Counselling Skills (Empathy, Positive Regard and Authenticity)

Counselling Skills (Empathy, Positive Regard and Authenticity)

• Counselling is a domain where a person entering the field is required to engage in self-introspection in order to assess her/his inclination and basic skill set for being effective in her/his vocation.
• Counselling provides a system for:

1. planning the interview
2. analysing the counsellor’s and client’s behaviour
3. determining the developmental impact on the client

• A counsellor is most often interested in building an understanding of the clients problem by focusing on what understanding the client has of her/his problem and how s/he feels about it.
• Counselling involves helping relationship, that includes someone seeking help, and someone willing to give help, who is capable of or trained to help in a setting that permits help to be given and received.

  

• The following elements about counselling are common to the major theoretical approaches to counselling:

1. Counselling involves responding to the feelings, thoughts, and actions of the clients.
2. Counselling involves a basic acceptance of the client’s perceptions and feelings, without using any evaluative standards.
3. Confidentiality and privacy constitute essential ingredients in the counselling setting. Physical facilities that preserve this quality are important.
4. Counselling is voluntary. It takes place when a client approaches a counsellor. A counsellor never uses any kind of coercion for obtaining information.
5. Counsellors and clients both transmit and receive verbal and non-verbal messages during the process.

Therefore, awareness and sensitivity to the nature of the message is an important prerequisite for a counsellor’s effectiveness.

Breaking the Myths of Counselling

Developing Effective Relationships

• Counselling usually has an all inclusive outcome for the clients.
• Effective behavioural change that takes place in the client is multifaceted.
• It may show up in the form of a client:

1. taking greater responsibility
2. developing new insight
3. learning to engage in different behaviours
4. making an effort to develop more effective relationships

Characteristics of Effective Helper

• Being a trained helper, the counsellor has the responsibility for ensuring that her/his client is benefited from counselling and its therapeutic effects are achieved.
• The success of a counselling process depends on the skill, knowledge, attitude, personal qualities and behaviour of a counsellor, any or all of which can enhance or diminish the helping process.
• Four qualities that are associated with effective counsellors are:

1. Authenticity

• One’s image or perception of onerself makes up his/her “I”. The self-perceived “I” is revealed through ideas, words, actions, clothing, and your life-style, which communicate one’s “I” to others.
• Those who come into close contact with that person also build their own image of him/her for themselves, and they also sometimes communicate this image to him/her, which develops into a ‘me’. This other perceived ‘me’ is the person that others perceive that person to be. This perception may be the same as or different his/her own self-perception of ‘I’.
• The degree to which he/she is aware of these perceptions of others as well as of his/her own perception of your self indicates that she/he is self-aware.
• Authenticity means that one’s behavioural expressions are consistent with what he/she values and the way he/she feels and relates to his/her inner self-image.

2. Positive Regard for Others

• In a client-counsellor relationship, a good relationship allows freedom of expression, which reflects acceptance of the idea that the feelings of both are important.
• Such feelings of uncertainity and anxiety, experienced upon forming a new relationship, get minimised when a counsellor extends a positive regard to the client by accepting that it is all right to feel the way the client is feeling.
• In order to show positive regard to others, the following guidelines may be kept in mind:​​​​​​​

3. Empathy

• It is the ability of a counsellor to understand the feelings of another person from her/his perspective.
• It is like stepping into someone else’s shoes and trying to understand the pain and troubled feelings of the other person.
• This is one of the most critical competencies that a counsellor needs to have.

4. Paraphrasing

• This involves the ability of a counsellor to reflect on what the client says and feels using different words.
• Paraphrasing allows one to understand how much the other person understood of what was communicated.

Ethics of Counselling

• Counsellors have taken important steps to develop their professional identity — the development and implementation of appropriate ethical standards.
• Awareness of the ethical standards and codes is extremely important, because counselling is a part of the service sector.
• Not following the ethical standards may have legal implications.
• The client-counsellor relationship is built on ethical practice.
• The American Psychological Association (APA) has developed a code of ethical conduct for behaviour and decision-making in actual clinical settings.
• The practical knowledge of these ethical domains can guide the practice of counselling in achieving its desired purpose.
• Some of the APA practice guidelines are:​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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