Importance Of Helping Skills In Student Affairs

Introduction Student affairs professionals typically have a calling to help students navigate the often-daunting path to college. As a profession, we are typically type “A” personalities who are proactive with responses and can sometimes offer advice before knowing all the information. Helping Skills in Student Affairs Work, has helped me identify the areas that I excel in, but most importantly identify the areas that I need to work on as I continue to grow as a professional. It is also important to remember that words have meaning and the more we are intentional with our language the greater our helping skills will be.

Skills I am Regularly Using One of the skills I find myself using the most in Encouragers. I am finding that I do not want

I always thought you just had to pay attention to someone to communicate, but I am now learning that I have to retain, reframe and ask questions to constantly learn about the person. The major way my perception has changed though is that I have learned it is not always easy to be a helper. I have a lot of self-biases and problems that I have to work on controlling and keeping in check. This came to light after I got the feedback from my last interview and I was using rendered judgments during an interview. I have to make sure I keep my assumptions and biases in check as much as possible when being a

One must be able to retain a ton of information, reframe that information into coherent summaries and be able to interpret what a person is saying. They also must stay engaged with non-verbals so the person knows that we are there to listen and help. Being a helper is checking your feelings and biases at the door and focusing on what that person is going through and realizing that we all see the world differently. As helpers we should not be afraid to say we don’t know and realize that we need to refer back to the literature to help us grow as professionals in this