International interviewing and counseling 9th ivey chapter 03

Intentional Interviewing and Counseling:
Facilitating Client Development in a
Multicultural Society
9th Edition

Allen E. Ivey

Mary Bradford Ivey

Carlos P. Zalaquett

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Chapter 3

Attending
and Empathy Skills

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Chapter Goals and Competency Objectives (slide 1 of 2)
Awareness and Knowledge

▲Develop a solid understanding of how attending behavior, attention, and selective
attention form the basis for all counseling and therapy.

▲Understand how basics of neuroscience explain and expand the importance of
attention.

▲Learn how teaching microskills of listening is a useful therapeutic strategy.

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Chapter Goals and Competency Objectives (slide 2 of 2)
Skills and Action

▲ Increase your skill in listening to clients, and communicate that interest.
▲ Establish an empathic relationship with your clients.
▲ Adapt your attending patterns to the needs of varying individual and cultural styles of listening and talking.
▲ Develop recovery skills that you can use when you are lost or confused in the session. Even the most
advanced professional doesn’t always know what is happening. When you don’t know what to do, attend!

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Introduction: Attending Behavior: The Foundation Skill of Listening (slide
1 of 4)

▲ Attending behavior is supporting your client with individually and culturally appropriate verbal
following, visuals, vocal quality, and body language/facial expression.

▲ Listening is the core skill of attending behavior and is central to developing relationships and
making real contact with clients.

▲ Listening is more than hearing.

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Introduction: Attending Behavior: The Foundation Skill of Listening (slide
2 of 4)

▲One way to understand good quality listening is to experience the opposite—poor
listening.

 Find a partner to role-play a session.
 Spend 3 minutes role-playing a poor and ineffective listener.
 After the role-play session, ask the “client” how he or she felt “inside” or emotionally when the
“counselor” did not listen.

 If no partner is available, think of a specific time when you felt that you were not heard.

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Introduction: Attending Behavior: The Foundation Skill of Listening (slide
3 of 4)

▲ When you use the microskills, you can anticipate how a client is likely to respond.
▲ Attending behavior has predictable results in conversations with clients.
▲ These predictions are never perfect, but research has shown we can generally expect specific
results from various types of helping interventions (Daniels, 2010).

▲ If your first attempt at listening is not received well, you can intentionally flex and use a
different skill.

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Introduction: Attending Behavior: The Foundation Skill of Listening (slide
4 of 4)

Attending Behavior: Support your client with

Anticipated Result: Clients will talk more freely and

individually and culturally appropriate visuals,

respond openly, particularly about topics to which

vocal quality, verbal tracking, and body

attention is given. Depending on the individual

language, including facial expression.

client and culture, eye contact, vocal tone,
completeness of story, and body language will
vary.

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Awareness, Knowledge, and Skills of Attending Behavior and Empathy
Skills

▲ Attention is the connective force of conversations and empathic understanding.
▲ We are touched when it is present.

▲

We know when someone is not attending to us.

▲ Attending behavior is the first and most critical skill of listening.
 It is a necessary part of all interviewing, counseling, and psychotherapy.
▲ Sometimes listening carefully is enough to produce change.

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3 V’s + B (slide 1 of 4)
▲

To communicate that you are
listening or attending to the client,

Visual / Eye Contact

you need the following:

Vocal Qualities

3 V’s+B

Verbal Tracking

Body Language

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3 V’s + B (slide 2 of 4)
▲ “3 V’s + B”
1.

Visual/eye contact. Look at people when you speak to them.

2.

Vocal qualities. Communicate warmth and interest with your voice.

3.

Verbal tracking. Track the client’s story. Don’t change the subject; stay with the client’s
topic.

4.

Body language/facial expression. Be yourself: authenticity is essential to building trust.

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3 V’s + B (slide 3 of 4)
▲ The 3 V’s + B reduce counselor talk time and provide clients with an opportunity to tell detailed
stories.

▲ Increase awareness of clients’ attending patterns.


Note clients’ patterns of eye contact, changing vocal tone, body language, and topics to which your clients
attend and those they avoid.



Note individual and cultural differences in attending.

▲ Attending behavior and listening are essential for human communication, but we need to be
prepared for and expect individual and cultural differences.

