Interview with supervisor Inge Tael

A company starting out in the creative industries needs three kinds of guidance in order to develop. First, it needs basic business knowledge, and the key term here might be writing a business plan. Second, to stay competitive with its products, it needs professional training in its own field, where, for example, a glass artist gets up to date with newer materials.

Most of the time this amounts to technological upskilling, sometimes slightly interwoven with the ideology and philosophy of the field. These two main areas of training have now been joined by courses that promise to stimulate creativity, to get people finding solutions and believing in themselves.

This knowledge and self-regulation are also very important for an artist who suddenly steps out of the role of an employee with a routine 8-hour working day and into the role of the person who generates the ideas, gets things going and carries the responsibility. Because the subject as a whole is rather “soft” and lacks clear contours, the quality of these courses also varies quite widely.

Participants have to be able to tell for themselves which courses are, in substance, little more than entertainment events and which, on the contrary, bring real, noticeable development. The Estonian Supervision and Coaching Association has so far kept a fairly modest profile in this training market. One might get the impression that, as with the Bar Association, an intensive sales strategy is not considered quite proper for supervisors either.

At the same time, what supervision promises is credibly logical, and because supervision is based on psychological science, it would seem able, unlike many others, to take responsibility for the result. With the help of supervisor Inge Tael, we look at what benefit an entrepreneur starting out in the creative industries could gain from supervision.

What is supervision?

Supervision is one form of psychological counselling, and it emerged in psychotherapy and social work in the 1920s. The main task of supervision is to help people shape and change their relationships in the context of work – both horizontal ones (between colleagues) and vertical ones (between subordinates and managers). But you can also look at people’s relationship with what they produce, with their partners outside the organisation, and with their work in general.

Supervision can be carried out in very different contexts and settings – from the individual to the organisation, and from there it can extend into the space between organisations. Supervision is always aimed at change and development – so that the people working in an organisation are able to change and are glad to do so. For that, however, you have to work with every level, from the workers through middle managers to top management.

So in organisational supervision the work is done with larger and smaller groups as well as individually. A person is ready to change, to step out of their comfort zone, only if they take part in the process of deciding on those changes. If they understand why a temporary state of discomfort is necessary, at least for a while. Because stepping out of a state of comfort means discomfort until the person gets used to the new situation and accepts it as their own.

People need to understand why they have to make the effort, and to see how it benefits them. Many changes meet resistance in organisations precisely because they have been imposed from the top down without really talking to people.

What are a supervisor’s tools?

Supervision uses both intangible and tangible “tools”, or techniques. It draws on techniques that are also known in active learning and in the various schools of psychotherapy, of which there are a great many. You could mention psychodrama, or sculpting, which is more widespread elsewhere in the world, and so on. The work is directed towards helping a person become more aware of what is going on inside them and why they make the decisions they make.

Does that include hypnosis?

I have certainly never heard of techniques that lower consciousness being used anywhere. The principle of supervision is quite the opposite: raising consciousness and awareness. What is used, though, is a range of techniques that let us glimpse what is going on in the subconscious – things the body is aware of but the conscious mind is not. We know a great many useful things that we don’t know we know.

Supervision, and especially one of its branches, coaching, makes a lot of use of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) techniques, many of which serve to broaden awareness by making better use of the senses. This doesn’t mean broadening consciousness in the direction of anything supernatural; it means learning to notice more of what our senses perceive. We learn to perceive ourselves and other people more consciously.

We notice more, get more information and understand more broadly what is going on, so that we can change our attitudes, values and prejudices – and teach this to another person as well.

“Unlike a businesslike manufacturer, a creative person doesn’t go and ask for help with their creative work, which is, after all, a far more personal and intimate process. This area has in fact been completely neglected.”

What is the difference between coaching, supervision, consultation and training?

As with all new things, there is a great deal of terminological confusion in this field. According to the terminology agreed by the Estonian Supervision and Coaching Association, supervision focuses mainly on relationships and mostly takes place in groups. That doesn’t rule out working individually. But relationships are still dealt with most fruitfully when all the parties are present. In coaching, the work is directed towards a very clearly defined goal, and it mostly takes place one-to-one.

In the coaching process, each person learns the ways of working that suit them best and are most productive for them individually. People learn to solve problems, to set goals and to find the paths that lead to them. This can also be done in teams.

Consultation takes place between specialists, one of whom is more experienced and knowledgeable and advises a less experienced specialist in the same field. Training, too, involves one or more specialists at a higher level in their field who teach people with less experience and fewer skills. Both consultation and training involve a vertical relationship, i.e. the higher influences the lower.

