The Awkward Session Doesn’t Book Itself

Most career practitioners have had this experience. A session that started reasonably well begins to feel awkward. The client grows quieter, or becomes vague, or oddly compliant. The practitioner works harder — explaining more, encouraging more, offering more options. By the end, both people are tired, and progress feels less certain than it did at the start.

Without anyone doing anything wrong, something shifted. It is worth understanding why.

The System Sets the Stage

In 1980, I was a financial assistance worker with the BC Government. My first client was a father of three who came in explaining that an unforeseen circumstance had left him without money for groceries, with a week still to go before his assistance cheque would arrive. The circumstances were credible. The need was real. It was a classic case for what was called a crisis grant.

I brought the request to my supervisor, who informed me that, this being January, the crisis grant budget had already been exhausted. There were to be no crises until April.

I have told that story many times over the years because it captures something that hasn’t changed much. The systems that practitioners work inside — with their funding cycles, placement targets, timelines, and outcome metrics — were not designed around the pace of human change. They were designed around something else entirely. And the gap between the two falls squarely on the practitioner.

Over time, that gap produces a particular kind of strain. Practitioners find themselves carrying responsibility that was never meant to be theirs: holding the client’s motivation, sustaining momentum, compensating for a lack of clarity that the system was supposed to help create. The strain accumulates quietly, and mostly without complaint, because practitioners tend to be people who care about getting it right.

What Happens Next is Entirely Understandable

Practitioners, like all of us, react to sustained pressure by adopting a defence mechanism. It is not a character flaw or a failure of commitment or skill. It is what humans do when they are asked to carry more than is reasonably theirs to carry.

Will Schutz identified six defensive responses that surface under pressure — the victim, the critic, the demander, the self-blamer, the denier, and the helper. Any one of them can quietly reshape a session. The helper is perhaps the most common in career development settings: the practitioner becomes overly warm, over-explains everything being done on the client’s behalf, offers advice that wasn’t asked for, smooths over every rough edge in the conversation. The intent is genuine care. The effect is something the practitioner rarely sees coming.

I remember that feeling walking back to my client in 1980 — knowing what he needed, knowing I couldn’t provide it, and feeling the pull to somehow make that easier for both of us. That is precisely the moment a defence gets triggered: not from indifference, but from being torn between what the client needs and what the system permits. The practitioner caught in that gap will do something with the feeling. The defence is what that something looks like.

The client senses it — without being able to name it. The practitioner is carrying something that has nothing to do with them. And so, quite naturally, they begin to manage that rather than focus on their own direction. They become agreeable. They go along, and they leave with a plan they may have no real intention of following.

The Conversation We Keep Not Having

Practitioner wellbeing has long been treated as a personal responsibility. Resilience, self-care, better boundaries — the advice tends to land on the individual, as though the strain were a private matter to be managed privately. It is not. The pressure that triggers defensive responses in sessions is largely structural, and the support needs to be structural, too.

Organizations that employ career practitioners are often caught in the same structural bind — managing funding cycles, reporting to funders, and measuring what is easiest to measure. But at every level, from funders to managers to practitioners themselves, there is an opportunity to build something the current system largely lacks: the infrastructure for reflective practice. That infrastructure could include regular supervision — not performance review, but genuine space to process difficult sessions — peer debriefs, and shared language for what defensiveness actually looks like in practice. These are not luxuries. They are what makes the work sustainable.

Having language matters more than it might seem. When a practitioner can recognize and name a defensive response — in themselves, in the moment — it loses some of its grip. That kind of self-awareness is teachable. It does not have to arrive only through years of accumulated experience, as it does now for most practitioners who develop it at all.

A Quiet Takeaway

“The field” of career development is not an abstraction. It is supervisors deciding whether to treat reflective practice as a priority or a luxury. It’s managers building space for peer debriefs — or not — and it is funders asking whether the metrics they require are measuring what actually matters. It is also practitioners themselves, choosing to name what is happening in a session rather than pushing through it.

None of those choices require waiting for the system to change.

The system probably will not change much. Funding cycles will end and targets will arrive before clients are ready because the pressure is structural and it is not going away.

But the practitioner who can recognize a defensive response in the moment — who has language for what is happening and a colleague to debrief with — is carrying the work differently than the one who does not. This happens not because the load is lighter. It happens because it is held better.

That part does not require a policy change. It requires a choice. And the choice is available right now, to anyone reading this.

– By Steve Miller – 

This article was edited with the support of Claude.ai. The ideas and insights shared are entirely the author’s own. Photo by Timur Weber on Pexels.