The first issue of ANSE Journal in 2021 is ready and can be downloaded. Since this winter an editorial board was installed and led by Chief Editor Sijtze de Roos. They did a beautiful job and produced the Journal with the topic “Digitalization”

For an overview of this not wholly unproblematic topic we open with a longread by Kristina Urbanc and Tatjana Vlašić (Croatia). Covering various aspects, they offer us insight into the functioning of online supervision in these turbulent times. Ella Büchner – from Germany, yet living and working in France – moves on to show us enthousiastically how we really can connect in virtual space. But how to maintain and guarantee quality? Annette Lentze (Germany) takes us up to the institutional level. Online supervisory quality is not just a matter for individual supervisors and coaches, to publicly enhance and guarantee quality, we need quality control and active support from our professional associations. Annette shows us how our DGSv colleagues tackle this challenge.

Sietske Jans-Kuperus (The Netherlands) makes us part of her struggle to find a both personal and professional answer to the question whether she can still be a supervisor in these corona times. She struggles and prevails – luctor et emergo – by so to speak ‘retooling’ and reshaping her approach. Her article forms a beautiful diptych with that of her compatriot Adrianne van Doorn, who admonishes us to ‘get out from behind out PC’s’ and start experimenting with the many online approaches offered us by the veritable ‘wealth of possibilities’ she so aptly describes. Bogdan Cuc (Romania) investigates the digitalizion of supervision from a completely different point of view. He elegantly makes clear that the new and in many ways unsettling reorganisation of time and space – this new, corona driven setting – requires a new mindset from us. It is not so much a matter of technique, but far more and first of all of changing our emotional responses and thinking routines. Clearly, changes of this magnitude come with anxiety, and as we all know anxiety breeds myths. In his eloquent contribution, Viktor Menovshchikov (Russia) covers ten Russian myths about distance counselling for us to learn from. The more so because these myths are, I would think, very familiar to all of us.

All this is decorated with vignettes from five different countries, neatly placed in between the main articles, in which colleagues describe how corona restrictions affect their professional conduct and how they confront and experience the challenges arising from it. I thank Gerian Dijkhuizen for suggesting this vignette-idea to us. And also for her usual opening column and her interview with Zilvinas Gailius from Lithuania, with which we close this issue.

Download your copy by registering at: www.professioneelbegeleiden.nl/anse