Supervision Skills Matter — Part Two

What do you do when office politics become personal and impact how you are supervised?

Photo by airfocus on Unsplash

Last week, I detailed how I was impacted by a supervisor I had early in my career. It has taken me years to unlearn the shame and pain from this experience. But my story didn’t end there, so here goes:

Eleanor Roosevelt Saves the Day

I felt shame and continued to feel shame for all of the sacrifices I made to make it in my field, by being told I wasn’t good enough. To be honest, they lasted for the better part of a decade.

It’s funny how that meeting will sometimes pop up in my life so many years later. I remember telling a supervisor I had recently that I needed some personal time to process a meeting after being told in a year-end evaluation some information I personally disagreed with and the evidence presented was unhelpful.

I remember these feelings and how acutely they impacted my professional sense of self. Though they have impacted me recently, as described above, the acuteness of the impact is less and less each day.

I want to describe the ways I was able to clarify my values around my sense of self and how it shows up in my professional supervision. As Eleanor Roosevelt has been attributed as saying, “No one can make you feel inferior…