Professional Guidance and Counselling
Senior 6 · Psychology
Professional Guidance and Counselling
Lesson 3 of 4
25 min
Keza, an S5 student, tells two different adults: "I'm failing chemistry. Maybe I should just leave school."
| Conversation A | Conversation B |
|---|---|
| "Leave school? Don't be silly. You just need to work harder. When I was your age I studied every night. Have you even been doing your homework?" | (Puts down the phone and turns towards her.) "You're failing chemistry and it's got so bad that you're wondering about leaving school altogether. That sounds really discouraging. Tell me more about what's been happening." |
The first adult means well, but in a few seconds he dismisses her feeling, lectures, compares, and asks an accusing question. Keza will probably say "Yes" and stop talking. The second uses three simple skills, attending, paraphrasing and reflecting a feeling, and opens the door. Counselling skills can be learned, and they are useful far beyond counselling: in families, friendships and any job that involves people. (An illustrative case.)
Definition
Active listening: listening with full attention to the client's words, feelings and body language, and showing that you have understood.
Attending: showing with posture, eye contact, voice and focus that you are with the client.
Paraphrasing: restating the content of what the client said in your own words. Reflecting feelings: naming the emotion the client seems to feel.
Open question: one that invites a full answer ("What happened next?"). Closed question: one that can be answered in a word ("Did you tell anyone?").
Empathy: understanding the client's world as if from the inside, and communicating that understanding, without losing the "as if".
Gerard Egan (The Skilled Helper, first published in 1975) summarised attending as SOLER: face the client Squarely, adopt an Open posture, Lean slightly towards the client, keep good Eye contact, and stay Relaxed. Egan himself stressed that these are guidelines, not rules: norms for eye contact and closeness differ between cultures, ages and sexes, so a good counsellor notices what helps this client feel comfortable. Attending also means putting the phone away, giving time, and a calm, warm voice.
| Skill | Purpose | Example with Keza |
|---|---|---|
| Open questions | Invite the client to explore | "What has chemistry been like for you this term?" |
| Closed questions | Check specific facts; use sparingly | "Have you spoken to your chemistry teacher?" |
| Minimal encouragers | Keep the client talking | "Mm-hm." "Go on." A nod. |
| Paraphrasing | Show you have understood the content | "So the last three tests have gone badly." |
| Reflecting feelings | Show you have understood the emotion | "You sound embarrassed, and a bit hopeless." |
| Clarifying | Check a vague or confusing point | "When you say 'leave', do you mean change school, or stop studying?" |
| Summarising | Pull together several points; begin or end a session | "So far: chemistry is hard, your friends moved to another class, and you feel alone." |
| Silence | Give time to think and feel | Waiting calmly after a difficult statement |
| Challenging (confronting) | Gently point out a discrepancy, once trust exists | "You say you don't care about school, but you've talked about university three times." |
| Immediacy | Talk about what is happening between you now | "I notice you went quiet when I mentioned your father." |
| Goal setting | Turn understanding into action | "What would you like to be different by the end of the term?" |
Allen Ivey's microcounselling model (developed from 1968) broke counselling into such small "microskills", each taught separately with demonstration, practice and feedback, then combined (Figure 1). Microskills training is now used to train counsellors, nurses and teachers in many countries.
Figure 1. A simplified microskills hierarchy (after Allen Ivey's microcounselling model). Each skill rests on those below it: there is no point challenging a client before you have listened well enough to understand.
Thomas Gordon (1970) listed twelve common responses that tend to stop people talking, including ordering ("Stop crying"), warning ("If you leave school you'll regret it"), moralising ("You should be grateful for your school fees"), advising too early, lecturing, judging, false reassurance ("Don't worry, it'll be fine") and changing the subject. Conversation A above used four of them in one breath.
Across many kinds of therapy, the quality of the relationship between client and counsellor, the working alliance, is one of the most consistent predictors of a good outcome: a meta-analysis of 295 studies found a correlation of about 0.28 (Flückiger and others, 2018). The counsellor's empathy shows a similar link (Elliott and others, 2018). These are moderate correlations, so skills are necessary but not sufficient: they work together with the client's own strengths, the approach used and life circumstances.
RSA: "Brené Brown on Empathy" (about 3 minutes, animated). Brown distinguishes empathy, which connects ("I'm here with you"), from sympathy, which can drive disconnection ("At least…"). Find two roadblocks from this lesson in the "sympathy" responses.
Warning
"At least…" and "I know exactly how you feel" are not empathy. Silver linings and claims of identical experience take the focus away from the client. Reflect the feeling instead: "That sounds really hard."
Tip
Paraphrase the facts, reflect the feelings, summarise the story. A reliable first response to almost anything: "It sounds like you feel [feeling] because [situation]."
Important
Practise. In threes (speaker, listener, observer), the speaker talks for three minutes about a real but low-stakes problem. The listener uses only attending, open questions, paraphrasing and reflecting feelings. The observer counts each skill and notes any roadblocks. Swap roles.
Practice
Sources and credits
Written by Ganzaa: the text, the diagram (Figure 1), the tables and the exercises.
