Skills to Support Discussion
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OARS
- These skills provide your core tools. Their selective use enables you to build up a partnership with the client and to guide the conversation.
- Learning to listen and provide reflections is crucial and takes practice and reflection on practice.
- Your most common response should be a reflection.
- Good reflections should increase the time spent talking by the client.
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Open questions
- Questions which do not invite one word answers:
- “What would you like us to talk about?”
- “How did you first start drinking?”
- “What would change in your life if you stopped smoking?”
- “How do you think that ......is related to .....?”
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Affirming
- Affirmations should be genuine and usually directed at something specific the client has done, or an appreciation of strengths or behaviours.
- “I can see that stopping smoking/making changes is important for you.”
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Reflecting
- Reflective statements restate the client’s comments using language that accurately clarifies and captures the meaning of what the client is saying.
- The inflection at the end of the reflection should be downward, otherwise it will sound like a question.
- Enables the client to amend or confirm what they have said.
- The practitioner can direct the conversation and focus by selectively choosing what to reflect.
- Simple reflections
- Rephrasing
- Slightly rephrases what has been said
- Complex reflections - paraphrasing/ reframing
- A more major rephrase, reflecting the meaning in what was said. Adds to and extends what was said.
- Can be a double-sided reflection if exploring ambivalence. The use of “and” rather than “but” can change resistance.
- Can amplify a reflection, in which the client is likely to take the opposite view.
- Reflection of feeling
- This is a deeper reflection which emphasises the emotional dimension of what has been said.
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Summarising
- In summary statements the practitioner selects several pieces of client information and combines them in a summary.
- Can be used to:
- Make a transition to another topic
- Invite more material
- Check accuracy
- Highlight ambivalence
- Lead into evocative questions and elicit change talk
- “What does this mean to you?”
- "How will you deal with this...?”
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