Evans - Counselling Skills For Dummies

Counselling Skills For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. , The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, www.wiley.com

This edition first published 2013

2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, West Sussex.

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Introduction

C ounselling skills are often referred to as active listening skills, which makes them sound simple after all, everyone knows how to listen, dont they? In reality, though, the following is true:

Listening isnt so simple after all.

Truly listening is a very powerful tool.

Finding out how to truly listen is intriguing, worthwhile, and exciting.

You can discover a lot about yourself in the process.

Active listening skills improve helping (and other) conversations and your relationships as a result.

Active listening skills are usually associated with a helping role but they are the foundation for helping conversations in many different contexts where interpersonal skills are important.

About This Book

For most of my adult life, and even earlier, I have been fascinated by human beings and found great personal satisfaction and a sense of achievement from helping people when theyre distressed or anxious. My goal in this book is to impart my enthusiasm and enduring interest for helping people with their concerns through the medium of the listening relationship. My own experience has been that discovering how to help people with their difficulties is a life-long process, because people and their situations are complex. This stretched me and kept me hooked even when the going got tough. What I didnt expect at the outset was how much I would find out about myself, and how much I needed to discover about myself to be a better listener. What you will notice in this book is the emphasis on growing your self-awareness as well as increasing your knowledge and developing your skills.

Of course I hope that this book is going to help make you a brilliant listening helper, but there are some things it cannot achieve. This book cant

Provide you with direct practice. You need to find people to practise on, which poses an ethical dilemma (this is only the beginning of the ethical dilemmas in this area of work!). Counselling skills can be very powerful tools for opening peoples emotions. You need to be aware of this and decide whether the other person is a willing participant and whether using your developing skills is likely to help.

Give you feedback, which is vital for your progress. I do encourage you, however, to practise and find ways of getting feedback from others about how youre doing with your listening skills.

Tell you absolutely everything you need to know. Ive had to be selective because this fascinating activity contains so much information.

Make you a counsellor. Listening skills are an important part of counselling (sometimes called psychotherapy, or just therapy). This book isnt about being a counsellor. You may have ambitions to become a counsellor and if so, I hope this book helps you along the way to deciding whether this is a rewarding career for you. Counsellor training courses usually require you to have grounding in the theory and practice of counselling skills in an environment where you can practise and get feedback on your developing skills from willing (well mostly!) participants. You can find many counselling skills courses in Further and Higher Education colleges and from private providers around the country.

Throughout the book I use the terms listening helper or helper to refer to you (and me) and help-seeker or speaker to refer to the person who needs to talk. The phrases counselling skills , listening skills , and active listening skills are used interchangeably to mean the set of skills that contribute to effective listening help. I have tried to use everyday terms but whenever doing so isn't possible, I explain what the technical terms mean. Web addresses are set in monofont . Even-numbered chapters use female pronouns and odd-numbered chapters are male, to be fair to both genders!

Foolish Assumptions

In writing this book, I assume a few things about you, the reader. I assume that: