Assessing your counseling motivations

When starting out as a listening helper, you may only be aware of your surface reasons for becoming one. Perhaps you find that others think you easy to talk to, or maybe they seek you out to ask your advice. Being helpful can be personally rewarding, giving you an internal glow. Below this, however, you may have some other powerful motivations that can distract you from careful listening. The factors that drive you to be a listening helper can be double-edged – positive or negative, dependent on the particular circumstances and also on your own self-awareness.
Take a little time to consider as honestly as you can the following questions to help you start to focus on some of the issues that may get in the way of listening, including what makes you want to take on this role:

• How did you decide to be a listening helper?
• Why do you want to be a listening helper?
• What is it that you want to give?
• What do you want to receive from people you help?
• What do you think you’ll get from being a listening helper?
• What are your expectations of anyone you might help?
• With what emotions are you comfortable?
• What emotions in yourself or in others give you trouble?
• How will you deal with the speaker’s feelings towards you?
• How will you handle your feelings towards those you help?

Revisit these questions when you finish this chapter, and later when you’ve found out more about the processes involved in using counselling skills. One theory about why people want to be listening helpers (and also to engage in intimate relationships) is to heal their own emotional wounds. The eminent American psychologist Carl Rogers suggested that we’re all, to a greater or lesser extent, prevented from being fully ourselves by conditions of worth that others impose on us: We conform to the expectations of others, rather than being truly ourselves, in order to feel of worth. However, we also have an actualising tendency, or drive towards growth. Becoming more able to be yourself through this growth enables you to be a better listener because you’re more able to accept others when you’re better able to accept yourself.