Table of Contents/Introduction
Time Checklist
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The Activities
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1. Accessing Your Counseling Style
Everyone has a range of communication skills. When these skills are combined, they make up a counseling style. Discovering one's own counseling skills help explain how we interact with others and establish relationships at work.
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2. A Questions of Attitude
The way we communicate with others is often strongly influenced by our attitudes. These attitudes are worth exploring.
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3. Asking Questions
Asking questions is a key communication skill. In counseling, the kind of questions that are asked and the way in which they are asked can open up or block progress in our attempts to understand problems and their potential solutions.
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4. Body Talk
Learning to comprehend the language of "body-talk" opens up new ways to unblock the recourses of individuals at work
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5. Challenging the Problems
Managers often need to find appropriate ways of directly challenging of confronting problems with individuals and how they might be resolved...The manager will, in the course of practicing challenging skills, know exactly what skills to use and when to use them.
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6. Changing Course
Sometimes it is necessary for people to change the course of events in their lives...This can be very effective in creating real changes that make a genuine difference to people
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7. characteristics of Effective Counseling
Identifying the characteristics of effective counseling provides the basis for a clear perspective on it. It highlights who and what makes for good counseling
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8. Check It Out
Too often we forge ahead with plans and actions without checking with those who are affected by our behavior. When we check our understanding of issues and problems we increase rapport with people and confirm we are on the right track.
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9. Clarify, Clarify, Clarify
In counseling we need to be as clear as possible. In order to clarify problem situations we need to establish what is going wrong and what is going right in a person's life...
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10. Combining Counseling Skills
Showing empathy toward someone while, at the same time, trying to further explore a particular situation tells the person that we really care but we are not going to accept the situation at its face value. combining empathy with this type of "probing" provides managers with the means to be both caring and critical.
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11. Constructive Confrontation
Managers often have to deal with sensitive and conflicting situations. Being able to confront problems without personalizing them permits us to manage mare constructively and help people overcome their personal and performance difficulties.
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12. Counseling Empathy Scale
Successful counseling begins by being able to see the other person's viewpoint. But it is more than that. The most effective use of counseling skills is apparent when we can "live in the same skin" as the person receiving counseling.
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13. Counseling Goals
In counseling we need to be clear about what we are tying to achieve. Knowing what our objectives are makes it possible to state the goals of counseling, which will provide us with a clear framework of values within which we can conduct counseling.
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14. Cueing Into Counseling
Many people have different views of what counseling is, and what it is not...Being able to distinguish between counseling and other forms of communication...is fundamental to anyone interested in developing counseling skills.
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15. Dress Rehearsal
It is not uncommon in counseling for people to express concern over their inability to manage situations. Carry out a dress rehearsal helps them to prepare for difficulties and overcome problems they anticipate might occur.
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16. Encouraging Sensitivity
Sensitivity to people allows them to be themselves and we can know them as individual. These in individuals often have to be understood so they can unpack the emotional mental "baggage" that often interferes with their personal life and undermined their performance at work. Studying cases of people who have problems helps managers to assess their level of personal sensitivity to others.
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17. Finding a Focus
It is important for managers to enable those whom they are counseling to "tell their story"
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18. For the Record
Keeping records helps us to provide objective information to balance our subjective impressions of others.
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19. From Strength to Strength
Much of the job in counseling is to help others become competent in more areas of their lives...This activity concentrates on the developmental tasks people face at their current stage in life, the situations in which they should find them relevant and the competence skills they need to develop.
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20. Getting to the Heart of the Matter
It's important to find the root causes of issues brought to counseling...Managers can get to the heart of the matter by developing their ability to empathize with people.
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21. Getting to Know You
One of the cornerstones of counseling individuals effectively is getting to know them better as they see themselves. This can be done very well using the sentence completion technique.
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22. Give Me a Specification
Using counseling skills with people involves being able to find out what matters to them, what they thing, feel and do.
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23. Giving Feedback
We all need feedback - without it we don not know how well we are doing. Giving feedback also prompts people to reflect on what they may need to change and what they should continue to maintain.
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24. Giving Information
Information is power...Being able to access appropriate information empowers people to perform, and solve their problems.
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25. Going for Goals
Goal setting is a central part of counseling, and managers should be aware of it as a means of establishing preferred outcomes with co-workers and subordinates.