Supervision and coaching involve a horizontal relationship – the supervisor and the coach are specialists in their own field, which is managing processes, and do not necessarily know the client’s field any better than the client does.

Many business training courses are sold with the slogan that the course will be fun and enjoyable. In supervision, on the other hand, you can sometimes get hurt.

Of course, it can happen that a person sees not only pleasant things inside themselves but also things that are unpleasant. Especially when the relationships under scrutiny are conflictual ones, where everyone involved is always responsible both for the conflict arising and for resolving it. In that sense, yes, you can of course get hurt in supervision. And there are people who are very sensitive to that.

At the same time, becoming aware of your own shortcomings is the beginning of being able to rework the unpleasant things you have uncovered into something that actually benefits you. Both you personally and all the relationships you build with other people and with your work.

Supervision assumes that we are dealing with more or less mentally healthy people – that the supervisee is capable of reflecting on their thoughts, views, feelings and values. That they are able to see their own part in, and responsibility for, the processes they take part in. That they are able to accept feedback from others on what they do, even when it isn’t pleasant.

In therapy, where we are dealing with a person in whom, for one reason or another, this ability is less developed or has diminished, this is not assumed. A therapist has to be more careful in their work than is needed in a supervision or coaching process. In the therapeutic process, the therapist’s responsibility is also much greater.

Supervision helps people realise their true potential. How do we know when our true potential is in use, and when we still have something in reserve?

A person always has something in reserve. The human “computer” is so vast that new connections can be made in it for as long as the body holds out. Perhaps a more precise wording would be “towards one’s true potential”. If you look at the course of a person’s life, development comes to a halt when the person thinks they are clever, strong and complete and need not learn or develop any further – when they no longer strive to grow. In fact, true inner development only begins in the second half of life, after the age of 40.

Before that, a person gathers everything there is to gather from the world – they learn, process it, connect things together, experiment. After 40 they are full of riches that are no longer a mere reflection of the world, something learnt from others, but something they have transformed through hard work into their own wisdom about life, and which they can draw on for as long as the body holds out.

There are lots of different training courses on offer for entrepreneurs in our training market. Yet these services are relatively undifferentiated – they depend more on the size of the company than on its field of activity. And yet team management or sales in a creative business, for example, ought to be different from team management or sales in a construction company. Does a supervisor take the company’s field into account?

As a rule, supervision has been commissioned by organisations that either manufacture products or provide services, whose direction of development is growth and expansion (we produce more and better and find new markets), and by questions about the quality of their products or services. The focus of supervision, however, is not so much on outward expansion as on the person – the producer or service provider and the consumer or client – and on the satisfaction of both. Helping people find what makes them happy and content. That doesn’t mean life should be easy.

The goal may be to learn to feel joy at overcoming difficulties – by evening I’m dog-tired, but I feel I’ve got something done. As for creative people, they do sometimes turn to a counsellor, but in the context of therapy. In creative crises, though, coaching could actually be a great help. For example: why does a person fall into a crisis, what lies beneath it? Often the causes are not so deeply rooted in the personality that they need to be dealt with at the level of therapy.

After all, there are plenty of places where a person can get stuck, emotional ones included. Coaching would make it possible to look at the hooks a person is caught on and to learn to release them. The mindset of creative people can also be an obstacle here. Unlike a businesslike manufacturer, a creative person doesn’t go and ask for help with their creative work, which is, after all, a far more personal and intimate process. This area has in fact been completely neglected.

The Estonian Supervision and Coaching Association has held information days for the public sector, for manufacturing companies, and for people working in education and healthcare. But yes, creative people have not been reached.

So if they get stuck, their only option is to start drinking?

There are plenty of other ways of avoiding harming yourself. Powerlessness turns into aggression, and that gets projected onto relationships with other people: it’s the others who are to blame… These things can be regulated if a person knows that there are tools for doing so.

What can a supervisor offer a creative business?

Any kind of counselling begins with the question the person is looking for an answer to. I think working with creative people is more delicate than working with rational people. One option I see is emotion coaching. That means discovering the emotional causes of deadlocks and learning how to get out of them. It is sometimes close to therapeutic work; often the walls between the two are very thin indeed. After all, from childhood we are brought up on punishment.

From a very young age, attention is paid to what has been done wrong or badly. The more sensitive the nature, the deeper the mark it leaves. If I’m constantly told what I’m doing wrong or badly, then it’s hard to discover and believe that I can do something right, even better than well. Being belittled by a teacher, being drawn into your parents’ quarrels, being teased by your peers…

There are countless such everyday traumas hidden in the past, and they can suddenly resurface at the most inopportune moment, strip a person of their self-confidence and hurl them into a black hole of despair. When the emotional knots and sore spots of inferiority are resolved, that in itself means a creative upswing. Resource coaching would also be very much in place. The supervisor’s task is not to mould a person but to help them see the opportunities and obstacles on their path.

