What to Expect in Your First Coaching Supervision Session

The video call connects and there’s that two-second pause where you’re both adjusting screens. The coach on the other side – credentialed, experienced, someone who’s sat with hundreds of clients – is visibly nervous. Not because they doubt their coaching. Because they have no frame of reference for what happens next. They’ve never been on this side of a professional conversation before.

I notice this almost every time. And the first thing I want them to know is: the nervousness is useful information, not a problem to solve.

The Anxiety You’re Not Talking About

Most coaches approaching their first supervision session are nervous – and most pretend they’re not. The nervousness tends to have a specific shape. It’s not general anxiety. It’s this: What if they see something wrong with my coaching?

That fear conflates supervision with evaluation. It assumes someone is going to watch your work, find the gaps, and tell you what you’re doing wrong. If you’re carrying that assumption, it’s worth naming it now – because coaching supervision doesn’t work that way, and the sooner you know that, the sooner the session becomes useful.

I’ve supervised coaches at every career stage, and there’s a pattern here that surprised me when I first noticed it. Coaches who’ve been practicing for ten or fifteen years often show more first-session anxiety than coaches who certified six months ago. The newer coaches figure they’re early in the process and expect to have things to learn. The experienced coaches feel they should have everything figured out by now. The competence that makes them excellent coaches also makes vulnerability harder. They’ve spent years being the expert in the room. Sitting in the other chair – the one where someone else asks the questions – feels unfamiliar in a way that’s hard to prepare for.

If that resonates, you’re in good company.

What Actually Happens: A Session Walkthrough

The first few minutes of a supervision session aren’t about diving into your coaching. They’re about establishing how you’ll work together.

Your supervisor will start by having a conversation about the structure of the relationship: what confidentiality looks like in this context (the same professional standards that govern your coaching practice apply here), what format sessions will take, how often you’ll meet, and what you each expect from the process. In supervision, we call this the contracting conversation. It sounds formal. In practice, it’s a ten-minute dialogue that establishes the ground rules so the rest of the space can be open.

After contracting, your supervisor will ask some version of: What brought you to supervision, and what’s on your mind?

You don’t need a perfectly formed question. You don’t need a polished case presentation. Most coaches start with whatever’s most present – a session that stayed with them, a client relationship that feels off, a pattern they’ve started noticing but can’t quite name. The supervisor’s job isn’t to wait for you to present a problem. It’s to help you find the thread worth pulling.

A pattern I see regularly in first sessions: a coach arrives wanting to discuss a client who seems stuck. They describe the situation, the interventions they’ve tried, the frustration of feeling like nothing’s moving. As we talk, something shifts. The questions I’m asking aren’t really about the client. They’re about the coach’s experience with the client. And what starts to surface is something different from the presenting topic – maybe the coach has been working harder than the client in more than one relationship, or they’ve been avoiding a direct conversation because they’re worried about the client’s reaction.

The coach didn’t walk in knowing that was the real material. Supervision didn’t “fix” the client situation. But it opened a different line of sight – one the coach couldn’t access alone because you can’t read the label from inside the bottle.

That first session doesn’t always produce a tidy resolution. More often, the coach leaves with a question to sit with rather than an answer to implement. That’s not a failure of the process. That’s how it’s designed to work.

What the Supervisor Is Actually Thinking

This is the part nobody covers, so let me pull back the curtain.

When you’re sitting across from me in your first session, I’m not evaluating your coaching competence. I’m not mentally scoring your interventions or comparing you to other coaches I work with. What I’m actually doing is listening – for what’s underneath the topic you brought. I’m paying attention to your energy, your language, the places where you speed up or slow down. I’m noticing what you’re saying and what you’re circling around.

What I hope you’ll bring is honesty more than polish. A real question more than a prepared agenda. I’m watching for where your awareness has edges – places where your self-observation gets blurry, where you can’t quite see what’s happening in your own practice. Not because those edges are flaws. Because that’s where the work is. That’s where supervision adds something your own reflection can’t reach.

There’s usually a moment – sometimes ten minutes in, sometimes forty – when something shifts. The coach’s posture changes. Their shoulders drop. They stop performing “being supervised” and start actually being in the conversation. Sometimes it happens when they say something they hadn’t planned to say. Not because I pushed them to – because the space allowed it.

Most coaches walk into their first supervision session expecting to be examined. What they actually find is someone who’s genuinely curious about their work – not whether they’re doing it right, but what they’re noticing about themselves while they do it.

That moment – when a coach realizes this isn’t evaluative, that something different is happening here – is one of the things I value most about this work.

What to Bring (And What Not to Worry About)

Almost every first-session coach over-prepares. They arrive with typed-out case notes, specific questions, sometimes even a structured agenda. Then we start talking, and what actually needs attention is something they hadn’t written down.

The coaches who arrive most “prepared” often have the hardest time accessing what actually needs attention. Preparation can become a way of controlling the session rather than being open to what it reveals. The best first sessions usually start with whatever you can’t stop thinking about – and that’s rarely what you wrote on your prep notes.

So bring whatever is most present for you. A session that stayed with you. A pattern you’ve noticed in your coaching. A client relationship that feels off in a way you can’t articulate. Or just a general sense that something isn’t working and you can’t name it yet. All of that is valid material. You can also explore topics for your first session if you want a sense of what other coaches typically bring – but don’t treat that as homework.

Don’t worry about: appearing polished, having read specific supervision frameworks, knowing the right terminology, or “doing it right.” There is no right way to do a first supervision session. There’s just showing up with some honesty about your practice.

One practical note: if your supervision is for credential hours – ACTC, EMCC renewal, or another pathway – mention this upfront so your supervisor can ensure proper documentation. It doesn’t change the session itself, but it matters for your records.

If you haven’t yet found a supervisor, choosing the right coaching supervisor is worth some thought – the relationship matters more than most coaches realize at the outset.

Want a simple framework for approaching your first session? Download our [session preparation guide] to help you get grounded before you show up.

What One Session Can – and Can’t – Do

Your first supervision session will not transform your coaching practice. It won’t solve the client situation you’ve been worrying about. It probably won’t produce a dramatic breakthrough.

I say that not to lower your expectations but to set them honestly. What a first session will do is begin something – a relationship, a practice of looking at your own work with someone else in the room, a different way of examining the patterns that shape how you coach. That beginning matters. But it’s a beginning.

Building the kind of trust that allows a coach to bring their real questions – not their polished ones – typically takes two or three sessions, not one. The first session is a foundation, not a finished house.

And there’s a boundary worth naming directly: supervision is not therapy. If you’re in genuine crisis – deep burnout, a serious ethical situation, mental health challenges that are affecting your work – a first supervision session is a starting point for recognizing that, but it may not be sufficient on its own. A good supervisor will name that boundary with you rather than pretend supervision can do everything.

What supervision can do, over time, is remarkable. But you don’t need to take my word for that yet. You just need to be willing to start. If you continue past the first session, getting the most from sessions is about building on what that first conversation opens.

If you’ve read this far, you know more about what a first supervision session involves than most coaches do when they book one. That’s not a small thing. The gap between “I should try this” and “I know what I’m walking into” is where most coaches get stuck.

The next step is smaller than it feels. Think about the last coaching session that stayed with you – the one you replayed afterward, wondering if you’d missed something or pushed too hard or not hard enough. You don’t need to have it figured out. You just need to be willing to look at it with someone who’s sat in that chair thousands of times.

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