During my initial self-evaluation and assessment of me as a perspective counselor, self- awareness was an essential aspect of becoming an effective counselor. I am aware of certain things that can prevent me from becoming a competent counselor such as being unaware of my strengths and weaknesses. As a current community support worker, I have already had the opportunity to work with individuals who require different levels of support. Providing assistance to the specific population has given me the chance to utilize my communication skills. My work experience has also allowed me to be more self-aware, and open minded. After taking the techniques of counseling class I am more than confident that I have grown professionally since the beginning …show more content…
Taking the techniques of counseling class was a great course that contributed to my evolution as a perspective therapist. Certain skills I already possess such as, great communication, being empathetic, and open to learning. However, throughout the class I learned different therapy policies such as confidentiality, attending skills, and self-awareness. Having knowledge of these basic practices and skills has contributed to me becoming well rounded, self- aware, and a competent perspective counselor. I have made moderate progress towards the learning goals I established for myself in the beginning of the semester. During the beginning of the semester I anticipated learning different counseling approaches, becoming culturally competent, and learning how to be more confident. Throughout the course not much was mentioned about theoretical approaches and how to incorporate the framework into therapy. Nonetheless, the content that I learned allowed me to be more culturally competent, self-aware, and confident. To be culturally competent, it is essential to know basic background information about a client before assisting them. It is imperative to know basic information about a client such as age, sex, and nationality to determine how to assist the individual. Not knowing certain information may contribute to unethical work and a disservice to the …show more content…
I was able to witness how an actual therapy session would look. Observing the sessions allowed me to become more self-aware and determine what I should and should not physically be doing as a perspective counselor. The more knowledge I gained from the content and class, the more confident I became. Also, the more video sessions I recorded the more comfortable and confident I became. I greatly benefited from learning the different techniques and practices, then having the opportunity to apply what was learned. The hands on experience awarded me the chance to utilize the skills taught and critique myself. I gained an abundance of knowledge about confidentiality, attending skills, and self-awareness that I did not anticipate learning. I am now aware of what exact confidential matters should be presented to a client before beginning therapy. I am also more aware of cultural competence and my own biases. Lastly, I learned how to utilize proper attending behaviors such as visual eye contact, vocal qualities, verbal tracking, and body language during a therapy
In completing the Reflected Best Self Exercise, I feel I not only have a better understanding of my strengths but also a better understanding of how others view my strengths. My best self portrait shows the underlying factors that show who I am and I see many aspects of it present in my every day life. Everyday is a battle with anxiety and depression, but a battle I win. I do not let my anxiety make me back down from what I stand for or what I believe is right, and my depression will not limit my opportunities to achieve my goals. I work hard every day, studying, taking notes, learning and adapting my knowledge, because I am focused and motivated to do well in school. I juggle multiple tasks everyday involving both schoolwork, stuff at home,
Another aspect of my personal theory comes from Carl Rogers and his Person Centered theory. My greatest take away from Rogers is his theory of unconditional positive regard. I am in agreement that an individual in counseling must feel as if they are being accepted and not judged by their therapist. Often individuals who seek counseling are fearful to begin with so as a therapist it is important to make this client feel at ease and understand that they are in a safe environment where they will not be judged. Once you can establish this with a client I believe that the relationship with that client will be more successful and the ...
¬When considering what my own personal philosophy of counseling would be, it was eye opening to consider who I was a person and how much I have grown. The self analysis was new to me because I never thought about how I do that on a day to day basis. Reviewing the questions I found that a lot of my focus surrounded family, my significant other, and close friends. Constantly living in a diverse population and having that as my surrounding also made its mark in my answers. I also noted that both past and present influences, but primarily the present, play a large role in my own perspective. By following the prompt, I was made to understand that my thought process makes me think of what is occurring in the present and how I can alter these happenings to help shape the future that I want.
The counselor accomplishes the above by expressing empathy, developing discrepancies, going along with resistance and supporting self-efficacy. Moreover, the counselor guides the client toward a solution that will lead to permanent posi...
Counseling skills has provided me with a valuable insight into the helping relationship and how it is both created and maintained in order to encourage growth and development in the client. The factors involved within the helping relationship include considering Roger’s core conditions, congruence, unconditional positive regard and empathy as the three main characteristics necessary in a helping relationship. In order to fully incorporate all three of Roger’s core conditions, I as the counselor must be self-aware, as a lack of self-awareness may inhibit truly listening and understanding the client; self-awareness can be enhanced through exercises such as Johari’s window. Counseling skills such as body language and active listening also plays a role within encouraging the client to open up and can help me as the counselor convey empathy.
Understanding the counseling session from the client’s perspective is a very important aspect in the development of a therapeutic relationship. A clinician must be an excellent listener, while being to pay attention to the client’s body language, affect and tone. The dynamics in the counseling session that is beneficial to the client include the recognition of the pain that the client is feeling. The detrimental part of this includes a misunderstanding of the real issues, a lack of consideration of the cultural aspects of the client, and a lack of clinical experience or listening skills. In this presentation, we will discuss the positive and negative aspects of the counseling session from the client’s perspective which includes the client’s attitudes, feelings, and emotions of the counseling session. We will next examine the propensity of the client to reveal or not reveal information to the counselor, and how transference, and counter-transference can have an effect on the counselor-client relationship.
