Level 2 Counselling Skills
19/09/2018
Digital Workbook Password: tsn2018_L2CSPA
UNIT 1 – Using Counselling Skills
Q1 Identify core counselling skills. (1.1)
There are nine significant core counselling skills that can be used to help develop healthy working counselling relationships and during interventions/activities. These skills are unconditional positive regard, genuineness, empathetic understanding, active listening, questioning, paraphrasing, reflecting, summarising and challenging.
The first three core skills were established by Carl Rodgers who believed that the combination of unconditional positive regard, empathetic understanding and genuineness were vital to practice to progress into becoming a successful counsellor.
Unconditional Positive Regard is being able to separate your personal beliefs from your consideration for your client. You must view them as an individual person regardless of personal aspects about them for example their sexual orientation, religion, beliefs and way-of-thinking. You must accept the person for who they are and show no signs of judgement or discrimination towards them.
Empathetic understanding is being able to comprehend what another person is going through from their point-of-view and putting yourself in their shoes. To emphasis with someone is to try and feel what it is that they are going through.
Genuineness is when you sincerely care for the person and your desire to want to help them is true and authentic. The willingness to helping someone has to be natural and not put on. This is an important aspect to have as it is a massive requirement to help develop trust and openness between the counsellor and the person who is being counselled.
Active Listening is putting in the effort to listen overall and thoroughly to what the other person is expressing. To understand the meaning behind something, you should listen and watch out for not only verbal communication like linguistically (words, phrases and metaphors), para-linguistically (tone, timing, volume, pitch). You also need to listen out for non-verbal communication like their body language, facial expressions and eye contact. Only 7% of communication is demonstrated through words, 38% through what you hear and 55% of what you see and feel.
Questioning is important. Depending on your style of questioning determines the responses that you will get from clients. Closed questions will provide you with vague answers like ‘yes’, ‘no’ or maybe. Using open questions gives the client opportunity to freely express themselves and give their answers in more depth and allows them to elaborate on what it is that they are saying.
Paraphrasing is rephrasing the content of what the person is describing or putting it into simpler terms or describing it in another way.
Reflecting is a useful skill to use to help the client understand their situation and look what on what it is that they can do to ensure they make better decisions, what they could of done better and...
