Today’s episode, which is the fourth on the Unit Supervisory Learning Pathway, focuses on a model for how to structure the typical supervision session. In the context of working on a residential treatment unit for children and youth, there are many sub-roles that define an effective relationship between a supervisor and their supervisees.  A Supervisor encompasses the roles of Counselor, Teacher, Coach, Leader, Superior, Boss, and Mentor.  This episode focuses on starting supervision meetings with the Supervisor focuses on the role of Counselor.  In that role, the Supervisor is most concerned about the emotional well-being of the direct-care staff being supervised.  

This initial focus on emotional wellness, which starts with simply asking a person how they’re doing this week, makes sense as a basic display of good social skills.  However, the Counselor sub-role goes far beyond good manners and tries to attend to helping your Supervisees manage the high level of exposure to traumatic stress that is a big part of their jobs.  Just expressing concern helps.  Beyond that, there will be times when engaging in psychological debriefing will be an appropriate way to help your Supervisees take the edge off of the more stressful encounters they’ve had that week.  Attending to the basic human emotional needs of your Supervisees also means trying to help them find inspiration and meaning in the work, celebrating their successes, and reinforcing examples of their good teamwork and their demonstrating strong executive skills in their work.

Sometimes, it makes sense to spend an entire supervision meeting primarily in that Counselor sub-role.  However, that should be the exception and not the rule.  Supervision meeting time is incredible valuable and a skilled Supervisor consciously designs their supervision time to be strategic about how many minutes to devote to the domain of emotions, before moving on to the other sub-roles (Teacher, Coach, Leader, Superior, Boss, and Mentor) that are also essential aspects of being an effective Supervisor.  

Now in its second season, the Becoming Centered Podcast has been a way for me to share my understanding of residential treatment for children and youth. It’s allowed me to present an integration of clinical and business perspectives that I’ve acquired over the past 40+ years of working as a residential counselor, supervisor, director, and therapist. With the most recent podcast, Becoming Centered has now reached the 2000 mark for downloads! This season presents two learning pathways. The Processing Pathway focuses on how to help kids learn from incidents of using problem-behaviors, and ultimately how to improve their own self-regulation skills. The Unit Supervisor Pathway focuses on the managerial skills needed to effectively run a residential unit and on how to provide effective supervision to super-charge the professional development of direct-care staff. It mirrors consultation work I’m doing at a relatively large residential program providing care and treatment services to hundreds of kids every year. I hope you’ll help spread the word about the Becoming Centered Podcast to other residential treatment professionals and help spread the use of respectful, caring, and effective techniques for transforming the lives of kids who face heroic challenges in their lives. A sincere thank you to all my listeners!

This episode, the third in the Unit Supervisor Pathway, focuses on the essential managerial skills of effectively delegating tasks and projects and keeping organized. I’m hoping that you’ve already followed advice in previous episodes and created clearly defined Unit Coordinator roles for all the residential staff on the unit. Residential treatment is a team sport; and you need every member of your team to not only work directly with the kids, but to also help administer a quality program. However, even with clear role descriptions outlining various administrative and operational responsibilities, a Unit Supervisor still has to become effective at verbally delegating tasks and projects. Effective delegation will make a huge difference with how many tasks and projects the residential team can simultaneously be addressing, a huge difference in the quality and timeliness of task completion, and a huge difference in how direct-care staff are lead in developing their professional skills. This episode presents a 5-step model for effective delegation. Now that you’ve delegated scores of tasks and projects, a Unit Supervisor has to keep all these tasks, deliverables, projects, and deadlines organized. This is a major way in which a Unit Supervisor sets up their people for success!

Episode 46 of the Becoming Centered Podcast is now available. This episode focuses on the essential managerial and coaching skill of giving feedback to others. Individual supervision and individual coaching is, by far, the most effective way to inspire and guide the professional development of direct care child care counselors. This individual attention is much more powerful than in-service training, articles, podcasts, or other ways to train staff. The heart of coaching is being able to give feedback to supervisees in a way that effectively influences how a staff person thinks about their work, how they feel about their efforts and experience, and how they develop their own executive skills and counseling skills. Giving feedback to others, in a way that the other person can process and incorporate into their own professional development, is both a core leadership skill and is very difficult to do. Defensiveness when receiving feedback is normal and natural. In this podcast I set out to raise the listeners awareness of techniques for compensating for that normal level of defensiveness and techniques for making positive feedback more sophisticated and effective.

In residential treatment programs by far the most effective way to train direct-care staff in how to effectively care for the kids and to provide counseling is through on-the-job coaching and individual supervision.  However, there’s a lot of very real barriers to providing quality supervision.

The nature of the work, especially at more intensive programs, means that there is a high frequency of behavior-problems on the residential unit.  This drives staff toward a short-term focus on getting through the shift, or perhaps through the week, with as few safety issues as possible.  The kids needs are essentially infinite and supervisory staff easily get pulled into intervening with the children and youth and just trying to provide all the care they need.

