Assignment Task

Reflection is a critical component in one’s professional and personal life. It provides a sense of meaning to experiences, an opportunity to put these experiences into perspective, and under review and provides an opportunity to change how you see, understand and experience situations. The reflective process involves reflective thinking and critical thinking and is a personal response to experiences and new information. It is important to develop our ability to reflect to inform and develop our helping role. Understanding how this process works and how we learn can help us appreciate how important the use of reflection is to our learning. Reflective writing flows from this process of reflection and is a way of exploring your learning, in identifying your knowledge gaps and areas for improvement and serves as a channel for communicating your response to thoughts, and feelings but more importantly, it serves to provide clarity and a better understanding of what you are learning.

The students’ ability to evaluate and express their thoughts and opinions about the content, in offering a unique and independent yet related view will be assessed. The student’s ability to demonstrate their understanding of the content as part of their learning and development process will further be assessed.

Instructions:

For this assignment, you are required to schedule a counselling session with a qualified counsellor to discuss any issue, difficulty or challenge of your choice. During your counselling session/s, take note of your thoughts, emotions and behaviour.

After your counselling session/s, you will need to write a reflective essay that addresses the following points:

1. Reflect on your experience of seeking and accessing a counselling service. Discuss how easy or challenging it was to access counselling and how you experienced the process of counselling.

2. Reflect on how you experienced being a client. Discuss what you found challenging throughout the process and what you found beneficial about the counselling process. Also, reflect on what made you feel comfortable or uncomfortable and how uncomfortable moments could be addressed with clients in future counselling spaces.

3. Discuss the approach to counselling that your counsellor adopted. Was this approach suitable? Explain why or why not. Also, reflect on what approach you feel you would like to adopt after the counselling experience.

4. Discuss what you would do differently as a counsellor, based on your research. Support
your stance with literature-based evidence.