BY FAITH POLLARD
EDITED BY RYAN BIGELOW
I remember being young and wondering “why is this kid mean and that kid nice?” or “how are my sister and I both girls, close in age, born to the same parents, raised in the same household, and still so incredibly different?”
The older I got, the more questions I asked. I realized I wanted to study this type of thing for a career and learn to service those who need help.
This led me to where I am today: a senior, psychology and corporate communication double major, passionate about counseling psychology, and trying to get into any graduate program that will accept me.
I am beginning to picture my future as a professional counselor and am looking at how different counseling techniques relate to interpersonal communication. While not everyone plans to go into counseling, these techniques are useful to college students.
Many students, myself included, have found deeper friendships in college than ever before. We also find ourselves making bigger decisions than ever before. So when friends go to you for advice, they need you to be attentive and to respond appropriately.
There is also a stigma surrounding mental health in America. Strides are being made to diminish it, but many are still uncomfortable discussing mental illness due to the enormous guilt they feel about it.
Therefore appropriately discussing mental health – the same as we would any physical illness – is an invaluable trait for college students.
Lichtenberg and Tracy at the University of Kansas conducted a study on how a counselor’s communication style impacts a client’s response.
The four response styles they analyzed were hostile-dominant, hostile-submissive, friendly-dominant, and friendly-submissive.
Hostile-dominant counselors are rude, overbearing and take control of the conversation while hostile-submissive counselors let the client control the conversation. Friendly-dominant counselors are open and understanding, but also control the conversation. Friendly-submissive counselors are open, understanding and let the client lead the conversation.
Complimentary (meaning behaviors that work well together) behaviors included matching friendly or hostile responses. Anti-complimentary (meaning behaviors that do not work well together) had conflicting hostile and friendly responses.
They found two general rules/strategies in the counseling setting:
- If the therapist presented a friendly-submissive behavior, the client would present a complimentary, friendly-dominant response.
- If the therapist presented hostile-dominant behavior, the client would present an anti-complementary, friendly-dominant response.
The effect of a counselor’s communication on their clients can be applied to everyday conversation when we view ourselves as the counselors and our peers as the clients.
We can use counseling techniques to give advice to friends, and in a university setting, to enhance the advising process or professor-student conferences. When properly utilized, these strategies help build trust, confidence, and enhance your interpersonal relationships.
The content of your message is equally as important to examine as the communication style.
Another study, conducted by H. Z. Waring in 2007, looked at different accounts of advice giving – everything from grammar changes to life changes.
He looked at four types of advice: pre-advice, immediately post-advice, post-problematic uptake, and post-acceptance. He also examined the effects of face-saving and face-threatening advice and found face-saving to be most evident prior to pre-advice.
Face threats do, however, play a role in all four types of advice giving.
Therefore it is important to self-monitor when giving advice. Advice is inherently face-threatening and sometimes hard to give, but by knowing effective face-saving techniques we can become far better advice-givers.
Your friends will appreciate if you give advice gently as opposed to brashly, so remember to give advice in a way that you would want that advice given to you. This includes building up to what you have to say; no one wants advice thrown at them!
Knowing yourself and your audience is paramount in advice giving and counseling. By knowing what to say, how to say it, how to listen, and how to respond, you more effectively help others gain insight. I have adopted these strategies into my own life and see the benefits to taking advice from these studies.