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3 V’s + B (slide 4 of 4)

▲Listen before you leap!
▲Avoid trying to solve clients’ difficulties too soon.
▲Clients developed their concerns over time.
▲It is critical that you slow down, relax, and attend to clients’ stories.
▲Use the 3 V’s + B to understand clients’ concerns and build rapport.

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Visual/Eye Contact

▲Observe cultural differences in appropriate amounts of eye contact.
▲Maintain and break eye contact as needed for specific results.
▲Observe clients’ pupils for dilation.

▲Use specific body language to achieve desired results.

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Vocal Qualities: Tone and Speech Rate

▲ Changes in pitch and volume, speech breaks and hesitations, and speech rate can convey your
emotional reactions to the client.

▲ Verbal underlining: the key words a person underlines by means of volume and emphasis.


Expect some significant things to be said more softly.



Expect a lower volume when a client is talking about difficult issues.



Match vocal tone to client’s in these cases.

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Accents

▲What are your reactions to the following accents: Australian, British English,
Canadian, French, Pakistani, Castilian Spanish, New England, Southern United

States?

▲Avoid stereotyping people with accents different from yours.

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Body Language: Attentive and Authentic

▲Like eye contact, body language patterns differ according to culture.
▲Maintain culturally appropriate distance.
▲Note client’s movements in relation to you.
▲Note your own body language patterns in the session.
▲Maintain authenticity in the client relationship.

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Verbals: Following the Client or Changing the Topic

▲ Verbal tracking is staying with your client’s topic to encourage full elaboration of the narrative.
▲ Selective Attention


Selective attention is central to interviewing, counseling, and psychotherapy.



Clients will talk about what counselors are willing to hear.



How you attend determines the length of the session and whether the client will return.



Observe the selective attention patterns of both you and your clients. What do your clients focus on? What
topics do they seem to avoid? Ask yourself the same questions. .

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The Value of Redirecting Attention

▲ There are times when it is inappropriate to attend to client statements.


For example, a client may talk insistently about the same topic over and over again.

▲ Through failure to maintain eye contact, subtle shifts in posture and vocal tone, and deliberate
jumps to more positive topics, you can facilitate the interview process.

▲ Redirect the conversation to focus on positive assets.

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The Usefulness of Silence

▲Sometimes the most useful thing you can do is to support your client

silently.

▲Search for a natural break in the client’s speech and attend appropriately.
▲The auditory cortex in the brain remains active when you are attending to
silence.

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Talk Time

▲Clients can’t talk while you do.
▲Review your sessions for talk time.
 Who talks more, you or your client?


With adults: Client > Counselor.

–

With less verbal clients or children, you may expect: Client < Counselor.

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Training as Treatment: Social Skills, Psychoeducation, and Attending Behavior

▲ Social skills training is training in a specific set of psychoeducational strategies oriented toward
teaching clients an array of interpersonal skills and behaviors.



These skills include a wide range of behaviors, such as listening, dating behaviors, drug refusal skills,
assertiveness, mediation, and job interviewing procedures.

▲ Virtually all interpersonal actions can be taught through social skills training.
▲ Training as treatment is a term that summarizes the method and goal of social skills training.
▲ Implications for your practice: Many clients can benefit from training and education in listening
skills.

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Empathy: Awareness, Knowledge, and Skills (slide 1 of 3)

Empathy: Experiencing the client’s world and story

Anticipated Result: Clients will feel understood and be

as if you were that client; understanding his or

more engaged in exploring their issues. Empathy

her key issues and expressing them

is best assessed by a client’s reaction to a

accurately, without adding your own thoughts,

statement and his or her ability to continue the

feelings, or meanings. This requires attending

discussion in more depth and, eventually, with

and observation skills plus using the important

better self-understanding.

key words of the client while distilling and
shortening the main ideas.

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Empathy: Awareness, Knowledge, and Skills (slide 2 of 3)

▲ Subtractive empathy: Counselor’s responses give back less or distort what the client has said.
▲ Basic empathy: Counselor’s responses are roughly interchangeable with those of the client.
▲ Additive empathy: Counselor’s responses add to or link to something the client has said earlier, or
a response may be a congruent idea or frame of reference that helps the client see a new
perspective.

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Empathy: Awareness, Knowledge, and Skills (slide 3 of 3)

▲ This 3-point scale is often expanded for classifying and rating the quality of empathy shown in a
session:

Level

1

2

Subtractive

Interchangeable
(Basic)

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3

Additive