SOCIOLOGY

Advanced Counseling Skills

Abstract

A counselor is one who has no active interest in additional conditions. They are a valuable person, and will receive, as a person that has always fair and genuine relationship with the client. To provide successful counseling services, a counselor must maintain some advanced skills that help them to create a good relationship with clients and also creates positive outcome in the end of the session. The main purpose of a counselor is to provide sound advice and consultation to clients according to their problem and situation for which they need counseling.

The paper describes the details about counseling involves thorough process and advanced skills that a counselor must adapt in order to make counseling session successful and effective. It includes introduction of counseling service, stages of counseling process, principles of counseling, advanced counseling skills and the discussion ends with a sound conclusion.

Advanced Counseling Skills

Introduction

Counseling is a process in which the expert or the counselor has face to face conversations with the patient to solve his social, personal or professional problems. Counseling is the process which handles individual personal, social, vocational and professional problems. Counseling is basically a theory based process and counselors work only in those fields in which they have expertise.

Counseling refers to advising or guiding a counselee to follow proper guideline that lead to success and happiness of life. A coach can be a mentor, fitness coach, public speaking coach, financial coach etc but Christian coach is very rare or does not exist. The other types of coaching are concerned with the growth and success of practical life but Christian coaching is mainly based on the spiritual happiness and success which makes a person different from others and can get away from many tensions and personal problems. Coaching is different from counseling. Coaching focuses on the choice of goals and right directions towards success whereas counseling means to advice a counselee to choose the right path to get rid of past problems and depression (Blocher, 2000, pp. 110-40).

Stages of the counseling process

Person-Centered counseling is related to non directive way of treatment which can be designed in a manner that the counselor does not lead the session; instead the individual counseling do as considered being an expert of his experiences (Kelly, 1998, pp.391).

The main objective of a counselor is to follow the directions of the client instead of following own rules and guidelines to achieve certain objective in the end of the process of counseling. Counseling provides self confidence to the clients and has strong faith in them for telling the things that they want to alter by counseling, which leads to the best way to identify the main problem. Counselors also realize that their clients know about the counseling process and the time it will take for the sessions to be completed. The purpose of this type of counseling is to make counselor realize that they must be supportive and encouraging so that their clients reach to the solution of the problem ...