Creative Supervision: Popping out of the Box Workshop with Shirley Smith and Jo Birch

Jo Birch MA FRSA, Supervisor, executive coach and psychotherapist

Jo brings people together in global learning communities. As Director of Crucial Difference & International Centre for Reflective Practice, Jo leads an international team providing training for coaches to become supervisors and continue developing as leaders in the profession. She is an accredited supervisor, and an active participant in the professional community, previously Chair of BACP Coaching and board member of AoCS and EASC.

Jo is editor of Coaching Supervision Groups: Resourcing Practitioners (2022); co-editor of EMCC Mastery Series publication Coaching Supervision: Advancing Practice, Changing Landscapes (2019) and previously series editor of Thinking Global in Coaching Today.

Jo also runs an annual international conference on Coaching Supervision in multiple languages including English, Russian and Chinese.

Shirley has extensive experience in cross-cultural work as a coach, mentor and supervisor of coaches and mentors. She often works with people who are working across cultures and might themselves be living in a different country from where they were born. Perhaps thinking in or speaking a language that is not their mother tongue. As a coach, supervisor and facilitator creative tools provide a gateway to a different way framing themes, discovering possibilities and expressing difficult emotions or dynamics when our constraint of language cannot readily or easily express what we are feeling or experiencing. From first-hand experience Shirley believes that imagery, art-based and embodied approaches can work both in-person and virtually. These are tools and skills that anybody can learn. Shirley has fine-tuned her skills in working with creative tools on a foundation of over 30 years in global human resource roles enabling both organisational and leadership development.