Counselling can be used as a process of self development leading to better understanding of yourself, your thoughts feelings and goals.
What is self development?
Self development is quite self explanatory, it means making a conscious effort to develop yourself. It is often used to signify improving you talents, skills and employability. In these instances it looks at goals what you want to achieve and the steps to achieving them. The focus of self development here is external such as I want to be more employable, I want to earn more, save more money, I want to travel, I want to have a beach body and I want a relationship.
The role of Counselling in Personal Development
To use counselling as a form of personal development, the focus in on you internally, your thoughts, feelings and ideas. Counselling helps you to develop self awareness and self understanding. It can help you to be clear about your values and who you really are, rather than perhaps the false ideas the other people gave you about who they decided you were. You can explore:
- your behaviours, why you do the things you do, why you behave in certain ways
- and reframe negative thoughts and ideas
- understand relationship dynamics
- explore the role you have played in the story you were given
- your values
- and move past blocks
- and develop communication skills.
Counselling encourages and supports your autonomy. Enabling you to make decisions and changes with your new understanding. It can make achieving goals easier, when you understand what you really want and how you might go about achieving that.
An example of how counselling would help your personal development
For example, you might have been told that you need to be more assertive at work in order to get promoted or be recognised as a valued member of the team. You might even have taken some workshops or courses on being assertive, and although you enjoyed them, it doesn’t seem to stick and you feel uncomfortable trying to be something that you’re not. Counselling can help you to discover why you don’t feel entitled to be assertive. This could be routed in past experiences, where each time you tried to ask for help or for your needs to be met you were ignored or abused. We can investigate the dynamics of difficult relationships, how to recognise the roles people play and how you want to work with that.
Enabling you to set boundaries and improve your communication skills and to know that you can express yourself clearly, put your ideas out there and ask for your needs to be met.
Counselling supports you in new understanding, which gives you new choices, so making changes feels easier and more natural. In the assertiveness example above, it is much easier to ask for what you want when you know that it is OK to do so, and you understand the other persons response and what means about who they are and the role they are playing. It is much easier to be assertive when it feels authentic, counselling puts the power back in your hands.
In summary counselling helps you to develop yourself understanding and when you develop this, it ripples out into all aspects of your life, your self confidence, your work, your friendships and relationships.
Check out my available counselling appointments.
If you’re wondering whether counselling feels right for you, my main counselling page offers an overview of how I work and what you can expect from counselling sessions in Plymouth.