So that the artist can move forward on their own and go on fulfilling themselves right into their nineties, as Titian managed to do.

What does it mean to be an entrepreneur and a family person at the same time? Is the price of starting a company the breakdown of a relationship?

Unfortunately, that is often the case. It’s hard to serve two gods at once. To create something, you have to devote yourself to it. It’s hard to create something close to your heart and at the same time set aside energy for something else as well. Dividing your energy, time and attention is higher mathematics, but good old common sense can help here too. A family is like a field of grain, which can only yield a harvest if you give it enough time, attention and energy. That is like rain on the field. Without it, a family won’t last.

The longer a family is treated as the poor relation, the greater the danger it is in. Agreements help, and they have to be kept. What part of my week will I devote to my spouse and children? You can set out how long the other half will have to hold out. This can also be a subject for supervision, but it is more one of the subjects of life coaching.

Life coaching looks at a person’s life a little more broadly: the balance between work and private life, the question of the meaning of life, which becomes conscious through what a person does in their life and with their life, and where they put the emphasis in what they do. It explores how to find new goals when the horizon has become blurred.

But there is always one condition that often turns out to be a stumbling block: the supervisor or coach is responsible for the process that takes place in supervision, but whether the client puts it into practice is the client’s own responsibility. This is where the supervisor can no longer help. If there is no real will and no deep understanding of why my family matters to me and how much, then family ties can wither despite all the supportive measures.

There are two things behind this – either the family isn’t actually as important as work, or the person simply isn’t capable of dividing their energies. Saying “this is so terribly important to me, but I don’t have time for it” is self-deception. People divide their time according to the order of priorities that is truly important to them. Choices, and the price they come with, are inevitable.

Presumably everyone who works in a creative field knows that there are creatively more fertile periods and leaner ones.

A creative person isn’t a production machine. That is exactly why fertile and less fertile periods have to alternate. Creating is giving birth. Whatever is to be born first has to be carried in hiding for a shorter or longer time. Just as carrying a child can sometimes be uncomfortable and make you feel unwell, carrying a work of art can sometimes bring a feeling of anguish too. But without pregnancy you can’t give birth to anything; you can only turn out trinkets. That is one of the differences between art and craft or production. It is inevitable.

Speaking of the longer periods of life, between 20 and 30 a person can be enormously prolific in terms of quantity. As a rule, the difference here lies in quality – in what values this creative work carries. Clearly, “descriptions of situations” come more easily. Giving birth to true works of art, which hold eternal values and the true laws of the universe – that is not something you can do every day. A mouse carries its young for far less time than an elephant carries its calf.

Why is it that many creative people work at night?

I have a feeling this may have to do with the principles of how the brain works. Our right and left hemispheres are different. Ours is a right-handed world, governed by the left hemisphere. That is linked to rational and logical thinking. The right hemisphere is associated with creativity, intuition and thinking in images. The right hemisphere works somewhat in the background, as if in a light reverie.

All creative activity is also linked to the right hemisphere, because creative activity is somewhat connected with daydreaming, reverie and dreams. Creative work is often connected with deeper subconscious symbols, which ordinary people usually gain access to through dreams. They are hard to grasp with our daytime consciousness. The practical things we do in daylight are more closely tied to the activity of the left hemisphere.

Many people will surely have noticed how at dusk the world seems to become softer – it’s easier to connect with people then, for example. What the right hemisphere produces becomes more accessible at night than in daylight, and artists make use of this unconsciously. I know many people who are very bothered by this. It can be changed, but it takes quite a lot of effort. It isn’t easy to learn to hold on to what happens during the hours of sleep in your consciousness during the day, when all the “respectable” people are at work.

“Ours is a right-handed world, governed by the left hemisphere.”

What do we mean by getting stuck?

When a person is “stuck”, they give up making decisions, because they are unable to make choices. A person who isn’t “stuck” yet makes choices. They make a decision, even if it’s the wrong one, and see what its consequences are. A “stuck” person can’t make choices; they stay in the same place, and because of that the situation gets even worse.

Getting stuck can happen on two levels. When I get stuck on the level of thought, I lack sufficient information about things – I don’t understand the connections between the elements I need to analyse. That is a question of information. Here training or supervision can help. Training brings new ideas and perspectives from outside. In supervision and coaching, the person is squeezed until they start to create new connections from within themselves, from their own resources.