The first managerial challenge to providing quality supervision involves carving out the time for a supervisor and a direct care staff person to regularly meet in an office, away from the kids.  I advocate for staff responsible for unit supervision to devote at least four hours per week to providing individual supervision.  The best way to do that is to delegate as many routine administrative tasks to direct care staff as is possible.  The best way to achieve that level of delegation is to clearly define unit coordinator and other roles. 

This approach both frees up time for unit supervisors to provide coaching and supervision, and provides real training to direct care counselors in how to organize and implement various components of the residential program, from keeping track of hygiene supplies, to designing and scheduling activities, to planning birthday celebrations, and hundreds of other necessary parts to running a quality residential treatment unit.

Episode 44 of the Becoming Centered podcast presents the third installment of the Processing Pathway, covering the technique known as “chaining.”  Chaining is a great way to add a visual element to cognitive processing.  It lays out a series of links representing a chain of behaviors and feelings that led to a child or youth having to be separated from their peers.  Once the sequence of links has been clarified, the key link that represents a realistic “choice point” is identified.  This link represents the point in the sequence where the client could have made a different choice that likely would have resulted in a better outcome.  Typical choice point behaviors include things like, asking for a check-in, asking to take space, or using some established coping mechanism.  An explanatory handout and illustration is available at https://www.bearclanllc.com/podcasts/the-processing-pathway/.

Episode 43 of The Becoming Centered Podcast is the second episode in the Processing Pathway series.  This episode introduces a 4-question outline for formal cognitive processing.  Basically, the four parts include helping the child or youth to take responsibility for the behaviors that resulted in their being separated from their peers; identify at least some of the feelings that drove the probelm-behaviors; identify how those behaviors might have impacted peers and staff around them; and identify a possible plan for how to handle things better in the future. 

One size doesn’t fit all, and there are several factors covered that will change how much detail and how much time a counselor should devote to processing with a client.  There are also some general goals of processing presented to the listener, that also apply for informal cognitive processing (that doesn’t use a written form and likely only covers some of the outline of formal processing).

Perhaps the most over-arching goal of cognitive processing is to help kids become more thoughtful human beings (who think before simply reacting to their own emotional states).  There are several supporting goals of processing that are covered in this episode that can also be found in handouts available at https://www.bearclanllc.com/podcasts/the-processing-pathway/.

Episode 42 of the Becoming Centered Podcast is now available. This is the first episode on the Processing Pathway. Processing involves a structured approach to helping children and youth to mentally process their incidents of problem-behaviors.

This episode introduces the concept of there being different ways that different parts of the brain process sensory data, personal experience, and the communications received from the other parts of the brain. This can result in various parts of the brain experiencing different types of confusion after a significant incident of problem-behaviors. Processing is intended to clear up that confusion. It’s intended to help kids become more thoughtful people who think before they automatically react to their own strong feelings with extreme behaviors.

This is achieved through leading kids, once they are generally calm, through a structured process of analyzing their own incidents. In formal processing, there’s typically a written form that guides children and youth through a meaningful way to understand an episode of problem-behaviors. The formal approach focuses on four goals: having kids own their own problem-behaviors, identifying feelings that drove those behaviors, identifying how those behaviors may have impacted people around them, and developing a plan for handling themselves better in the future. Residential Treatment Programs are encouraged to require formal processing, at a level appropriate for each individual child, for incidents involving serious problem-behaviors such as violence, major threats, and major disruptions.

Informal processing typically doesn’t use a form but has the same general goals. Informal processing makes sense for less significant problem-behaviors like instigating and refusing to follow basic program expectations. Informal processing is likely to be conducted only on a verbal level, and the counselor uses their judgement to decide how many of the four processing goals will be a focus of the conversation.

Episode 41 of the Becoming Centered Podcast kicks off season 2 of this effort to spread knowledge about professional residential treatment of children and youth. This season is organized into two different educational pathways, mirroring consulting work being done.

The Processing pathway is all about how to help kids process their own use of problem-behaviors. With structured guidance from staff, they can learn how to understand their own patterns of behaviors in a way that leads to increased self-control and self-regulation of feelings, thoughts, and behaviors.

The Unit Supervision pathway starts with a focus on how to create the time for all direct-care staff to receive several hours of individual supervision each month. It then moves on to how to structure the supervision time and then what content to cover in supervision. It presents a combination of management training and techniques, tools, and perspectives for how to teach counseling skills.

This episode also presents a couple concepts for residential staff to consider. The first is the distinction between providing Care and providing Treatment. The second is a way to distinguish between providing Counseling and providing Therapy.

While the podcast episodes will continue to be available on most podcast hosting sites, this season’s episodes will tend to have more written support materials that listeners can download from the www.BearClanllc.com website Podcast page.

The www.BearClanllc.com website has added a new page, MEDITATION, where you’ll find instructions and audio recordings from a weekly course taught by Caroline Durr. After participating in different meditation techniques for years Caroline came upon a different meditation that connects you with your body and your body’s sensations. Through this connection and the practice of accepting what is, you become more of a participant in the unfolding of your life, going from feeling like life is happening to you to life is happening with you.