25 Guidelines in Effective Counselling

M. Priya

Introduction:

The term counselling comprises a wide variety of procedures to help individuals adjust and includes various kinds of assistance, interpretation of tests and results. It is viewed as special kind of helping relationship or as set of activities and methods and can even define an area in which services are provided. Effective counselling is a two way process, in which co-operative efforts by both person giving counselling and who receiving it. It’sa helping relationship extends the empathetic understanding and respect for client potential to lead his/her own life with confidence and genuineness. This includes not only the counsellor’s skills that reflect feeling and contents and capacity for unselfish care and concern. The entire process being psychological, it involves continuous interaction between two or more individuals who engages in various kinds of behaviour. The counselling process requires well developed interpersonal skills through which the counsellor can provide a safe therapeutic environment for the client. The counsellor needs to know when to refer to another professional, when to terminate a counselling relationship, as well as be able to recognise the limits of his/her professional competence.

Objectives:

To know the meaning of effective counselling
To be aware of the characteristics of an effective counsellor
To understand client-counsellor relationship for effective counselling
To know the characteristics of effective counselling
To know the influencing factors of effective counselling

Effective counselling:

According to British Association for Counselling, ‘Counselling includes work with individuals and with relationships which may be developmental, crisis support, psychotherapeutic, guiding or problem solving. The task of counselling is to give the client opportunity to explore, discover and clarify ways of living more satisfactory and resourceful’. An effective counselling is concerned with bringing about voluntary change in the client. Counselling provides facilities to help achieved the desired change or make the suitable choice. The most important point in counselling is that the client is responsible for the decision he makes, though the counsellor may assist in this process through his warmth and an understanding relationship (Pal, 2011).

Characteristics of an effective counsellor:

1. General characteristics of a counsellor

The importance of the counsellor’s attitudes to counselling outcomes cannot be overemphasized. In order to identify the counsellor characteristics which are of concern, investigators employed four approaches:

(i) Common qualities

The question as to what the characteristics of an effective counsellor is led to much speculation. The national vocational guidance association listed such characteristics as interest in people, patience, sensitiveness, emotional stability and objectivity as being important for good counselling. These are some of the common qualities in which the counsellor must have, such as understanding, sympathetic attitude, and friendliness, sense of humour, stability, patience, objectivity, sincerity, tact, fairness, tolerance, neatness, calmness, broadmindedness, kindness, pleasantness, social intelligence and poise.

(ii)Identifying effective relationships

The crux of the problem lies in establishing effective counselling relationships. Counsellors as individuals bring into the situation of their own needs, values, anxieties and conflicts. For example parent accepts his child and showers concerns and affection, notwithstanding the fact that the child has committed an error are misbehaved. For the parent, she/he is her/his child and this relationship does not end because of the misdeeds or mistakes committed by the child. The parent’s affection is unconditional. This does not preclude the fact that a parent may experience unhappiness and misery owing to his/her child’s behaviour.

(iii)Hypothesized characteristics

This approach is used to find out whether certain characteristics that have been hypothesized as necessary for counselling are present and functioning. It can be identified by “the presence of anxiety in the therapist, whether recognised or not, affects his ability to do successful psychotherapy and insight into his anxieties alone is not sufficient”.

(iv)Relationship between counsellor variables

The relationship between counsellor variables and some criterion to measure the effectiveness of counselling are mentioned below.

Effective male counsellor trainees were confident, friendly, affable, likable and generally were satisfied with themselves and their surroundings.
Effective female counsellor candidates were outgoing, efficient and confident. They appeared to be assertive and were more person-oriented than object oriented.
Effective male and female counsellor trainees showed similarities between themselves and were more like each other than like their counterparts from the less effective group.

2. Personality characteristics of the counsellors

Several studies have attempted to determine the personality characteristics of counsellors which are basic to effective counselling. Some of the suggested traits of effective and successful counsellors are:

Interested in helping people

Some investigators have reported that a ‘social service need’ is necessary for success and satisfaction with a counselling job.

