Managing stress or enhancing wellbeing? Positive psychology's contributions to clinical supervision

Abstract

One of the key functions of clinical supervision as practised by health professionals such as psychologists includes the restoration of wellbeing, but there are few guidelines in the supervision literature on how to go about this. Research into concepts from the field of positive psychology such as work engagement, sense of coherence, self-efficacy, flow and resilience has begun to provide detailed understanding of workers' happiness, health and betterment. These findings provide possible directions for supervision interventions that go beyond traditional review of self-care and stress-management strategies and seek to extend the wellbeing of the supervisee. This article explores the application of positive psychology to enhance the wellbeing of practitioners such as psychologists, who often work in inherently difficult work environments such as the mental health field. Specifically, a narrative approach is proposed as one possible method and practical examples are offered to demonstrate how positive psychology may be applied in the practice of clinical supervision.