises to a space where they can accomplish their goal, which we should all know is becoming a competent, fully licensed professional. So we will make sure we equip them to pass their next evaluation, to make sure that they don't need remediation, the best we can.

Speaker 1: 25:00

And if that means putting on that counselor hat, deploying some person-centered supervision, then excellent Supervisor. You've got this. You're doing a wonderful job of helping your supervisor, supervise-y, feel that safe space in that relationship. You are the keeper of the relationship, but you're also the gatekeeper. If you notice, this happens supervision after supervision, after supervision, and you've deployed a few evaluations and they're not quite meeting expectations, it's time to do something different. If that's an evaluation, if that's a remediation, if that's hitting pause on supervision and counseling completely. That's up to you. You just can't forget ultimately, that's your job supervisor All of these theories. And don't forget to check out the podcast episode where I talk about how to do CBT supervision, and you're going to hear how different that sounds because of the different role. Cbt you got to teach your head on. You're teaching, you're re-teaching. Something is going on that you've got to get through it. This is definitely a pause button where you're paying attention to something.

Speaker 1: 26:14

All right, hey, badasses, we can all agree that counselors want a path to a successful counseling career, but that means you have to find quality training. That's not even the real barrier. The real problem is a lot of information can be overwhelming and you, my badass, are busy. So you're probably asking yourself how can I improve my practice while still caring for people? How do I grow my skill set, become a supervisor without losing my work-life balance? How do I find quality training that won't cost too much time and money?

Speaker 1: 26:56

Bottom line counselors who want a successful counseling career value the goal of growing their skill set and even becoming a supervisor, but at the same time, struggle with finding time to attend quality courses. Counselors can't overcome this barrier because so many times, courses with tempting titles, over-promise and underperform. Let me ask you something what if there were courses that delivered exactly what they promised, that didn't take a lot of time and didn't break the bank? That's exactly the kind of course we design at Kate Walker Training. I specialize in helping you grow your skill set and career with quality courses on demand, and we have so many to choose from.

Speaker 1: 27:43

If you're asking yourself where do I go if I want to sustain my practice and grow my marketing presence, well, check out the Step it Up membership. What do you do if you're ready to pay it forward and add streams of income? Well, check out the supervisor training. See if you're eligible. If you're looking for an experience that's more hands-on, keep an eye out for open enrollment for Badass Basics and our exclusive mastermind groups Music. I'm Dr Kate Walker. Thank you so much for listening to Texas Counselors Creating Badass Businesses. Thank you to Ridgely Walker for her lovely voiceovers at our introduction and do me a favor when you get a second, please like, share and subscribe and write us a review. That's really how we get picked up by other RSS feeds and we get this information out to the mental health badasses who need it Once again and keep saving the world with excellent therapy Music.