ATTENDING BEHAVIOUR

Attending is the behavioural aspect of building rapport. When a

counsellor first meets with a client, they must indicate to the client
that they are interested in listening to them and helping them.
Through attending, the counsellor is able to encourage the client to
talk and open up about their issues. Attending behavior, essential
to an empathic relationship, is defined as supporting your
client with individually and culturally appropriate verbal
following, visuals, vocal quality,
and body language. Listening is the central skill of attending
behavior and is core to developing
a relationship and making real contact with our clients.Listening
is more than hearing or seeing. Attending behavior will have
predictable results in client conversation. When you use each
of the microskills, you can anticipate how the client is likely to
respond.

HISTORY OF ATTENDING BEHAVIOUR

Th e attending behavior concepts above were fi rst introduced

to the helping fi eld by Ivey,
Normington, Miller, Morrill, and Haase (1968). Cultural
variations in microskills usage were
first identified as central to the model by Allen Ivey, THROUGH
HIS DIFFERENT UNDERSTANDING OF THE CULTURES ,
THE ASPECT OF MULTICULTURALISM PLAYS HUGE
ROLE IN USING THE MICRO SKILLS LIKE THAT OF smiling,
listening, and a respectful and understanding vocal tone are all
things that help us work
through cultural differences.

SIGNIFICANCE OF ATTENDING BEHAVIOUR

 Developing a relationship and making real contact.
 Makes a difference in the session.
 Communicate our empathy and understanding.
  Behavioral roots to the working alliance and a good
counseling relationship.

To communicate that you are indeed listening or attending to

the client, you need the
following “three V’s 1 B”:*
1. Visual/eye contact. Look at people when you speak to them.
Clients often tend to look away when thinking carefullyor
discussing topics that particularly distress them. Through
breaks in eye
contact or visual fixation, vocal tone, and body shifts,
counselors indicate to their clients
whether the current discussion topic is comfortable for them.
Cultural differences in eye contact abound. Direct eye contact
is considered a sign
of interest in European North American middle-class culture.
However, even here people
often maintain more eye contact while listening and less while
talking. Furthermore, if a
client from any cultural group is uncomfortable talking about a
topic, it is probably better
to avoid too much direct eye contact.

2. Vocal qualities. Communicate warmth and interest with your

voice. Your voice is an instrument that communicates much of
the feeling you have about yourself
or about the client and what the client is talking about. Changes
in pitch, volume, and
speech rate, as well as breaks and hesitations, convey the
same things as the nature of your
eye contact. VerbaL underlining also plays a very crucial role ,
they give emphasis over few words by louder volume and
increased vocal emphasis to certain words
and short phrases. The key words a person underlines by
means of
volume and emphasis are often concepts of particular
importance. At the same time, expect
some especially significant things to be said more softly
.Accents plays a major role ,as different cultures and
demographic people talking in their own ways which can cause
biased and stereotypical understanding which must be avoided.
3. Verbal tracking. Track the client’s story. Don’t change the
subject; stay with the client’s
topic.
Verbal tracking is staying with your client’s topic to encourage
full elaboration of the narrative.
Just as people make sudden shifts in nonverbal
communication, they change topics
when they aren’t comfortable. Verbal tracking is especially helpful to both the beginning
counselor and the experienced
therapist who is lost or puzzled about what to say next in response to a client.
Selective attention : Selective attention is central to counseling and
psychotherapy. Clients tend to talk about what counselors are willing to hear. Focusing on one
stimuli/topic, when multiple stimuli/topics are available.
The Value of Redirecting Attention :
There are times when it may be inappropriate to attend to the here and now of client statements.
For example, a client may talk insistently about the same topic over and over again.
In such cases, intentional nonattending may be useful. Through failure to maintain eye
contact, subtle shifts in body posture, vocal tone, and deliberate jumps to more positive
topics, you can facilitate redirecting the session to other areas. Instead of actively changing
the topic, you may want to ask for details from the repeating story. We need to hear that client’s
story, but we also need to selectively attend and not pay attention to only the negative.
Clients grow from strengths. Redirect the conversation, and when you observe a strength, a
wellness habit (running, music), or a resource outside the individual that might be helpful,
focus on that positive asset.
The most skilled counselors and psychotherapists use attending skills to open and close
client talk, thus making the most effective use of limited time in the session.

