Listening well is the foundation of a successful counseling relationship. But how exactly can this play out?
Clients often come in wanting me to give them advice or tell them what to do. (Spoiler Alert: counselors do neither of these things most of the time!). In these situations, I try to listen for both the content and the emotion in what they are saying. What I usually find is that they have a lot of anxiety as well as a tendency to question themselves on a regular basis.
When this is the case, my job is to reflect that back to them and bring it into their awareness. Not only that, but to take them deeper to where that tendency may originate. For instance, people who tend to doubt themselves often have a low sense of self worth because of difficult experiences or a lack of emotional attunement in childhood. My role as the counselor is to unearth the pain of that for them, to help them come to terms with it, and ultimately to help them learn to both trust and value themselves.
The insight and self-awareness that emerges from this exchange can be transformational for people. If I would have listened only superficially and merely given advice in this scenario, it would have been to miss the heart of the matter. Clients wouldn’t have had the same opportunity to grow.
At the same time, it can be an incredibly empowering experience for clients to realize that they already have many of their own answers within themselves. They already have the resources to handle life, even though they might be out of touch with them because of being consistently invalidated by others. My job is simply to draw their God-given capacity out of them by listening well.
Do you find yourself asking others for advice much of the time? How often do you find that you trust yourself on any given day? If you have trouble in either of these areas, the skilled listening that happens in counseling may be a powerful next step for you!