Counselling Skills Fundamentals (I)

There are 8 lessons in this course:

1. Learning Specific Skills - Learning methods; the counselling rold
2. Listening and Bonding - Meeting and greeting; helping the client relax; listening with intent
3. Reflection: Paraphrasing - Reflection of feeling; client responses to reflection of feelings; reflection of content and feeling
4. Questioning - Open and closed questions; other types of questions; goals of questioning
5. Interview Techniques - Summarising; confrontation; reframing
6. Changing Beliefs and Normalising - Changing self-destructive beliefs; irrational beliefs; normalising
7. Finding Solutions - Making choices; facilitating actions; gestalt awareness; psychological blocks
8. Ending the Counselling - Terminating the session; closure; further meetings; dependency, confronting dependency.

Each lesson culminates in an assignment which is submitted to the school, marked by the school's tutors and returned to you with any relevant suggestions, comments, and if necessary, extra reading.

• Explain the processes involved in the training of counsellors in micro skills.
• Demonstrate the skills involved in commencing the counselling process and evaluation of non-verbal responses and minimal responses.
• Demonstrate reflection of content, feeling, both content and feeling, and its appropriateness to the counselling process.
• Develop different questioning techniques and to understand risks involved with some types of questioning.
• Show how to use various micro-skills including summarising, confrontation, and reframing.
• Demonstrate self-destructive beliefs and show methods of challenging them, including normalising.
• Explain how counselling a client can improve their psychological well-being through making choices, overcoming psychological blocks and facilitating actions.
• Demonstrate effective ways of terminating a counselling session and to explain ways of addressing dependency.

• Report on an observed counselling session, simulated or real.
• Identify the learning methods available to the trainee counsellor.
• Demonstrate difficulties that might arise when first learning and applying micro skills.
• Identify why trainee counsellors might be unwilling to disclose personal problems during training.
• Identify risks that can arise for trainee counsellors not willing to disclose personal problems.
• Discuss different approaches to modelling, as a form of counselling
• Evaluate verbal and non-verbal communication in an observed interview.
• Identify the counsellor’s primary role (in a generic sense).
• Show how to use minimal responses as an important means of listening with intent.
• Explain the importance of different types of non-verbal response in the counselling procedure.
• Report on the discussion of a minor problem with an anonymous person experiencing that problem.
• Identify an example of paraphrasing as a minimal response to reflect feelings.
• Discuss the use of paraphrasing in counselling.
• Differentiate catharsis from confused thoughts and feelings.
• Identify an example of reflecting back both content (thought) and feeling in the same phrase.