I had a lot of Counselling myself in early 2000s which was really helpful for me and lead to me wanting to be a Counsellor myself.  Whereas the space to be and explore is incredibly helpful as is getting insight about why you are the way you are it is ultimately action towards the vision which helps you to make progress.

It’s interesting to study Counselling and Psychology as I have and see ideas thrown around such people moving towards being more ‘fully functioning’ or ‘self actualising’.  More Psychoanalytic therapy like Freud keeps diving into the past and our primary relationships and different conflicts we may feel inside.

I learned first hand though from this the potential to keep going around in loops and searching and searching for something and maybe even reinforcing an idea that there is in fact something wrong.

When I worked in the UK I worked for the NHS where their were limited sessions to help people. 8 sessions dedicated to help someone work through something around depression or grief worked wonders.  I have clients now where we have real Counselling conversations where we hold space and take an edge off then they move on.  There’s great work to be done here.

It was later on though I wondered when people keep trying to improve themselves does pure Counselling work.  I felt that this wasn’t the case.

There’s only a certain amount of insight and information about yourself you can keep getting and a point where it can just become counterproductive and not create movement at all.

I wanted to find an overall way of working to help people through a whole journey.  Not just healing the pain but moving towards what Carl Rogers would call being more ‘fully functioning’.  I realised it was more Coaching which gave this which I practiced later.

Having the insight about why we are the way we are helps to free us from the past.  When we get to this point it can be highly beneficial to really look at accountability.  What are we actually doing from one session to the next and what’s the thing we’re really creating for ourselves.  

Getting a real focus at this point is where the real fun begins.
I’m always flexible with clients as we keep working and we can keep clearly identifying without judgement whether we are in a more Counselling or a more Coaching type of conversation.  The insight is useful but it’s ultimately the repeating action over and over and being accountable for this which is truly going to create the new canvas and a life we want more based on our integrity.

I find it’s typically a dance between anchoring our own world mixed with the necessary conversations (sometimes challenging) to take place with other people.  Really getting locked in some idea of what you may do between one session and the next and maybe even some items of accountability can work wonders to get traction in sessions.

Just knowing the session is coming up can give the motivation to get stuck in and take the needed action to stop us getting lost in analysis paralysis and just getting more and more insight.