Counselling Microskills: Offering Affirmations
Channel: Sandra Collins
Date: 2021-04-30

The counselling microskill of offering affirmations involves providing specific, positive, genuine, and tangible feedback to the client, including highlighting motivation, successes, and strengths (e.g., "I notice that before you met with your boss, you took the time to breathe and ground yourself"). The purposes of this microskill are to foreground and reinforce client strengths and competencies, to help build client self-efficacy, to foster client self-compassion, and to communicate empathy. Offering affirmations is different from engaging in cheerleading, which does not provide clients with specific feedback. An example of cheerleading is provided in this video: https://youtu.be/QyJ2ZyDAN5U.

 You can view other skills videos through my Counselling Microskills and Techniques playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZkRzHU4Rjb00X5yz475ITmTzPepFhXEm.

For more counselling resources, please subscribe to my YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/c/SandraCollinsDr or check out my counselling ebooks at https://counsellingconcepts.ca/.

Sandra Collins, PhD
https://drsandracollins.com/

© Sandra Collins, 2021, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/