Counseling Skills Training

Origins and Development of Skills

The identification of the first microskill of attending behavior is illustrative of the theory and practice orientation of the counseling skills approach. In 1966, video was new to the helping profession and few had ideas on how to use this new medium. Allen Ivey and Weston Morrill asked a volunteer “counselor trainee” to conduct a videotaped interview. Fortunately, the trainee was ineffective and the team review of the video revealed that the beginning counselor (1) failed to maintain eye contact, (2) moved her hands and legs nervously, (3) had a tense vocal tone, and (4) awkwardly changed topics and ended up talking about herself. The opposite of these four behaviors were named attending behavior, now a generic part of the language of the helping field. The trainee was returned to the interviewing room with feedback and then conducted a vastly improved session with another client. Furthermore, 2 days later the trainee commented joyously that she had attended to her husband and that they had enjoyed a “beautiful weekend.” The next skill to be identified was the skill of reflection of feeling (“You feel… because …”), and other listening and influencing skills soon followed. These [Page 537]first identified counseling skills became the basis of social skills training. Skills training in communication is often the basis for management training, nutrition counseling, AIDS peer counseling, medical interviewing, and many other types of counseling. From 1968 to 1970 Ivey demonstrated the effectiveness of teaching hospitalized patients basic communication skills. Patients who had been in a Veteran's Administration (VA) hospital for years were successfully trained and released to the community without further therapy.

Microcounseling instruction in each skill is followed by practice sessions with feedback and a focus on generalization of each to the “real world” of interviewing practice.

Critical to this entire process is the identification of observable, countable behavioral skills that are verifiable and that produce predictable results in client verbal and nonverbal behavior. B. F Skinner lauded the microcounseling approach as indicative of how reinforcement patterns could affect the counseling and therapy process, while humanistically-oriented counselors decried the scientific orientation of the system.

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