A successful counselor needs many types of skills. It’s a multi-faceted job. Most of us didn’t sign up to learn Paperwork Compliance 101, but it’s a key treatment skill. In fact, sometimes we spend so much time on treatment skills and job growth skills and supervisor/supervisee management skills that it seems we have little time left to develop our counseling skills.
But counseling skills is the reason most of us chose this job. We want to work with clients, we want to provide the help and resources they need to start successfully down the path to lifetime recovery.
We develop counseling skills based on experience, and on who we are, and on our own recovery (if we’re recovering,) and always on learning. It’s a constant process. Recovery Systems Institute’s counseling skills resources are here to help. Some (maybe most) of this will be old stuff to you–but a refresher or a view from another perspective never hurts. And maybe you’ll find an idea or two that you can put to use doing what you do best: Getting the suffering alcoholic or drug addict safely through that doorway to lifetime recovery.
You can see all our articles on counseling skills in this feed.
