Welfare Case

"Counseling involves a process, the aim of which is to help others to help themselves by making better choices and becoming better choosers of options" (Lister.I, 2008). The counselor's repertoire of skills includes those of forming an understanding relationship, as well as interventions, focused on helping clients change specific aspects of their feeling, thinking and acting. Counseling can provide people with a regular time and space to talk about their problems and explore difficult feelings in a confidential and dependable environment. According our handout( week 2), Counselors do not usually offer advice, but instead give insight into the client's feelings and behaviour and help the client change their behaviour if necessary. They do this by listening to what the client has to say and commenting on it from a professional perspective. In the first assignment, we practiced the counseling process which gave me a better understanding of what the counseling is and other related theory we learned about this subject. In this essay I will talk about my experience and my understanding on counseling.

The scenario I played with the other classmate Lico is about a Chinese student struggling in Australia. As we know, as an overseas student, living in a new country is not an easy job. After the first few weeks' excitement, everything seems wrong for this young guy, for example, he failed one subject after the first semester, and he missed his family, Chinese food and so on. Therefore, he just lacked of confidence to stay in Australia.

There are several skills I used during my counseling process. First of all, I wanna talk about is SOLER model. According to our handout, S means face the client and sit squarely; O means adopt an open posture; L means lean forward towards the other person. E means maintain good eye contact. R means be relaxed or natural. This is a kind of micro skills level. Body language is a very useful way to communicate with your client, for instance, head movement like nodding to agree and encourage your client; smiles, leaning forward, raising and lowering your eyebrows, slouching, volume and so on. Maybe sometimes I just need to monitor the tone of voice. These skills played an essential role during my play, because it is not so easy when you play in front of teacher and other students, using these skills helped the client and me be more confident and comfortable. Also, human presence demonstrates to the client the counselors' level of commitment to the client's welfare.

Then, I would like to talk about listening. As a counselor, is to facilitate the person's resolution of these issues, whilst respect their values, personal resources, culture and capacity for choice so that a counselor needs to identify a blind spot in a client's story and a response which means counselor has to ensure hear all the client has to say and confirm the information by repeating back what they say or paraphrasing. Listening seems an easy but significant communication skill needed to be a counselor. In my case, if I can not hear the Chinese client's story, how can I address his issue and help him. It includes non-verbal, verbal and context.

Next, questioning. In our handouts, it consists of open question and closed question. An open question is one that is used in order to gathering lots of information - you ask it with the intent of getting a long answer, like tell me about your study. Also, open question could tell the client that you are interested in whatever they gonna say. A closed question is one used to gather specific information - it can normally be answered with either a single word or a short phrase. This is a very good counseling technique to know and use, like how are you doing today? I used it a lot during the role play, I got the a lot of information about this Chinese