Introduction to Guidance and Counselling
Senior 6 · Psychology (Languages)
Introduction to Guidance and Counselling
Lesson 3 of 4
25 min
Read this extract from a first counselling session with Ishimwe, an S6 student. The counsellor’s turns are numbered.
Ishimwe: I don’t think I’ll pass the national exams. Everyone in my family expects me to become a doctor.
Counsellor (1): Mm.
Ishimwe: My father says there is no other good job.
Counsellor (2): So at home, medicine is spoken of as the only good path.
Ishimwe: Yes. And I’m not even good at chemistry.
Counsellor (3): You sound worried. Maybe even a bit trapped.
(A pause of several seconds.)
Ishimwe: Trapped… yes. I’ve never said that to anyone.
Counsellor (4): What would you choose, if the choice were only yours?
Notice what the counsellor did not do: no advice, no “don’t worry”, no judgement. Yet each short turn did a specific job, and the pause let Ishimwe find a word he had never used. Each of these moves is a named, learnable technique. By the end of this lesson you will be able to name all four.
Definition
Active listening: giving full attention to the speaker and showing, through words and body language, that you understand both what they say and what they feel.
Paraphrasing: restating the content of what the client said in your own words.
Reflecting feelings: naming the emotion you hear behind the words (“You sound frustrated”).
Summarising: pulling together the main points of a conversation or session.
Empathy: understanding the client’s experience from their point of view, and communicating that understanding.
Gerard Egan summed up attending behaviour in the acronym SOLER: face the client Squarely (or at a slight angle), keep an Open posture, Lean slightly towards them, keep appropriate Eye contact, and stay Relaxed. These must be adapted to culture: in many Rwandan settings a young person may lower their eyes before an adult as a sign of respect, so a counsellor should not read that as evasion, nor insist on a steady gaze.
| Technique | Purpose | Example (to Ishimwe) |
|---|---|---|
| Minimal encouragers | Show you are following and invite more | “Mm.” “Go on.” A nod. |
| Open questions | Invite the client to explore | “What worries you most about the exams?” |
| Closed questions | Get specific facts | “When is your first paper?” |
| Paraphrasing | Check you understood the content | “So your family has always talked about you being a doctor.” |
| Reflecting feelings | Show you understand the emotion | “You sound afraid of letting them down.” |
| Clarifying | Make a vague point clearer | “When you say you won’t pass, which subjects do you mean?” |
| Summarising | Pull ideas together, move on | “So far you’ve said you’re worried about chemistry, you feel pressure from home, and you’re not sleeping well.” |
| Using silence | Give time to think and feel | A calm pause after a difficult statement |
| Gentle challenging | Point out a contradiction kindly | “You say you don’t care what happens, yet you’ve come to talk about it twice.” |
| Quality | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Empathy | The client feels understood, which builds trust. |
| Genuineness (congruence) | The counsellor is honest and real, not playing a role. |
| Unconditional positive regard | The client is accepted as a person, without conditions (Carl Rogers, Unit 8). |
| Patience and warmth | Clients need time; change is slow. |
| Trustworthiness and discretion | Without it, confidentiality means nothing. |
| Self-awareness | Knowing one’s own values and reactions stops them from intruding. |
| Cultural sensitivity | Respects the client’s language, faith and customs. |
| Emotional stability and self-care | Counsellors hear painful stories and need support themselves. |
Research supports the importance of the relationship. A 2018 meta-analysis by Christoph Flückiger and colleagues, combining 295 studies with more than 30,000 clients, found a consistent link between the strength of the client–counsellor alliance and the outcome (a correlation of about 0.28). A separate review the same year (Elliott and colleagues) found a similar link between the counsellor’s empathy and client improvement.
The Skilled Counselor: “Basic Counseling Skills: Paraphrase, Reflection of Feeling, and Summarization”. Watch the examples and note the difference between paraphrasing content and reflecting feeling.
Important
Evaluate the evidence. The alliance and empathy findings come from many studies in many countries, which makes them robust, but they are correlations: clients who are already improving may also rate the relationship more highly. Skills such as SOLER were developed in Western settings and need cultural adaptation. Techniques are tools, not scripts: used mechanically (“I hear you saying…” after every sentence) they can sound false and damage genuineness.
Warning
Common mistake: confusing empathy with sympathy. Sympathy is feeling sorry for someone (“Oh, poor you”). Empathy is understanding the experience from their side and showing it (“It sounds lonely to carry that by yourself”).
Tip
Memory hook: paraphrase = the facts back; reflection = the feelings back; summary = the whole back.
Practice
Sources and credits
Written by Ganzaa: the text, the tables and the exercises. The photo is used unchanged. This lesson adapts CC BY-SA material and is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.
