Helping Relationship Lesson 1 Flashcards
Describe situations in which you may be a helper.
jobs and careers where they will be directly interacting with children, families, and individuals in “helping” capacities. Many HDFS student also eventually enter a “helping profession” where the skills learned in this course are especially relevant (e.g., clinical psychology, counseling psychology, social work, rehabilitation, nursing, health and nutrition education, speech pathology, and others). Beyond professional benefits, as mentioned, this course may also provide a significant personal growth experience as helping skills are relevant across contexts (i.e., with friends, relatives, etc.) and can potentially serve to enhance personal relationships.
Explain why self-reflection is an important part of the learning and helping process.
Your own openness and self-awareness will help you to become a better helper. Makes you aware of your own strengths and weaknesses.
Explain what is meant by “intentionality” and “intentional interviewing” and why these are important.
When in a helping or counseling situation, collecting information (or, interviewing) should be approached with “intentionality.” “Intentionality” is acting with a sense of capability and deciding from among a range of alternative actions, thoughts, and behaviors in responding to changing life situations. As such, intentional interviewing refers to when one interviews in such a way (including information gathering, problem solving and advice giving) that demonstrates clear reasoning and a clear intention. It is important for a helper to be intentional and thoughtful in order to stay organized and focused in order to optimize one’s ability to be an effective helper
Describe strategies for intentional interviewing.
Strategy 1: Listen first; solve problems later.
As mentioned above, it is important to collect information so you can be informed and be able to logically and thoughtfully craft your response. Given the essentialness of the information to the process, a helpee must first listen to a client or potential helpee. Remember, you cannot solve without fully understanding. In the coming lessons, you will learn about strategies for how to be an active listener.
Strategy 2: Avoid “perfect” solutions. Do not get hung up on finding a perfect response or solution. Sometimes, perfect solutions don’t even exist!
Strategy 1 above refers to “solving” later. It is important to remember that your role as a helper is not necessarily to “solve” anyone’s problems. Rather, the best helpers are equipped with strategies to help clients/helpees to think through and process their own thoughts and emotions. This process may lead to a solution or it may not. For instance, it may lead to an increased awareness, understanding, or ability to move forward and handle situations and emotions – in a way, these things can be solutions. It is essential that a helper does not get bogged down by searching for the perfect solution as this type of perfection may not exist. Rather, a helpee should focus on the goal of improvement, not necessarily solving
Strategy 3: Avoid jumping to the “right” response too soon.
Strategy 3 is also related to the two strategies you’ve read about above. Again, the key is to pace yourself and not jump in too soon. Just like you should be mindful not to offer a perfect solution, you should also not feel compelled to offer any response prematurely. Throughout HDFS 411, you will learn skills and strategies to bring to a helping relationship that will help you to pace the process in order to best serve your client/helpee.
Strategy 4: Adapt your style to suit different individuals / cultures.
As you read above, it is important to collect information in order to be an effective helper. An aspect of such information should include information and an awareness of one’s cultural upbringing, beliefs, and expectations. Across the remainder of this lesson, you will learn more about the importance of multicultural awareness as it relates to one’s ability to be “intentional” and an effective helper.
Define multiculturalism and describe elements of multiculturalism that pertain to helping interactions.
The word multiculturalism is when humanity lives in unity of acceptance of all people from numerous lifestyles and circumstances. Where everyone accepts and respects each person’s lifestyle and learns customs/traditions.
As a helper, you should know that you very well may encounter individuals from various backgrounds who have had different upbringings, have different experiences, and have different values. Given such situations, you should focus on adapting your helping style and technique to best fit the person’s personality and needs. Sometimes individual needs can be based on cultural backgrounds. An important step to begin the process of being adaptive is focusing on self-awareness and awareness of differences in general
Explain why applying a multicultural perspective to counseling is important.
As a helper, we should be concerned with multiculturalism because many of the clients within our careers come from numerous circumstances that we need to become more accustomed to. We need to take time and be aware of different backgrounds and lifestyles. For instance, the online lesson mentions that helpers should adapt their learning style to numerous people and their backgrounds. There will be times in our career that we will work with clients that have differences. We must respect these unique customs and listen fully without interjecting our customs. As successful helpers, we must gather insight before seeking an answer to their issues
Part of this process is learning to be aware of one’s own, perhaps underlying, biases.
It is important that you understand that it is not uncommon for people to hold biases and people who hold biases are not inherently bad. Furthermore, it is not the goal of this course or exercise to rather, learn to acknowledge and move beyond maladaptive generalizations.
Becoming more self-aware of one’s biases and prejudices enables us, as educated persons and helpers, to think more clearly and move beyond such maladaptive generalization and ways of making assumptions. This can help us to develop strategies to make sure that our underlying biases do not interfere with or hinder the helping process.
Awareness
A counselor should make commitment to developing self-awareness and work on fostering cultural expertise.
* Self-Awareness: Counselors should be aware of their own assumptions, values, and basic biases. Additionally, a counselor should be aware of the impact of cultural heritage as well as aware of their own limits and abilities relevant to working with different cultures. Furthermore, a counselor should be dedicated to constant self-assessment and committed to self-improvement whereby they understand and acknowledge that their world view may be culturally different than clients and work to stay aware of this and understand these differences.
cultural expertise
: A counselor should be committed to being aware and sensitive to cultural issues beyond their immediate cultural identification. A counselor should know about oppression, racism, and discrimination as it may exist.
knowledge
A counselor should make a commitment to learning about multicultural issues by learning about multicultural groups, their history and the issues that impact individuals of specific cultural backgrounds. The knowledge dimension focuses on facts and information that a counselor should have in order to be competent with regard to another culture. This involves awareness of emotional reactions towards other racial ethnic groups, knowing the culture of the client’s population and its influence on counseling as well as being skilled in mental health issues of other cultures and learning about helping processes in other cultures and seeking to include them, as appropriate, in their own practice.
skills
A counselor will focus on developing skills attuned to the unique view and culture of a widely varying base of clients. As such the interviewer should aim to respect the first language of the client and ensure that careful translation is available when appropriate. Furthermore, a counselor should develop appropriate intervention strategies and techniques. For instance, a counselor should ask what recourses are appropriate to use and available in cultural contexts. A counselor should be skilled in structuring their helping to fit within cultural contexts and institutions. In other words, the way a counselor works with a client will be significantly different with the way one may work with individuals of different cultures. good helper must channel such awareness into their helping strategies. Given the information you’ve now learned about multicultural competence, you know now how essential it is for you to be aware and knowledgeable about cultures in order to be an effective helper. To gain knowledge and information, it is often quite important that you ask questions to help you to understand one’s experiences and background. This is the intersection of intentionality and awareness
overall multicultural approah helps us to be better and effective helpers by prompting us to:
- Examine our own beliefs, attitudes, and biases as they relate to diverse groups
- Discuss diversity at an institutional level
- View clients as individuals AND as members of diverse groups
Having all of us become culturally aware of our own values, biases and assumptions about human behavior