Training uses someone else’s resources; coaching uses the client’s own. The difference is simply that what a person learns in coaching stays with them and they can go on using it in future. What they have learnt in training is harder to go on using on their own. On the level of feelings, training doesn’t help; supervision or coaching does, where you look at why the person can’t let go of a particular approach, why they can’t move on.

Probably every one of us has experienced a working environment where there is tension and conflict in the air. Every now and then the media carry examples of disputes among the staff of some theatre or school… Usually these situations never really get resolved – either people leave their jobs or the organisation changes: it either falls apart or takes on a new form. How can a supervisor solve a problem that has been building up for years?

There are no grounds for hoping that difficult situations will resolve easily, or that things that have been cemented in place for years can be put right in a week. Coaching is a fast and relatively simple process aimed at narrowly defined goals, and it takes place with people who are interested in achieving those goals. That is why it is usually a counselling process of 10–15 sessions. In supervision, which deals with relationships, the process over which these changes happen is considerably longer.

Getting an ordinary team supervision under way takes about a year of monthly sessions. After a year of sessions you can see improvements in how work is organised and managed and in how information flows, but even a year isn’t always enough to change deeper relationships between many people. If there is an open conflict, then of course resolving it doesn’t take as long. Relationships are complicated, though, and there are situations that simply can’t be resolved to the satisfaction of all parties.

To change situations like these, people have to be given the chance to express themselves honestly and openly. That means endless time to go over and over the points that some people aren’t happy with, where someone has been hurt, and to reach an understanding of why these things happened. Often we don’t even know that we have hurt someone else.

But surely the best information still gets passed around in the smokers’ corner?

It is possible to create alternatives to the smokers’ corner. If there is a place where people come together informally, both informal and formal information will start to flow there.

In its introduction, supervision promises to relieve stress. Stress usually arises from situations that seem impossible – the company’s financial position is ominously bad, the work won’t be ready by the deadline, or the like. Surely a supervisor can’t ring the clients and tell them that we’re relieving stress here, so please wait another two weeks?

Supervision can involve relieving stress directly, but as a rule there is little of that. What does happen, though, is a change of attitude. When, on top of my main job, I was also lecturing at the university and rushing from work to my lectures, I often tended to be late, and I got nervous and flustered about it. At some point I decided that whether I was late or not, I wasn’t going to get flustered about it. Nothing gets any better by my winding myself up emotionally.

On the contrary – if I don’t get flustered, I can start work the moment I arrive and don’t have to calm down first. My stress eased and my productivity went up. It’s a question of attitude. Work can be organised so that it is more intensive – for example by discovering resources, by giving up unnecessary breaks or, quite the opposite, by allowing yourself breaks to recover your strength. If I see that even that doesn’t help, I know how to regulate the tension and not get worked up, and the result is better.

Creativity and innovation are closely linked to start-ups and are often a precondition for their success. Yet I haven’t come across the term supervision in the systems that prepare start-ups in Estonia. What you hear far more often are words like “business plan”, “sales forecast”, “investments” and “business risks”…

A new entrepreneur would also gain a great deal from coaching or supervision. Coaching would help them learn to integrate all their knowledge and skills and to apply them more effectively, and also to get to know their weak spots and build bridges over them. Supervision, on the other hand, would be an ideal process for shaping a (new) team and the relationships within it in the best possible way, for building a sense of standing shoulder to shoulder, and for getting to know one another’s strengths and weaknesses.

When psychotherapy began to develop 100 years ago, its result was greater harmony with oneself. Working with organisations and companies is a second wave of the same process, on another level. I am convinced that supervision would be needed by every new organisation starting out in life, so that they can be more humane in their work and in what they produce. We have a project-based economy, which interrupts development and reduces sustainability. It suits a young person’s abilities and qualities.

But the sense of perspective is weak and the horizon a little too close. Supervision and coaching would be useful in ensuring continuity and sustainability. In life coaching, among other things, you also learn that not everything has to be done immediately and all at once. That there are different kinds of resources, and using them can be just as problematic as finding them.

As a dyed-in-the-wool humanist, I am convinced that the human being is the measure of things, including success. People drive all development, and they do it for themselves. Our whole economy works towards expanding our footprint. And then we say the footprint is too big, that soon the Earth won’t be able to carry us any more. We think that if we can consume more, we will be happy. But still we aren’t happy… still we have nothing to wear… For humankind to move forward, we would need to change direction.

How not just to acquire, but to be with the things the soul longs for. Both supervision and coaching processes are aimed at helping a person get to know themselves, so that they are content with what they themselves do. When a person is content, they don’t need so many baubles, so many new cars… so much reassurance that they’re a big shot.

Yes, it’s putting the world to rights… But there is practical benefit in it too.