The neophyte supervisor: Navigating the swampy lowlands through collaborative approaches to supervision

Meta-supervision, or supervision of supervisors-in-training, is designed to enhance the quality and efficacy of the supervisory process. Supervision can be a difficult, complex process that is essential in helping budding sport, exercise, and performance psychology (SEPP) professionals learn the craft. There are myriad approaches to supervision and meta-supervision. Psychodynamic supervision emphasizes those largely pre- and unconscious drives, motives, and conflicts that ebb and flow in interpersonal relationships. Psychodynamic meta-supervision can also take on a supervisory matrix-centered theme in which the relationship dynamics between the meta-supervisor and supervisor in training are at the core. Resources such as Siegel help demystify interpersonal neurobiology and make the research accessible to a wide variety of practitioners. The major ground rule is that the environment where meta-supervision takes place is a nonjudgmental space. Andrew and Fred learned heaps from each other even though a lot of that learning was painful.