The counseling session began with the introductions where I introduced myself as the counselor and later introduced my client. This stage is important in any counseling session since it is the time of exploration and focusing according to Gerard Egan as quoted by Wright (1998) in his essay on couselling skills. It is in this session that I was able to establish rapport and trust with my client in order to come up with a working and fruitful relationship with him. During this stage I made use of skills like questioning, where I would pose a question directly to my client, sometimes I would choose to just listen to what the client wanted to speak out while in some instances I would be forced to paraphrase the question if I felt the client did not understand the question I had asked previously. There were also other times when I would reflect through silence. During such a period, I got time to study the client and the information he had given. This being a difficult area, since some clients may not be able to volunteer information to you as the counselor, I decided to assure the client of confidentiality of any information he was willing to share with me with a few exceptions which I also told him about. Being open to him about the only times the information may not be confidential was part of my building rapport and establishing trust with him. I therefore, decided to ask the client what information he wanted to share with me and lucky enough he was ready to speak to me about different issues that he was going through.
I believe it is important for any student who wants to do their best in a class to take a moment to evaluate their own work to determine the rate their writing is progressing and how they can continue to advance their writing. When I looked through my own work I asked myself “what have I learned this semester?” and “what do I still need to learn in order to improve my writing?”. Answering both these questions will help me with my last step of my self-evaluation, developing a plan to learn new skills.
As we reviewed the self awareness module this past week it was very interesting to see how the self assessments provided the class information about their own personal human behaviors. I was aware of most of the information provided but there were some tendencies I was surprised to find fitted my character. It was good to be reminded of the things I had forgotten about myself. Learning about my individuality and how I interact and respond to others based on my traits, personality and behavior has been an awakening experience. It is also great to know that I can work on areas that need improvement to become a more balance person to better assist my subordinates, teams and organizations.
There are many values that I examined in this course. As a future mental health counselor, I accept and value all that I have absorbed to make my future career a reality. Most importantly, I have learned to do what is ethically right when it comes to obeying all state laws. The responsibility of a counselor is to gain an understanding of their client background and develop a strong counselor-patient relationship. I have reexamined that making choices that are appropriate and not jeopardize losing my license as a result of not being responsible for my client. Overall, the information learned in this course will forever imprint in my passion as a mental health professional.
Self assessment is a process in which you examine yourself in attempt to discover and learn more about yourself. Your likes, dislikes, behaviors, attitudes and habits can be found during this process. You can use the discoveries to your advantage by accepting or changing strengths and weaknesses. I plan on using this course to enhance my personal skills to become a better student and find success in earning my Bachelor of Arts degree at Ashford University in Social Science. Self Assessment is the first step in my successful future.
One aspect I found striking was the role of advice giving in counseling. Prior to this class, I knew that counselors did not typically give opinions or advice to lead a client in a certain direction. What I did not know was the entire reasoning behind this. A counselor might avoid giving advice so that a client learns to make his/her own decisions, does not become dependent on the counselor, and to ensure that a client will not later blame the counselor if the counselor’s advice did not turn out well. In this context, I have a better appreciation and understanding of why therapists refrain from telling the client what to do.
Personality is the expression of a person’s traits according to ones feelings, mentality and behavior. It involves understanding individuals’ traits such as withdrawal and willpower and how various parts of an individual link together to form personality. Personality expresses itself from within an individual and is comparatively regular throughout in an individual’s life. Different people have different personalities dependent on factors such as environment and genetic composition. Our personality is dependent on the success or failure of our development in the eight stages of life. This is proposed by Erik Erikson. Success in the development stages lead to virtues while the failure leads to malignancies.
A reflection of the self is an important tool to use to figure out whether or not your self-concept provides you with a positive self-esteem. First ask yourself, ‘who am I?’ and once you figure that out, determine if your perception of yourself is a positive one. If it’s not positive, you might want to consider making a change very quickly in order to live a fulfilling life. An even more important tool is to compare your own self-concept to the perception others have of you. I interviewed four people and asked them three questions. Those questions were as follows. “How do you perceive me physically? How do you perceive me socially? How do you perceive me psychologically?” Their overall physical perception of me is, I am beautiful,
As I reflect on my past assessment process, I realized how much my assessments have changed over the years. In my early years, I used tests for informational recall as my assessments. I felt these were appropriate guidelines in which I needed to follow in order to substantiate a student’s grade. Every assignment or tests was given a point value and then based on the amount of points, a grade was given. Every student’s assessment was exactly the same, and the assessments did not contain any subjectivity. I felt confident in giving the grade based on a valid point system. However reflecting back, I see that I did not include any performance-based assessments or individual learning styles in my early assessment. I also did not take into consideration the individual needs of my students. My assessment approach was awful. I am embarrassed that I use to assess students in this manner.