The Skills One Need to Have to Be a Good Councelor

Counseling is a kind of communication process that occurs between the counselor and the client. In counseling, counselors are helping clients to make accurate diagnoses, detect emotional distress in patients and etc. Since better communication skills of counselor help client to make better health decisions. To be an effective in communication, counselor must have communication skills such as good listening ability, attending, empathy, observing, awareness, summarizing, thinking, verbal expression and reflecting, probing or questioning etc.

The counselor must have good listening ability to capture and understand the messages that clients communicate as stories and whether those messages are transmitted verbally or nonverbally. And also having good listening is important for counselor to understand the combination of experiences, behaviors, facial expressions, general appearance, and physical appearance and etc that cause to the emerging the client’s problem. In addition to that listing ability of counselor lead to valuing the client and demonstrating interest for the conversation is very helpful to success the counseling process effectively.

Attending is the way of counselor is with their client both physically and psychologically. Attending depict to the client that counselor with him and he can share their world with the counselor. So, improving this kind of skill to the counselor helps to develop relationship with client and that help counselor to deal with the client. And also having effective attending of counselor leads to listen carefully to what their clients are saying or not saying and this helps to understand accurately about the client situation and difficulty that he face.

Empathy means that counselor temporary forget his/her own frame and think beyond their frame about clients and try to understand and tackle the clients world and his/her thinking pattern, the way they are look at their problem and acknowledging the client’s emotions. By improving this kind of skill by the counselor can understand and recognize the actual problem of the client that he/ she face. As well as, counselor can easily recognize and provide the treatment to their clients.

Observing client/patient body language, voice tone and emotional expressions also help counselor to understand and recognize the situation of the client and his/ her problem. By using this skill counselor can realize the client’s responses on his questions and that help counselor to determine his treatments.

Summarizing also a kind of communication skill that must poses with the counselor. This is very useful for the counselor to summarize what he/she said within counseling session, what are the things that have discussed, what are the treatment that provide and that useful to motivate the client to reduce he/she abnormal situations. And also having a summery helps the counselor to prevent from saying repeat things to client and I it will help client to move forward from their current situation. As well as this summery is helpful counselor to situation in which the client is stuck and that can use as an aid to push the client forward.

Probing is kind of questions and statements that ask by counselor from client regarding any significant issues of he/she life. Probes are in form of statements, questions, requests, single word or phrases and non-verbal prompts. By using these probes counselors can encourage reluctant clients to tell their stories. And that will help clients to identify relevant issues they may faced. Not only that, this helps clients to recognize their behaviors, experiences and feelings of their story and helps to identify the missing parts of the story. Since by using probes counselors can accurate picture regarding the situation that face the client and that will help counselor to determine the next step of the counseling process.