Skills of a Counsellor

           Counselor’s skills are very important factor for an effective counselling. These skills make a counselor good, average or bad. Knowing these skills are an important prerequisite to attain them. The important skills are the following:

1. Attending skills

        It includes attending physically, observing and listening.

Attentiveness is one of the important skills of the counselor. To understand the essence of the content and feeling expressed by the counselee, the counselor should be attentive while listening and observing. Attending physically means attending contextually and personally to the client. The counselor by his very posture must let the client know that he is with him and he is completely available to him. For e.g. we communicate attentiveness when we maintain eye contact with the client or often look at his face.

The skill of observing means the counselors ability to see and understand the client’s non-verbal behaviors. The client gives the counselor may clues to the way he experience the world in his physical appearance and behavior.

The skill of listening means the counselor’s ability to listen and recall all the verbal data presented by the counselee. The counselor must listen to both verbal and non-verbal massages of the client. It helps in establishing a rapport and get insight in to physiological world of the client. The skill of listening involves, i) listen to confirm the hypothesis counselor made from his observation with client’s words, ii) listen the specific content i.e., the who, what, where, when, why and how of the situation iii) resist distracting thoughts and imagination, iv) recall counselee’s voice tone, words they use, specific feeling, way of expression etc.

2. Responding skills

This involves the skill of reacting appropriately to the problem narrated by the client. The counselor should be respond with empathy. The purpose of responding is to enter in to the counselee’s frame of reference ((the way he sees himself in relation to the world around him). It involves reflecting the content, reflecting the feeling, dealing with strong negative feeling, responding to silence, asking facilitative questions, skill of spacing responses, giving information etc.

The counselor should ask probing and reflecting questions. Probing questions refers to going deep in to the clients response by asking a serious a subsequent questions. Empathetic approach is very important skill of a counselor.

The skill of responding involves the counselor’s ability to communicate to the client his feelings and his ability to capture the experience of the client. He must respond not only what the client has said, but also to how it is said.

3. Initiating skills

This involves the ability of the counselor to initiate the client to act. This involves skill to change what can be changed, skill in defining the goals, skill in helping client to accept the change gracefully, skill in preparing the client to happy. It is the skill of the establishing rapport. Rapport is a worm, friendly and understanding condition which for an effective relationship between the counselor and counselee. Rapport is not one sided. It is mutual and grows out of the cooperative effort. It helps the counselor to facilitate the development of the client by motivating him to take decisions.

4. Skill of personalizing

Personalizing is an attempt on the part of the counselor to make the client realize his personal deficits that contributed to the problem. This involves skill of making client to internalizing the experience (personalizing the meaning), skill of preparing the client to take decision and execute it (personalizing the problem), skill of making client to rectify the deficiencies of his role in the problem (personalizing the goal).