Professional Memberships and Continuous Professional and Personal Development for Counsellors

Professional Memberships

Do ensure that you keep up your membership(s) to professional bodies. Not only will this give your clients confidence in you (and may result in a larger number of clients – some will wish to know such things before committing their time and money to you), but they will keep you in touch with up-to-date research, training courses and other professional issues that are vital if you’re to keep a high level of professional competence.

Martin et al (1992) refers to accreditation as “A benchmark and a burden”. You’ll need to weigh these two views if you have not yet taken the route to accreditation, and consider if the time and effort involved will enable you to increase and expand your practice.

Continuous Professional Development

This is now a “given” for anyone belonging to any professional body. Firstly, do ensure that you complete the number of development hours required by the professional body you belong to, to ensure that your accreditations and registrations stay up to date.

More importantly, however, if you wish to develop as a therapist, you’ll need to constantly expand your own personal theoretical knowledge of your subject. Read, use the internet, use peer group discussions, attend courses and workshops. Develop a thirst for knowledge so that you really enjoy your on-going learning, rather than seeing it as a necessary chore.

Personal Development

There is a further area of personal development that is vital to the success of your private practice. This really is simply, your own persona. The development of warmth, empathy, genuineness, patience, intelligent interest and a desire to truly understand your client and his difficulties will stand you in as good, if not better, stead than all the theoretical knowledge (and even possibly, previous clinical experience) that you have under your belt. It is an observation that, in pressurised agency environments, clients themselves can be less demanding – they are desperately grateful to receive any help at all.

Private practice is different. Clients ask for the absolute best from you at all times, and you cannot afford to give anything less than this. This means not just being the cleverest theorist in the world (although of course that is important), but having the ability to establish a strong personal relationship of real quality with the client. Unlike the agency clients, who usually have little choice in who they see, the private client does have choices, and if you don’t work on this side of your therapy skills, you’ll lose clients to therapists who do possess – and develop – this quality.

Also important, although rarely raised as a discussion issue, is how you dress and present yourself physically. If your office is in your home, you may well see this as an opportunity to adopt a very casual dress code. Think hard about this. What image do you want to present to your clients? You may wish to dress differently according to the type of client you have. It is actually a good idea for your own dress code to reflect that of the individual client (although I’m obviously not suggesting you keep flying upstairs to peruse your wardrobe every time a new client walks in). At the very least, ensure that you look neat, clean and tidy. Much research shows that clients are most comfortable where the therapist is dressed in a way that they see as appropriate to the meeting, and in line with their own dress code.

And now I’d like to invite you to claim your free E-Course “How to Develop your Counselling Practice” available at http://www.counsellingpracticematters.com

Gladeana McMahon is listed as one of the UK’s Top Twenty Therapists by the Evening Standard. An innovator, Gladeana is also one of the UK founders of Cognitive Behavioural Coaching and an internationally published author with over 20 books of a popular and academic nature on coaching and counselling to her name.

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