Develop your ability to support or counsel others through the processes of personal growth and change. The skills and knowledge gained from this course can help you help others overcome limiting thinking and replace feelings of helplessness with productive behaviours such as goal-setting.
COURSE STRUCTURE
The course is divided into eight lessons as follows:
- Learning Specific Skills – Learning methods; the counselling role
- Listening and Bonding – Meeting and greeting; helping the client relax; listening with intent
- Reflection: Paraphrasing – Reflection of feeling; client responses to the reflection of feelings; reflection of content and feeling
- Questioning – Open and closed questions; other types of questions; goals of questioning
- Interview Techniques – Summarising; confrontation; reframing
- Changing Beliefs and Normalising – Changing self-destructive beliefs; irrational beliefs; normalising
- Finding Solutions – Making choices; facilitating actions; gestalt awareness; psychological blocks
- Ending the Counselling – Terminating the session; closure; further meetings; dependency, confronting dependency.
AIMS
- Explain the processes involved in the training of counsellors in micro-skills.
- Demonstrate the skills involved in commencing the counselling process and evaluation of non-verbal responses and minimal responses.
- Demonstrate reflection of content, feeling, both content and feeling, and its appropriateness to the counselling process.
- Develop different questioning techniques and to understand risks involved with some types of questioning.
- Show how to use various micro-skills including summarising, confrontation, and reframing.
- Demonstrate self-destructive beliefs and show methods of challenging them, including normalising.
- Explain how counselling a client can improve their psychological well-being through making choices, overcoming psychological blocks and facilitating actions.
- Demonstrate effective ways of terminating a counselling session and to explain ways of addressing dependency.
WHAT YOU WILL DO IN THIS COURSE
- Report on an observed counselling session, simulated or real.
- Identify the learning methods available to the trainee counsellor.
- Demonstrate difficulties that might arise when first learning and applying micro skills.
- Identify why trainee counsellors might be unwilling to disclose personal problems during training.
- Identify risks that can arise for trainee counsellors not willing to disclose personal problems.
- Discuss different approaches to modelling, as a form of counselling
- Evaluate verbal and non-verbal communication in an observed interview.
- Identify the counsellor’s primary role (in a generic sense).
- Show how to use minimal responses as an important means of listening with intent.
- Explain the importance of different types of non-verbal response in the counselling procedure.
- Report on the discussion of a minor problem with an anonymous person experiencing that problem.
- Identify an example of paraphrasing as a minimal response to reflect feelings.
- Discuss the use of paraphrasing in counselling.
- Differentiate catharsis from confused thoughts and feelings.
- Identify an example of reflecting back both content (thought) and feeling in the same phrase.
- Demonstrate/observe varying responses to a variety of closed and open questions in a simulated counselling situation.
- Evaluate your use of open and closed questions in a counselling role play.
- Identify the main risks involved in asking too many questions
- Explain the importance of avoiding questions beginning with ‘why’ in counselling.
- Explain how the application of different micro-skills would be useful in counselling in observed communication (written or oral).
- Give examples of situations when it would be appropriate for the counsellor to use confrontation
- Discuss appropriate use of confrontation, in case studies.
- Show how reframing can be used to change a client’s perspective on things.
- Develop a method for identifying the existence of self-destructive beliefs (SDB’s).
- Identify self-destructive beliefs (SDB’s) amongst individuals within a group.
- List methods that can be used to challenge SDB’s.
- Explain what is meant by normalising, in a case study.
- Demonstrate precautions that should be observed when using normalizing.
- Determine and evaluate optional responses to different dilemmas.
- Explain how the ‘circle of awareness’ can be applied to assist a client, in a case study.
- Explain why psychological blockages may arise, and how a counsellor might help a client overcome them.
- Describe the process through which a counsellor would take a client to reach a desired goal, in a case study.
- Identify inter-dependency in observed relationships.
- Explain why good time management is an important part of the counselling process.
- Compare terminating a session with terminating the counselling process.
- Demonstrate dangers posed by client-counsellor inter-dependency, and how dependency can be addressed.
- Explain any negative aspects of dependency in a case study