The Usefulness of Silence ; Sometimes the most useful thing you can do as a helper is to
support your client silently. Your client may be in tears, and you may want to give
immediate support. However, sometimes the best support may be simply being with the
person and not saying a word. Of course, don’t follow the silence too long, search for a
natural break, and attend appropriately.
4. Body language. Be yourself—authenticity is essential to building trust. To show interest,
face clients squarely, lean slightly forward with an expressive face, and use encouraging
gestures. Especially critical, smile to show warmth and interest in the client.
What determines a comfortable interpersonal distance is influenced by multiple factors.
Hargie, Dickson, and Tourish (2004, p. 45) point out the following:
Gender: Women tend to feel more comfortable with closer distances than men.
Personality: Introverts need more distance than extraverts.
Age: Children and the young tend to adopt closer distances.

Empathy

Carl Rogers (1957, 1961) brought the importance of empathy to our attention. He made
it clear that that we need to listen carefully, enter the world of the client, and communicate
that we understand the client’s world as the client sees and experiences it. Putting yourself
“into another person’s shoes” or viewing the world “through someone else’s eyes and ears” is
another way to describe empathy. Rogers’s thinking led to extensive work by Charles Truax
(1961), who is recognized as the first person to measure levels of empathic understanding. He
developed a nine-point scale for rating level of empathic understanding (Truax, 1961). Robert
Carkhuff (1969), who originally partnered with Truax, developed a five-point scale. These scales
have been used widely in research and have practical applications for the session.
common current practice is to describe three types of empathic understanding

Subtractive empathy: Counselor responses give back to the client less than what the client
stated, and perhaps even distort what has been said. In this case, the listening or
influencing skills are used inappropriately.

Basic (interchangeable) empathy: Counselor responses are roughly interchangeable with

those of the client. The counselor is able to say back accurately what the client has said.
Skilled intentional competence with the basic listening sequence (see the later chapters
of this book) demonstrates basic empathy. You will find this the most common
counselor comment level in helping. Rogers pointed out that listening, by itself, is not
only necessary but sufficient to produce client change.

Additive empathy: Counselor responses may add something beyond what the client has
said. This may be adding a link to something the client has said earlier, or it may be
a congruent idea or frame of reference that helps the client see a new perspective.
Feedback and your own self-disclosure, used thoughtfully, can be additive.

Many other dimensions of empathic understanding will be explored throughout this

book. For the moment, recall the following points as central.
1. Aim to understand your clients’ experience and worldview in a nonjudgmental supportive
fashion as they present their story, thoughts, and emotions to you.
2. Seek to communicate that understanding to the client, but avoid mixing “your own
thing” in with what you say.

Empathy and Mirror Neurons Historically, counseling and therapy have advocated and
demonstrated the importance of empathy, but empathy has always been a somewhat vague
and sometimes controversial concept. Well-established findings from neuroscience have
changed our thinking. Empathy is identifiable by means of functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI)and other key technologies. Key to this process are mirror neurons, which
fire when a human or other primate acts and when they observe actions by another. Many
psychologists believe that mirror neurons are one of the most significant discoveries in recent
science.

Attending behaviour in challenging situation

Don’t be fooled by the apparent simplicity of the attending skills. Some beginning counselors
and psychotherapists may think that these skills are obvious and come naturally. They
may be anxious to move to the “hard stuff.” The more we work with beginning and experienced
counselors, the more we realize how difficult it is to master these skills. Yes, they can
be learned, but it takes time, commitment, and intentional and deliberate practice. You also may
have wondered how attending behavior can be useful if you plan to work
with challenging clients in schools, community mental health centers, or hospitals.