Basic Counseling Skills

Counselling Skills

• Counselling is a way of working with people in which you understand how they feel, and help them to decide what they think is best to do in their situation

• Counselling skills helps people to change as they learn to think things through for themselves and make their own decisions, free of the effects of past experiences or practices

Counselling skills include:

• Listening skills –active listening, reflective listening

• Learning skills

• Building confidence and giving support skills

When counselling it is important to listen and allow the other person to speak, providing open questions and closed questions appropriately and sharing reflections to make them feel understood.

Active listening happens when you “listen for meaning”. The listener says very little but conveys empathy, acceptance and genuineness. Key points in active listening;

• Before the session, make sure your physical needs are taken care of (thirst, hunger, bathroom, stretching)

• Look at the speaker. Taking a few notes can keep you on task; mentally put masking tape across your mouth

• Watch your non-verbal messages

• Encourage the speaker to continue with short, gentle comments like “uh-huh”, “really?”, “tell me more”, etc.

• If the person is not normally talkative, you may have to refer to your brief one or two word notes and ask an open question.

In addition to the active listening skills, other important counselling skills include:

• Asking questions skills

• Reflecting back skills

• Building confidence and giving support skills

Asking questions skill

• Asking questions - open and closed - is an important skill in counselling. They can help a person open up and close them down

• An open question is one that is used in order to gather lots of information – you ask it with the intent of getting a long answer

• It has no correct answer and requires an explanation of sorts. The who-what-where-why-when-how questions are used for the open question

For example:

• Do you have an idea about why this keeps happening?

• What is your plan B?

• How does that make you feel?

Open questions are great for:

• Starting the information gathering part of the counselling session

• Keeping the client talking

Reflecting back skill

• Reflecting back is a skill to repeat back what a client (whom you are counselling) has said to you, to show that you have heard, to clarify what you have heard and to encourage him/her to say more.

Building confidence and giving support skills

• People can take action easily when they are confident that they will succeed and get positive results from their action

• If the decision for the action is individual, the chance for the person to take action increases tremendously because the person owns the decision

• However, if a person loses confidence in oneself, this may lead him/her to feel that he/she is a failure and give in to pressure from family and friends

• It is important to help the person feel confident and good about themselves

To help someone build his/her confidence in themselves and for their action, we:

• Accept what a person thinks and feels

• Recognize and praise what a person is doing right

• Provide key information

• Support the person’s decision-making

• Avoid using judging words