School of Education
Assignment One (Reflection)
Fall 2020 10/31/2020
Course Title : Counseling Theory and Practice
Course Code : EDUC 667
Instructor : Dr. Chafica Mansour Gharbieh
Student : Raneem Awad
ID : 31130734
Campus : Beirut
Grade/20 : ____________________
Comments
____________________________________________________________
2
NINE BASIC COUNSELING SKILLS
A counselor is a licensed professional who have the opportunity to help people who are
coping with loss, depression, addiction, relationship issues, or other everyday struggles. It is
eminent to note that no one can change the other, yet a counselor’s role is helping his client to be
encouraged to move toward change through building a healthy and trustful relation. Only by
engaging the client can a counselor contribute to build up such relation and attain goals. The
treatment is based on counselling techniques which are regarded as the theoretical concept
practiced by the counselor. Yet techniques solely are not enough, certain skills and
characteristics should be presented by the counselor in order to implement change. There are
nine basic counselling skills every counselor should acquire in order to succeed in his goal.
One of the main basic counselling skill is “Listening” which may be divided into two
subcategories: attending and observing. The client could sense that the counselor is attentive and
aware of his presence and to what he has to say through body language and posture. The
counselor is “attending” when he gives his client his utmost focus through eye contact, leaning
forward to show engagement and reacting to what he is saying by nodding the head for example
to show conformation. Making encouraging verbalizations and mirroring the client’s posture and
language makes the patient feel secure and comfortable too. Thus it is important for the
counselor to avoid placing objects in the room that may diverge his attention or moving around
too often since it send false signals of being bored and uninterested. Another main part of
listening is “observing” or actually listening by understanding and retaining the information
being conveyed by that patient. Information can be of two sources: content and process. Content
refers to what is actually said in terms of words, expressions and patterns in order to have a
deeper insight and to decipher and remember what the client said. Process, on the other hand,
3
NINE BASIC COUNSELING SKILLS
refers to all nonverbal communication of how the content is being portrayed through
recurring themes, body language and interactions for example.
The second skill is “Empathy” that is developing the ability to discern another’s
experience and then to communicate that perception back to the client in order to clarify what
they said. Communicating empathy is done by nonverbal and verbal attending (listening), and
paraphrasing. In order to paraphrase, a counselor listens and recalls what the client
communicated in a rephrased and shortened without missing on the main ideas and significant
details, identifies the content aspect of the information, be it a situation, idea or person…the
client is talking about, and finally rephrasing the entire information back to the client in a form of
a question. The client then eithers confirms or denies the precision of the paraphrase and this is
called “perception check”. Through paraphrasing, the counselor can reflect on the patient’s
feelings in an open-minded approach by carefully weighing his words to form a fair deduction
about the client’s emotional state.
The third skill is “Genuineness”. A counselor should be himself, honest and comfortable
since his actions reflect the words he says. Showing unconditional positive regard is a fourth skill
a counselor should present. Whether the counselor disagrees or refute the reason of his client, he
should show endless amount of kindness and care to gently persuade the client to perceive things
in another scope.
Concreteness is important in order to stay focused on specific facts and feelings without
retaliating from the main topic through aiding the client in narrowing down his ideas to a specific
area and assisting him in recognizing it and pursuing growth in it. This can be done recapping the
4
NINE BASIC COUNSELING SKILLS
main goal of the session, presenting questions and propositions in order for the client to clarify
facts, feelings and goals, and adapting a here-and-now focus.
Practicing open ended questions is an essential skill to encourage the client to open up
and clarify or explore his own thoughts and feelings. A seventh skill is disclosing personal
information related to the counselor and only sharing personal information, that be feelings and
experiences unless for urgent clinical needs.
Interpreting the client’s thoughts is providing a new perspective, provoking feelings and
thoughts or presenting an explanation for behaviors. So an important skill a counselor can build
up is interpretation since it reveals patterns or themes and offer a fresh way of thinking. The last
skill would be giving information and removing obstacles to change. This can be done through
identifying possible problem with the client that hinders his growth process and finding possible
solutions and alternatives.
In conclusion, theoretical knowledge of counseling techniques is important in addressing
the problems the client is facing, yet attaining these nine basic skills would build up a trustful
counselor-client relation. When the counselor displays attentiveness and empathy and knowledge
of his client mental state, the client is then able to progress with the counselor’s track of
treatment in order to build up a new perspective of his struggles and eventually move towards
change.
Reference
Counselor: Basic Skills of a Counselor. (2017, October 11). https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=lJXSf-cx8V8
