Helping Skills: Facilitating Exploration, Insight, and Action

This book is excellent if you are first beginning to learn helping skills in clinical psychology. The book is structured in a way to effectively teach the reader how to work with helping skills. Very easy to read and understand. Fantastic book! Highly recommended!

As the new semester has just begun, I have had limited exposure to this book, but what has already become apparent is the no-nonsense, easy way in which this text is written. I am a full-time student who has so much text book reading to do, so it is a real pleasure to have a required reading that is so straight forward while being also very imformative. I wish all my reading was this great.

This book leads the reader through a three stage model of helping: exploration, insight, and action. This book is incredibly well-balance between Rogerian, psychodynamic, and CBT skill sets. If you just pick up the book and read it may seem like it is simplistic; however, the high quality of the book is that it gives the readers several activities to practice the skills in the book. Things that seem easy, like restating what someone just said, become difficult when you try to do it in practice. If you follow along with the practices after each chapter you will see how the book is molding you to become a better listener and a better helper. This book is primarily used for counseling-type classes. However, this book would be useful for anyone that that talks to other people and wants the other person to feel comfortable.

I first used this book in my graduate program in a class for communication and leadership. This skills taught in this book are outstanding. Now, I plan to use the ideas from this book in my own career, as well as helping an undergraduate peer staff at a university learn the basic helping guidelines. This book is highly recommended.

We just completed a doctoral level seminar by using this book to guide process research. It's fabulous. While the book is certainly appropriate for teaching basic counseling/helping skills at the upper undergraduate and graduate levels, I also believe it has applicability for advanced practicum and research. Good work!