PERFORMANCE COUNSELING

Performance Counseling

Abstract

Quality assessments of interventions are seen as essential in optimizing their implementation, interpreting their effectiveness, and illuminating their underlying processes. In Hartslag Limburg, a cardiovascular prevention project, the quality of a health counseling intervention was assessed as part of the process evaluation. Four health advisors each video-taped 16 counseling sessions, all of which were assessed by three independent observers. Health counseling was found to be a very difficult skill, but, all things considered, the overall quality was evaluated as rather encouraging. No indication was found of quality improvement over time. The interpretation of the findings was complicated by limited absolute interobserver agreement, but reliable relative distinctions could be made between the health advisors' performance and their application of various counseling skills. Future quality investigators are advised to carefully match study goals with study methods, and practitioners planning a health counseling project should take the complexity of the task into account.

Performance Counseling

Question 1

Role of self-Analysis in Counseling

Counseling is a learning-oriented process, carried on in a simple, one to one social environment, in which a counselor, professionally competent in relevant psychological skills and knowledge, seeks to assist the client by methods appropriate to the latter's needs and within the context of the total personnel program, to learn more about himself, to learn how to put such understanding into effect in relation to more clearly perceived, realistically defined goals to the ` end that the client may become a happier and more productive member of his society (Kettunen 2001). In lay terms counseling can be described as a face to face relationship, having goals to help a client to learn or acquire new skills which will enable them to cope and adjust to life situations. The focus is to help a person reach maximum fulfillment or potential, and to become fully functioning as a person. There have always been counselors people who listen to others and help resolve any type of difficulties or problems that they may have. (Gladding 1996 pp. 152-269) says “To understand what counseling is you must first understand these two concepts Guidance and Psychotherapy”. Guidance is the process of helping people make important choices that affect their lives, (Bolles 2008) such as choosing a preferred life-style and never the less it sometimes distinguishes a way of helping that differs from the more encompassing word counseling.

One distinction between guidance and counseling is that while guidance focuses on helping individuals choose what they value most; counseling focuses on helping them make changes. Psychotherapy (or therapy) traditionally focuses on serious problems associated with intrapsychic, internal, and personal issues and conflicts.

Counseling contains a number of common points some of what which follows (Bolles, 2008)

Counseling is a profession

Counseling deals with personal, social, vocational, empowerment, and educational concerns.

Counseling is conducted with persons who are considered to function within the “normal range”.

Counseling is theory-based and takes place in a structural setting

Counseling is a process in which clients learn how to make decisions and formulate new ways of behaving, feeling and ...