Counselling Skills for Becoming a Wiser Practitioner: Tools, Techniques and Reflections for Building Practice Wisdom

People learn mainly from experience and from doing. This book conveys the reality of the counselling room and provides helpful tips and techniques to enable practitioners to develop and refine their ability to enter into another person's internal world, thereby gaining practice wisdom. At the heart of this book is the idea of 'situated' action. By this we mean suspending purely intellectual faculties and exploring a different kind of intelligence - one shaped in the real world during down-on-the-ground, embodied and deeply felt experiences - in essence what happens to theory when it meets real life. It offers thirty-four skills to achieve this kind of practice wisdom which contain a mixture of reflection, client stories, quotes, images and excerpts from students' writing. This text will translate theory into practice for students and be a source of inspiration and reflection for the experienced practitioner wanting to develop their skills.