Counseling aims to help individuals accomplish mental health, wellness, education, and career goals through a collaborative process. It deals with personal growth, relationships, and empowerment and can address attitudes, behaviors, decision-making skills, and emotional distress. The counseling process typically involves initial disclosure, in-depth exploration of issues, and commitment to action through goal setting and monitoring progress. The ultimate goals are changes that empower clients to better understand themselves and function effectively in their lives and communities.

1. DEFINITION, NATURE AND GOALS OF
COUNSELING.

2. 1.“Counseling is a professional relationship that
empowers diverse individuals, families, and
groups to accomplish mental health, wellness,
education, and career goals”
- ACA
2.“Counseling is a series of direct contacts with the
individual which aims to offer him assistance in
changing his attitude & behaviors.
- Carl Rogers

3. 3. “Counseling is a learning oriented process, which
occurs usually in an interactive relationship, with the
aim of helping a person to learn more about the self,
and to use such understanding to enable the person
to become an effective member of society”

4.  Counseling deals with wellness, personal
growth, career, education, and empowerment
concerns.
 Counseling is conducted with persons
individually, in groups, and in families.
 Counseling is diverse and multicultural.
 Counseling is a dynamic process.
 Counseling is goal directed.

5.  Interactive, mutually respectful collaborative
process.
 Bring changes in attitude.
 Making self sufficient & independent.
 Helps in adapting to the changes or new
environment.
 Improve the understanding of self.

6.  Enhancing coping skills.
 Facilitating behavioral changes.
 Positive mental health.
 Problem resolution.
 Personal effectiveness.
 Promoting decision making.
 Improving relationships.
 Facilitating client potential.

7. Process goals are plans for events that take
place during the counseling sections and in the
counselor’s office. They are events that the
counselor considers helpful and instrumental in
achieving outcome goals.

8. A process is an identifiable sequence of
events taking place over time.
STAGE 1 : INITIAL DISCLOSURE
At the beginning of the counseling, the counselor
and client does not know each other. The client is
a bit anxious about disclosing his problems.

9. To encourage disclosure, the counselor must set
conditions that promote trust in the client.
Rogers (1951) described the following trust
promoting conditions as the characteristics of a
helping relationship.
1. Empathy : Understanding another’s experience
as if it were your own.
2. Congruence or Genuineness : Being as you
seem to be, consistent over time, dependable
in the relationship.

10. 3. Unconditional positive regard : Caring for your
client without setting conditions for your caring (
avoiding the message “I will care about you if you
do what I want” ).
Egan ( 1988) adds another condition that has
relevance throughout the counseling process.
4. Concreteness : Using clear language to describe
the client’s life situations.

11.  To let the counselors know what has been
occurring in the client’s life and how the client
thinks and feels about.
 To encourage the client to gain some feeling of
relief through the process of talking about his or
her problems.
 To encourage the client to develop a clearer
definition of his or her concerns and greater
understanding about exactly what is disturbing

12.  To help the client to being to connect
components of his or her story that may lead to
new insight.
STAGE 2 : In-depth Exploration
 In this stage the client should reach clear
understanding of his or her life concerns and
begin to formulate a new sense of hope and
directions

13.  The counselor begins the discussion about his or
her diagnostic impressions of the client’s dynamics
and coping behavior.
 As the relationship becomes more secure, the
counselor also beings to confront the client with
observation about his or her goals behavior.
 constructive confrontation provides the client with
an external view of his or her behaviour, based on
the counselor's observations. The client is free to
accept, reject or modify the counselor's impression.

14.  Immediacy is another quality of the counselor's
behaviour that becomes important in the second
stage of counseling.
 According to Egan Immediacy is the ability of the
counsellor/helper to use the immediate situation to
invite the client to look at what is going on between
them in the relationship.
 immediacy involves:
- revealing how you are feeling/thinking/sensing;
- sharing a sense of what the client may be
feeling/thinking/sensing here and now (and possibly
linking this to the clients issue);

15. -inviting the client to explore what is going on
between you.
 The focus of counseling is clearly on the client by
the second stage, the counselor may begin sharing
bits of his or her own experience with the client
without fear of appearing to oversimplify the client's
problems or seeming to tell the client's "Do as I
did".

16.  Incidents in the counselor's life may be shared if
they have direct relevance to the client's concern.
 The second stage of counseling becomes
emotionally stressful, as the client repeatedly faces
the inadequacy of habitual behaviour and must
begin to give up the familiar for the unfamiliar.

17. STAGE 3 : Commitment to Action
 In third and final stage of counseling client resolve
how to accomplish any goals that have come over
during the previous two stages.
 The clients have to realised how his or her own
behaviour related to accomplishing the goals that
have been clarified through the counseling process.
 This stage includes recognising possible alternative
courses of action (or decision) the clients might
choose and evaluating each of them in terms of the
likelihood of outcomes.

18.  Once an action decision is made, the clients usually
try some new behaviours.
 Together, the counselor and client monitor the initial
steps of the change process.
 Often the client needs to be reinforced to behave in
new ways, both because the old behaviours are
habitual and because new behaviours may not
bring about immediate results. Especially when the
goals involve improving interpersonal relationships
with one or more people, the other parties may not
respond instantly to the client new direction, which
can be discouraging.

19. Outcome goals are the intended results
of counseling. Generally, they are described in
terms of what the client desires to achieve as a
result of his or her interaction with the counselor.
Outcome goals are described in terms of change in
the client that will manifest after the counseling and
outside the counselor's office.

20. Change in counseling can take several forms:
overt behaviour change, improvement in
decision-making or coping skills, modification of
beliefs or values, or reduction of the level of
emotional distress.
Behaviour change :
 Is probably the easiest type of change to
recognize because it is overt and observable.

21.  A behaviour change might also enhance one's
potential for personal growth.
 Many counselors believe that changes in thought
and attitudes must precede changes in behaviour.
 Counseling may also enhance an individual's ability
to cope with life situations.
 Certain environment conditions are adverse and
difficult to change, but learning how to manage one's
life in the face of adversity creates room for
accomplishment and enjoyment in spite of such
conditions.

22. Coping ability :
 Coping ability depends on the individual's skill in
identifying the questions to be resolved, the
alternatives that are available, and the likely
results of different actions. Sometimes coping
means learning to live with what one cannot
change.
 Counseling may also contribute to a client's
ability to make important life decisions.

23.  The counselor teaches the client about self-
assessment procedures and how to use information
to arrive at personally satisfying answers.
 Though not directly observable, change in
beliefs (also called personal constructs) may occur
in counseling and can be assessed from the client's
verbal output.
 A common goal of counseling is that the client will
improve his or her self-concept and come to think of
himself/herself as a more competent, lovable, or
worthy person.

24.  An additional function of counseling is the relief
of emotional distress. Many clients enter
counseling because they feel bad and need a
place where they can safely vent those feelings
and feel sure that they will be accepted and
understood. Their level of emotional distress
may be interfering with their daily activities, and
they need relief from their psychic pain

25.  Change that occurs in counseling can influence
feelings, values, attitudes, thoughts, and actions.
 One of the significant outcomes that are
expected from counseling is the establishment of
free and responsible behaviour.
 Freedom is the power to determine one's own
actions, to make one's own choices and
decisions. One of the roles of counselors is to
help clients assess the true margins of their
freedom by focusing their thoughts on the
consequences of their actions and decisions.