Thinker, Feeler, Doer

Went for my second supervision (meaning I counsel someone under the watchful eyes of an experienced counselor). Argh......with feedback from first session, I tried to avoid the same mistakes second time round on a different client. Ha again backfired. See the first time I was told not to rush the client towards a goal when the client was not ready and just wanted to express her feelings. So this round I just paced the client and let her talk and reflect, talk and reflect moving in circles. At the end of the session the supervisor asked me whether I knew what the client wanted out of the counseling session? Huh? In my heart I said "I thought you told me I can not rush the client? Oh man you really confused me!"

Went home and over dinner shared about how my supervisor really confused me. My son just remarked "maybe circumstances are different ". That set me thinking. Counseling is of course no exact science. You can not apply a set of procedures throughout although you learn to give appropriate responses (externalised, personalised etc), try to help client see blind spot and how their thinking affects them; and various skills to guide clients to explore, understand and take actions. However fundamentally, each person is unique and the same set of intervention strategy can not be applied to another person. So a counselor needs to be intuitive and creative.
Not easy hhuh.

But what may help is to try and decipher whether the person is more of a thinking, feeling or doing person. So whilst the client for the first supervision is a feeling person, the client for the second supervision is a thinking person, hence I should not have led her round and round but should have gotten her to think what she really wanted.

Basically a thinker is one who analyses a lot but may risk ignoring his feelings and perhaps not acting. A feeler relies on emotions and is more subjective in his decision making process hence risking insufficient analysis and procrastinating as well. The doer is driven by the need to act and is not burdened by too much analysis and feeling. However he runs the risk of ignoring his feelings and not rationalising. We have all these in us, but one aspect may be more predominant. Hence understanding the type that the client belongs to may help the counselor find the open door to the client faster.