Perceptual sensitivity

The counsellor should perceive and understand the thoughts and feelings of the client and should be sensitive to the clues given by him/her.

Personal adjustment

It is natural for counsellors, as any other individuals, to have problems of adjustment. The counsellor should be able to cope with his problems of clients when he himself is facing difficulties.

Personal security

The counsellor may feel secure in his counselling role and feel insecure in certain areas outside counselling. This indicates that the way he conducts himself in a counselling situation is important and not the way he behaves in all life situations.

Genuineness

The counsellor should establish a genuine relationship with his clients by which they can achieve their counselling goals.

3. Counsellor Attitude and Beliefs

The nature of the effective counselling relationship depends to a large extent on the impact of the counsellors attitudes on the client.

Beliefs- the dominant belief of the counsellor should be that the client be treated with dignity, equality and individuality. The counsellor believes in the worth and value of the counsellee. He believes in man’s need for freedom and liberty. Here liberty means the power to strive for goals without any external constraints. Many counsellors believe that counsellees have the ability to deal efficiently with their problems.
Values- points out that counsellor cannot be indifferent to social and moral standards and should not try to be neutral. Humanness is the most important variable in counselling. The counsellor however is expected to expose his values to the clients and not pretend as though he doesn’t have any values.
Acceptance–a few writers classify acceptance and understanding as techniques, and a few as attitudes. Acceptance as a “warm regard for the client as a person of unconditional self-worth and value, no matter what his condition, his behaviour or his feelings are”.
Understanding- this stresses the importance of understanding in the counselling process. He holds that the counsellor should be able to participate completely in the client’s communications.

Client-counsellor relationships:

The core of the counselling process is the relationship established between the counsellor and the client. We had occasion to examine how the attitudes of both the counsellor and the client affect the relationship. It is means of this relationship that the counsellor elicits and recognises the significant feelings and ideas that determine the behaviour of the client. It also helps the client to recognise these feelings and ideas.

This determines the quality of the relationship and affects the progress of the counselling process. ‘Relationship’ has immense significance in counselling. It acts as a curative agent in its own right.

Most clients do not have effective inter-personal relationships and therefore are not able to make harmonies and self-satisfying adjustments. The counsellor helps the client make effective interpersonal relationships and to free him from unrealistic aspirations. In this role the counsellor plays the part of a teacher. Relationship “as a hypothetical concerns to designate the inferred affective character of the observable interaction between two individuals”. It is necessary to examine the dimensions and characteristics of this relationship a little more closely.

Uniqueness-commonness- which comprises an important dimension of the counselling relationship. At the outset it should be recognised that each client-counsellor relationship is unique. No two individuals are alike and hence it is not possible to have a generalised type of relationship. The unique factors, for instance, comprise counsellor and counsellee attitudes, beliefs, likes and dislikes, physical characteristics and home- social backgrounds of the counsellor and the counsellee.
Objective and subjective relationship- The relationship is objective in so far as the cognitive, scientific and generic aspects are concerned. It is subjective in so far as the relationship involves the feeling of warmth and psychological closeness which enables the development of intense interest in a particular client of his problems. This aspect of intense interests depends on feelings of mutuality by which is meant that the client believes that his counsellor understands him and derives from his feeling a sense of support. It is not uncommon for a few of the clients to perceive the involvement of the counsellor as threatening. They tend to interpret the relationship in terms of submitting or revealing themselves to another person. Naturally they become anxious when relating personal feelings, especially when conveying feelings of rejection. The nature of emotional interaction determines the quality of relationship. The counsellor needs to be aware of the differential levels of his impact on the client and of the client of the client on him. For instance the counsellor may react at a physical level, taking nointerest in the client’s expression of feeling. Or he may react in a friendly way, just showing warmth towards the counsellee. He may react to the client, ignoring the qualities he may like or dislike in him. This type of reaction is of the nature of a genuine personal encounter. Further he may react at a deeper level of responding to the emotional state of the client. Response to the emotional state of the client receives more attention in existential counselling.
Existential encounters- these are basically of two types: self-self-encounter and self-other encounter. In the former type the individual must understand himself both as a subject and object. The other encounter, that is, encounter with others involves affection, friendship, empathy and eros. In most human encounters these four kinds of emotional relationship receive emphasis. In this kind of relationship the counsellor may get emotionally involved to make the client similarly involved with him. The basic concern underlying this is a keen interest to help the client overcome negative feelings of rejection or anxiety.
Cognitive-conative relationship- The cognitive aspects concern the exchanging of information and understanding the implications of various courses of action. The conative elements refer to the expressions of feelings. There is need for the counsellor to interpret the client’s problem rationally. At the same time the counsellor realizes that action without knowledge would be of little value. Therefore, he has too encouraged an understanding of feelings. Thus balance has to be maintained between the cognitive and conative aspects.
Responsibility-this is another characteristic of counselling relationship. How much responsibility should the counsellor accept for the outcomes of counselling?

