10 Essential Skills of Counselor

10 Essential Skills of Counselor 

1. Ability to understand the client and make them feel understood

2. Ability to ask the right questions to dig deeper into the problem

3. Ability to actively listen to client without judgement and prejudice

4. Ability to communicate both literarily and metaphorically

5. Ability to help the client clearly define the aspiring future

6.Ability to help client shift focus from past to present and future

7.Ability to work with conditioned behaviors, thoughts, positive intentions, feelings, defence mechanism, believes and values

8.Ability to help client release suppressed intense emotions and replace them with constructive ones

9.Ability to help client recover repressed memories and work with them

10.Ability to move forward in the session by keeping the focus on the client

In order to successfully execute these skills certain subset of skills can be used including:

1. Empathetic understanding: it refers to understanding client's emotions and feelings while keeping in mind the source of those feelings is the client

2. Unconditional positive regard: being non-judgmental and showing acceptance and care irrespective of client's past actions.

3. Congruence: show genuine interest in understanding client and helping them.

4. Respectful: it's important to treat the client with respect, dignity and make them feel valued

5. Confrontation: it involves challenging the point of view of client in order to better understand the client and create awareness in the client about problem in a very gentle and non-accusing manner.

6. Active listening skills: it refers to actively listening to the client along with providing feedback

7. Reflective skills: it refers to reflecting back client's feelings, emotions and thoughts which helps to convey understanding and interest to the client.

8. Paraphrasing: it refers to convey understanding by changing client's words without changing the meaning

9. Summarizing: it refers to convey understanding through summarizing the client point of view

10. Probing: it refers to digging deeper into the problem in order to have better understanding of the situation

11. Silence: it provides the client time to think about the problem, process his or her feelings and decide what issues he or she wants to bring next into the session

12. Humor: it can have a positive effect on the counselling process when used properly.

13. Questioning skills: asking questions in a logical and sequential manner.

14. Verbal and nonverbal skills: it refers to focusing on both verbal and nonverbal cues as they can give better insight into the feelings and emotions of the client.

Although, the question arises is there one single approach to counselling which can be followed in order to successfully execute all the above-mentioned skills.