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26. Is Anybody Listening?
It's said by cynics that listening only happens when someone who is talking stops and takes a breath. Clearly, listening skills are fundamental to all forms of spoken communication between people. This activity examines the benefits of accurate listening, the costs of not listening, and the skills needed to become a "good listener."
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27. I Want to Tell You a Story
Sometimes the quickest and most effective way to "get through" to another person is to tell a story. Storytelling often succeeds in counseling when a person seems otherwise unable to grasp the point or refuses to see the significance of his/her problems.
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28. Johari Window
This approach involves examining four main ways by which we communicate with each other...The purpose of the Johari Window is to gain greater self-awareness, and improve our ability to communicate clearly and openly.
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29. Knowing That I Know What I Am Good At
It is common experience for people undergoing counseling to have lost confidence in themselves...This situation can be successfully countered by helping people to see what they are good at and to know that they are good at certain things and not so good at others.
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30. Let's Look at That Another Way
When people have problems they first try the solutions that have served them well in the past. Sometimes these do not work and they feel "stuck" and trapped. By looking at the problem from a different viewpoint and "reframing" it they can see new possibilities and find fresh solutions.
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31. Modeling
Modeling skills are very effective in acquiring new and preferred behaviors.
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32. Motivating for Change
In order for people to change their behavior and overcome their problems, it is important that they are rewarded for doing so. Managers will find the benefits of rewarding new behaviors lead to real and sustained change.
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33. Pay Attention
People respond to us when we are attentive to them and their interests and concerns. Being attentive is an important prelude to accurate and helpful listening.
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34. Personal Goals
Personal goals lie at the heart of any counseling activity. Understanding and identifying people's personal goals is important if they are to achieve their aspirations and better manage their problems.
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35. Personal Satisfactions and Frustrations
Helping people to see what satisfactions and frustrations are operating in their lives and how these are influencing them provides a useful basis for decision-making in counseling others.
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36. Planning for Action
The Performance Action Plan (PAP) helps people to unclutter their minds and gives them clear guidelines for action, it is also used when commitment to more substantial change is required.
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37. Point of View
Learning to appreciate each other's point of view gives us the basis for valid action.
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38. Probing
Probes can be used to help individuals "spell out" their problem situations and unexplored opportunities for using their human recourses in terms of specific experiences, behaviors, feeling and achieving goals.
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39. Productive Versus Unproductive Experiences
Being able to increase productive experiences and reduce unproductive ones in our communication with other requires key counseling skills, reviewed here.
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40. Reading a Person's Face
To increase our understanding of another person we need to improve our perception of him/her...To be able to "read" facial expressions accurately is a key counseling skill.
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41. Resourcing and Challenging
Knowing our resources and how we can use them better can be found by the sensitive use of challenging skills.
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42. Starting and Continuing Conversations
We are all more or less effective at opening and continuing conversations but should, by intent rather than by accident, be able to demonstrate a high level of skill in this.
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43. Stereotypes: Their Uses and Abuses
Stereotypes provide us with a way of making rapid decisions about other from a limited information base...Managers need to know the advantages and disadvantages of using stereotypes in their communications with others
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44. Summarizing Skills
Throughout the process of counseling, it is important periodically to summarize the individual's position...Summarizing is an integral part of the counseling process and is essential for the management of our personal and working lives
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45. The Process and Stages of Counseling
There are a number of specific processes and stages involved in using counseling skills with people and it is important that we understand them
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46. There's Nothing so Practical as a Good Model
A clear practical model of counseling is a good way with which to develop counseling skills...This model is based on four key assumptions for counseling: rapport, defining the problem, setting goals, and commitment to change.
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47. The Significant Event
Identifying significant events reminds people that they have being in difficult circumstances before and they do have untapped resources they can call on to overcome their problems.
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48. What It Will Look Like, How It Will Feel
Identifying how to deal successfully with difficult problems is not always easy. One way of overcoming this situation is for managers to help people understand what the situation will look like and how it will feel after the problem has been solved
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49. Will I or Won't I, Do I or Don't I?
Managers need to be able to help people identify and overcome, or avoid, undesirable conflicts at work.
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50. Working on Aggression
Aggression can be positive or negative...People in counseling often need to find ways of expressing their aggression in a socially-acceptable way. Click here to dowload
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