How far should the counsellor share the client’s troubles? Should counselling be viewed as a very serious business in which the counsellor endeavours to play his rightful part? Counsellors differ in their interpretation of what they expect from the clients in terms of responsibility. Counsellors may even have to assume certain liabilities for the possible outcome of the counselling relationship for the simple reason that the outcome is influenced by their own personality in addition to that of the counsellee’s. The amount of responsibility that a client is asked to shoulder or that a counsellor should be willing to share depends on a variety of factors, such as the client’s age, ability, background and type of problem. It would suffice to state that mutual responsibilities have to be worked out in each case, taking all the factors into account.

Characteristics of an effective counselling:

The following are the major characteristics of an effective counselling.

Counselling is a person to person relationship
It involves two individuals- one seeking help and the other – a professionally trained person who can help the client
The objective is to help the counsellor to discover and solve him personal problems independently
It considers breadth rather than depth i.e. the counsellor must have minimum competency in a wide range of techniques
There must be s co-operative relationship and the counsellor must act as a point of contact
In order to help and assist properly the counsellor must establish a relationship of mutual respect, co-operation and friendliness between the two individuals
The counsellor discovers the problems of the client and helps him to set up goals and guide him through difficulties and problems
In the whole of counselling process the main emphasis is on the counsellor’s self-direction and self-acceptance
For a counsellor, psychology should not be the sole basis: other branches of study are also helpful to him
There must be recognition of socio-economic client centred, technique centred, problem centred nor counsellor centred, but should meet all the needs
An effective counselling is democratic. It sets up a democratic pattern and allows the counsellee to do freely whatever he likes while the consultant and not under the consultant.

The influencing factors of effective counselling:

(i) Structure

More often than not counsellor and counsellee have different perception about the purpose and nature of counselling. Many clients consider the counsellor a magician and in the same way the clients often do not know what to expect from the process of counselling or how to get while involve in it. Often, clients think a counsellor is just a friend, a teacher or as the process continues start considering the counsellor a family member. And very often, this along with other misconceptions makes many clients enter counselling reluctantly and hesitantly. Such uncertainty can inhibit the entire counselling process. A pre-defined structure for the counselling process is helpful in clarifying the counsellor client relationship. Therefore, counsellor need to be flexible and continuously negotiate the nature of the structure with their client. Just as the client is at his/her first session with the counsellor, the counsellor needs to establish forthwith the counselling process structure.

(ii) Initiative

The category can be thought of as ‘the motivation to change’, Ritchie (1986), has noted that clients will be co-operative, which however is not always the case indeed, many clients come to counselling on a self-referred basis. They face problems, experience tension and concern about themselves or others, and are willing to work hard in counselling sessions. On the other hand, clients of a more introvert nature could have reservations a full participation in the counselling process.

Now the question is how to deal with such clients who does not take any decisions. There are major five ways suggested by experts.

The first way is to anticipate the anger, frustration and defensiveness that some clients display. Counsellors who are prepared for a situation where a percentage of their clients would resist or be reluctant are able to pre-empt that reluctance, because being prepared, surprise erases to an operating factors.

