Building Credibility
Building a working alliance would be best to build credibility with your clients. The working partnership is a vehicle used to create expectations and is central to therapeutic change, an observation strongly supported by research evidence.
Baldwin, Wampold, and Imel disentangled the therapist’s and the patient’s contributions to the alliance and found that only the therapist’s contribution to the coalition predicted outcome, a result confirmed meta-analytically.
Warmth
Warmth is the ability to communicate and demonstrate genuine caring and concern for clients. Using this ability, counselors and therapists convey their acceptance of clients, their desire for clients’ well-being, and their sincere interest in finding workable solutions to the problems that clients present.
Empathy
Therapists possess and utilize many skills, but empathy is a fundamental responsibility for them to master within their practice. Empathic responding (or active listening) is when the counselor communicates – through paraphrasing or mirroring – their client’s feelings and why they possess them (again, according to the client).
Emotional Expression
Emotion is central to the success of therapy. Effective therapists can modulate and express feelings. Often therapists need to activate avoided emotions, such as sadness or anger and must be able to appropriately model and express these emotions for patients.
Verbal Fluency
Verbal fluency is critical for providing a believable, concise, and adaptive explanation and a compelling rationale for the therapeutic actions. Psychotherapy is, above all else, talk therapy. That is, the delivery of psychotherapy is via verbal means; thus, an effective therapist must be able to communicate clearly and succinctly.
Hopefulness
Effective therapists communicate hopefulness and optimism that patients can reach therapeutic goals, even if particular patients have made many unsuccessful attempts, within and outside of therapy, to solve their problems (e.g., patients who abuse substances and have failed repeatedly to maintain sobriety for significant periods).
Persuasiveness
A key component is that patients accept the therapist’s explanation and believe that the treatment will be beneficial. Not surprisingly, Anderson and colleagues found that effective therapists are persuasive.
Problem/Solution Focus
Solution-focused therapy is a type of treatment that highlights a client’s ability to solve problems rather than why or how the problem was created. It was developed after observations of therapists in a mental health facility in Wisconsin by Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg and their colleagues.
Like positive psychology, Solution Focused Therapy (SFT) practitioners focus on goal-oriented questioning to assist a client in moving into a future-oriented direction.
Due to its broad application, solution-focused therapy has been successfully applied to various client concerns. It has been utilized in a wide variety of client groups as well. The approach presupposes that clients have some knowledge of what will improve their lives.
Fundamental Mental Map
A “game plan” – a short-term goal for each specific game and a long-term vision for a season – is essential to winning in sports and life. Our ability to transform our mind from focusing on a loss, crisis, or disaster to an exceptional moment, plus getting the highest quality of support, translates into a winning mentality. When it comes to capitalizing on our potential, the things we say to ourselves (our quietest thoughts) make all the difference in the world.
Types of Communication
Communication is a set of skills that we employ with ourselves before others hear what we have to say. Psychologists call it “self-talk.” But the result is the same whether we talk to ourselves or are merely thinking about ourselves. We too often dwell upon the negative in a situation, which brings us down even more. How can we get ourselves positively focused again? It’s a habit to be practiced for sure.
We all have interpersonal communication skills, but we refine them to varying degrees. For example, when someone is talking, is it insulting to interrupt them? I would say that engaging with another means we have to be involved in the conversation. However, we often tend to interrupt when others speak merely to express our points, share our interests, or bring out our issues.
If we allow a rant or a monologue to form, that might suggest that we are passively engaged or not engaged. Engaging another by mirroring their comments for clarification and understanding is not the same as interrupting to change the focus of the conversation or for our motivations.
Self-Confidence
Confidence is not something that we can learn and memorize, like a set of rules and procedures. It is a state of mind and a set of skills we need. Indeed, it can be cultivated. Here are a few fundamentals for enhancing our self-confidence. Positive thinking, visual imagery, practicing successful routines, training with new ones, and eliminating poor ones. Start a habit of reading, becoming more knowledgeable, and talking about your feelings with other people. These are all useful ways to help improve or boost our confidence levels.
Confidence comes from feelings of well-being and self-worth, acceptance of our bodies and minds (our thoughts and emotions create our self-esteem), and beliefs in our abilities, skills, and experience. Confidence is an attribute that most of us would like to possess. Feeling it is not the same as faking it.
Life experiences provide us with opportunities to learn, change, grow, and ultimately shape our evolution. Reflect, meditate, and develop a mindful position with all our relationships. This is essential for us to move, shape ourselves, and evolve.
You’ll have questions about these skills. We are ready to discuss them with you. One of our specialties is confidence coaching, but you can secure two or three individual sessions for yourself first.