Why Supervision Can Hold All Three and Still Be Its Own Discipline.
Mentoring, coaching, and supervision are often spoken about interchangeably. The distinctions between them are not semantic; they are functional and ethical.
Teams are not problems to solve. They are living systems to work with. This is where team coaching fundamentally differs from individual coaching. Linear tools don’t stretch far enough. What’s needed instead is a systemic stance one that pays attention to relationships, patterns, and what’s emerging over time.
Where might collusion be happening — inside us, between us, and within the systems we serve? Collusion often appears quietly in teams and organisations — through agreement, silence, loyalty, and the patterns we find ourselves playing along with before we have fully noticed them.
A complete guide to team coaching. Learn how team coaching works, how it differs from facilitation and team building, and what ICF and EMCC emphasize in effective team development.
In co-coaching, whole partnerships become a mature developmental capacity rather than a static achievement.
Co-coaching partnerships are living systems. They are shaped by autobiography, polarity, attachment, authority, and systemic invitation.
This is not about perfect partnership.
It is about evolutionary partnership in service of living systems.
This is the layer that Marc Gafni and Barbara Marx Hubbard describe in Whole Mate: The Future of Relationships as the Soulmate dimension of partnership — a relational field designed to catalyse growth through mirroring and shadow activation.
Translated into co-coaching, this becomes Soul Partnership.
In our own early years of co-coaching (2010–2012), while we never formally assigned roles in the room, we increasingly noticed where each of us naturally held particular poles. Through briefings and debriefs, we began naming these tendencies and inviting each other into the edges — supporting one another to stretch beyond comfort rather than unconsciously defaulting to strength. In hindsight, this marked the early movement from role partnership toward soul partnership.
