A counselor’s role is crucial in the healthcare setting. They are responsible for providing support to patients with poor mental health conditions. The purpose of their practice is to help their clients/patients improve their mental well-being, process emotions, overcome trauma, and navigate symptoms of stress and depression. Thus, it makes sense for counselors to hone their skills and become better at their jobs. And if you are such a professional looking for advice, we will help you in that self-improvement journey by giving you tips on becoming a better counselor.
Some suggestions are listed below. These include:
1. Learn continuously
Just like any professional, you must commit yourself to professional development at every stage of your career. This is truer for people in healthcare-related jobs since someone’s well-being depends on them. The lack of commitment to professional development impacts your progress and your quality of service.
So, try to stay up-to-date with the latest developments and knowledge in your profession by reading, researching, and attending conferences and workshops. You can also choose to pursue higher education along with your job if you’re looking for a more straightforward approach. Suppose you decide to take up educational endeavors.
In that case, we recommend selecting the online route rather than the traditional offline method of acquiring more education. An online counseling masters program can offer you the flexibility to obtain higher education and maintain a healthy work-study-life balance. Plus, these options are cheaper since you don’t have to pay for commute and campus accommodation.
2. Start working on your micro-skills
There are many micro-skills counselors, especially mental health specialists, must hone to practice. These include focusing, summarizing, paraphrasing, observing, questioning, negotiating, reflecting, confronting, etc. All of these skills help you provide your clients with sound advice.
With the help of these skills, you’ll understand your client’s condition and help them navigate their crises. Some of these skills are also referred to as “influencing skills” by professionals. When such skills hold so much importance in the process, it becomes crucial to improve them.
3. Increase professional effectiveness
Professional effectiveness strategies help counselors become more efficient and organized in their daily activities. These strategies include time management methods, goal setting, emotional resilience, treatment planning, etc. How you choose to apply these strategies will ultimately help you improve your practice. Improving your effectiveness strategies will help you manage your clients in a more organized manner.
4. Understand your clients
When dealing with your client, your communication, responsiveness, and flexibility will play the primary role during the session. They are essential skills that a counselor needs because each client is different. Hence, it would be best to approach every client’s emotional state with a unique strategy. Most of the time, you will have to modify your plan according to your client’s needs and progress accordingly.
Moreover, you will also have to deal with stubborn clients who resist communicating, have completely shut off, lie, resist change, or are unhappy with the situation. You will also find some clients are not attending counseling for their own sake but rather because they have been forced to. Therefore, you will have to understand the client’s condition and help them open up gradually.
5. Be organized
To become a successful counselor, you must also improve your organizational skills. This aspect of personal management becomes crucial as you get more clients over time. But incorporating new habits to organize yourself early on will help you a lot in the future. Your clients surely won’t appreciate you walking in late, last-minute cancelations, or forgetfulness on your part. Therefore, you must make your clients your priority in every manner.
You can start by keeping a diary or a digital organizer to prepare and maintain your schedule. If there are any changes, notify the concerned person at an appropriate time. Doing so will help in improving your services, and hence, generate favorable word-of-mouth.
Understand the difference between empathy and compassion
Secondary trauma comes from hearing about the trauma of a client. It can affect your own mental health, which is why you must employ both compassion and empathy during the counseling session. Empathy can be defined as your capacity to feel the same emotions as the client so that they are not alone when they re-state their trauma. While empathy is valuable in counseling, it often leaves the counselor and emotionally vulnerable as well.
On the other hand, compassion is concern and pity for the client, which helps you understand their feelings while protecting your own mental state. A good counselor will use both of these skills during a session to ensure maximum effectiveness.
Take care of your well-being
If you aim to improve as a counselor, you must first improve yourself as a person. You must take good care of your mind and body. Because if you are unable to look after yourself, how can you look after your clients? Hence, incorporating some healthy habits in your routine, such as meditation, reading, and taking mental breaks, can help you take care of yourself. Moreover, it would help if you also took care of your mental health by allowing yourself to destress and relax from time to time.
These aspects are particularly crucial for counselors because they have to absorb a lot of pain and trauma their clients have been through. If you don’t have a healthy outlet to let go of all the secondary trauma, it will affect your professional etiquette and personal life.
Conclusion
Aiming to become better shows your professional integrity and commitment. It is an admirable quality your clients appreciate. Therefore, improving your competence as a counselor result in helping you find good working prospects. So if you have the same goal, you can follow these tips to become a better counselor.
Most of all, ensure you pursue this goal to help make people’s lives a little bit better. Because there is a lot of pain in the world, and counselors are people who help in easing that pain for others.
Also read: What Lifestyle Changes Should You Make to Promote Mental Health?