The second way to deal with lack of initiative in the counsellee is to show acceptance, patience, and even understanding. A general non-judgemental attitude is also of great help. This stance promotes trust.

The third way is persuade-all counsellors have some influence on clients, and so do counsellee on counsellors. How a counsellor responds to a client, can significantly determine whether the client takes the initiate action to produce change.

The fourth way to deal with such clients is through confrontation. In this procedure the counsellor simply points out to the client exactly what the client is doing. For ex: being inconsistent. The client then takes responsibility for responding to the confrontation. The three primary ways of responding are: denial or acceptance of all or part of the confrontation as true , or developing a middle position that synthesizes the first two.

The fifth way as recommended by Sack (1988) is the use of pragmatic techniques. These include silence (pause), reflection (empathy), questioning, describing, assessing, pretending and sharing the counsellees perspective, as ways to overcome client resistance.

(iii) The physical setting

The most importance to external conditions involved in counselling process is the place where counselling occurs i.e. physical settings. Most counselling generally occurs in a room. However, there is nothing special about a counselling room. It just had to be comfortable and attractive. These features include proper lighting, quite doors and comfortable furniture. Such features should help the client adjust to the surroundings.

The second important aspect of physical setting is the distance between the counsellor and the client. This affects their future relationship. A 30 to 39 inches distance is the average comfortable distance between counsellors and the clients of both the genders. But this optimum distance may vary because of room size and furniture depends on the counsellor. Some counsellors prefer to sit behind a desk during sessions. The chairs should be set at a 90 degree angle to each another so that client can look either at the counsellor or straight ahead. The table can be used for many purposes, for that matter, even a box of tissues. The only essential factors that the counselling room should be comfortable and attractive and if thought necessary, sound proof also.

(iv) Client qualities

Counselling is a two-way operation with the counsellor at one end and counsellee at the other end. It could be said that “clients come in all shapes and sizes, personality characteristics and degree of attractiveness”. Some clients are more likely to be successful than others. A counsellor must consider a client’s body gestures, facial expressions, eye contact and voice quality to be as important as the person’s verbal communication. It is also crucial to consider the cultural, educational, financial backgrounds of clients as also their family and friends and the schools and institutions indeed.

(v)Counsellor’s qualities/characteristics

The personal and professional qualities of a counsellor were already discussed and it is very important in facilitating fruitful relationship.

(vi)Initial interviews

This is another important factor that influences the counselling process. In the first session, both the counsellor and the clients work to decide if they want to or can continue the relationship. A counsellor can quickly assess whether he or she is capable of handling and managing a client’s problems by being honest to themselves. The primary aim of all interviews is to establish rapport between the client and the counsellor and to continue the rapport.

(vii) Empathy

Empathy is the most important quality a counsellor can have. Empathy is the apprehension rather than the mere comprehension of the emotions of another person. Empathy can be of two kinds: primary empathy and advanced empathy. Primary empathy is the ability to respond in such a way that it is apparent to both client and counsellor. Advanced empathy is a process of helping a client explore themes, issues and emotions new to the client’s awareness.

(viii)Exploration of goals

In counselling process, the counsellor helps the client explore specific areas and begin to identify goals that the client wants to achieve. Thus Egan (1990) cautions that in the exploratory and goal settings stage of counselling, several problems may limit the building-up of a solid client-counsellor relationship.

Conclusion:

An effective counselling and an effective counsellor both are important in any counselling process. Thus an effective counselling depends on numerous variables, including personal background, education, skills and experience. An aspiring counsellor must carefully do journey into the acquisition of these important guidelines to perform counselling effectively.

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References:

Pal,O.B (2011). Guidance and Counselling, APH Publishing Corporation, New Delhi.
Narayana Rao. S (2008). Counselling and Guidance, Tata Mc Graw-Hill Publishing Company Ltd, New Delhi.
Hamrin, S.A., B.P. Paulsen (1950). Counselling Adolescents. Chicago, Science Research Associates.
Stefflre, B.P., King and F.Leafgren (1962). Characteristics of counsellors judged by their peers, Journal of counselling psychology, 335-340.