Critical Analysis: Reflective Practice in Counselling and Theory

This essay examines the critical role of reflective practice in the professional life of counselors. It defines reflective practice as a method for counselors to study their own experiences to improve their work, bridging the gap between theory and practice. The essay highlights key traits for successful counselors, such as communication, empathy, and problem-solving skills, and argues that reflection helps counselors identify and develop these attributes. It emphasizes the importance of self-awareness, flexibility, and continuous learning through reflection, enabling counselors to adapt to diverse client needs and challenging situations. The essay concludes that reflective practices empower counselors to identify strengths and weaknesses, provide better patient care, and evolve as expert healthcare providers by integrating innovative approaches into their practice.

Running head: REFLECTION
REFLECTION
Name of the student:
Name of the university:
Author note:

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Reflective practice can be explained as the ways of studying one’s own experiences for
improvement of the ways by which he or she works. It is found to be useful for the healthcare
professionals who want to be engaged in lifelong learning throughout their lifetime. Studies are
of the opinion that when individuals engage in reflective practices, they can successfully help in
improving the quality of care they provide to their clients and also close the gap that exists
between the theories and the practices (Bond, 2015). Reflection mainly helps individuals in
identifying the various weakness and strengths that they possess and how they can work more on
the attributes to become an expert healthcare professional in their career. This assignment would
mainly shed light on the facts that would establish reflective practice as a critical component for
the professional lives and how it helps individuals to become experts for their future.
A counselor can be referred to as the healthcare provider who is concerned with the
profession of providing advice on the different aspects to their clients like that of academic
matters, personal relationships, various forms of dilemmas in life as well as vocational issues.
They are mainly licensed mental health professionals who have the ability to provide successful
assessment as well as diagnosis and even counseling to various types of people facing varieties
of life stresses as well as psychological problems (Wosket, 2016). They are also seen to help
people with different types of relationship issues, job stress, and family issues. Mental health
issues like depression and other challenging issues. Studies are of the opinion that in order to be
a successful counselor, certain important traits are important to provide person-centered care.
These are communication skills, acceptance and being non-judgmental, flexibility, empathy,
problem-solving skills, rapport-building skills, self awareness and multi-cultural competence
(Vetere et al., 2016). It is very important for such professionals to develop such attributes to
provide high quality care to clients. However, not all professionals have all the attributes to a

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sufficient extent but they might not be aware of the lack of competencies they have. In such
areas, reflection acts as one of the best methods to make counselors aware of the attributes they
lack and then develop action plans to work on them to achieve them for their profession.
Studies are of the opinion that reflective practice act as one of the significant tools in
practice-based professional learning settings (Reid & West, 2016). With the help of this medium,
professionals would be able to learn from their own experiences rather than from the different
types of formal learning. It is one of the best tools for personal development as well helping
professional to identify whether the different personal attributes required for being a counselor
are present or not. Studies have found out that a counselor who reflects throughout his or her
practices are not only looking back on the different past events and the actions but they are also
taking conscious look at the emotions, actions, experiences as well as responses and then
utilizing such information for adding his or her existing knowledge base and also to reach
successfully to a higher level of understanding (Geldard et al., 2017)
One of the reasons why reflection is important for counseling professionals is that it helps
in building self-awareness. This skill can be described as the ability in looking within and
identifying own unmet physiological needs and the desires like that of the need of intimacy or to
become professionally competent or others. This ability might prevent the issues of the
counselors from affecting as well as conflicting with those of the clients. This has a major impact
on the counselor’s effectiveness (Arthur, 2016). Reflective practices help individuals with the
time where they can ask themselves important questions by which they can gain better strengths,
emotions, weakness as well as the driving factors. Once the counselors get to understand the
important aspects of self during reflection, they can become better able to adapt as well as to

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changing situations and different tough circumstances and prevent their own emotions to disrupt
or act as barriers in quality care services.
Counselors need to have problem solving skills. This helps them to be better able to
provide help their clients to successfully identify as well as make changes for different negative
thought patterns and other types of harmful behaviors which might be contributing to their
issues. Another important skill of the counselors are flexibilities where they would need to have
the ability in adapting and changing the ways they respond to meet the needs of the clients in
diverse an unique situations in place of following a rigid and predetermined treatment paths.
Reflection helps counselors to identify whether the experiences and events that they have gone
though had helped them to exhibit high problems solving skills as well as flexibilities and
whether their patients have been benefited. Researchers are of the opinion that life of every
professional is a cycle of doing and producing where they need to maximize their productivity
and minimize the time spent through expert attributes (Bor & Watts, 2016). Therefore, when
individuals are always acting and moving from one thing to next, sometimes they might forget to
stop and think. Refection allows them the time to think about the incidents, the attributes, the
exhibited skills, the success levels, the failures and others. Taking time to think also allows
professionals to emerge and counter the risk of being stagnant and become more flexible. This
helps in evolving of the counselors with new ideas and continuous changes that might help to
match the expectations of various client with unique demands and help in satisfying clients.
From the above discussion, it has been seen that reflective practices act as one of the
tools in helping counselors identify their strengths and weakness and to provide best care to
patient by development of such attributes. It also acts as the best medium that helps in lifelong
learning of the counselors providing them the scope of evolving as an expert healthcare provider.

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It helps them to develop self-awareness and become emotionally strong as well. Personal
attributes, hen reflected upon, helps counselors to interact better with clients and handle their
varied demands with expertise. Reflection ensures help individuals to evolve with better ideas
and innovative approaches and this make them successful counselors.

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References:
Arthur, N. (2016). Constructivist approaches to career counselling: A culture-infused
perspective. In Career Counselling (pp. 72-82). Routledge.
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781317436966/chapters/10.4324/978131569359
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Bond, T. (2015). Standards and ethics for counselling in action. Sage.
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Reid, H., & West, L. (2016). Negotiating professional and personal biographies in a liquid world:
creating space for reflexive innovation in career counselling. British Journal of Guidance
& Counselling, 44(5), 562-575. https://doi.org/10.1080/03069885.2016.1145014
Vetere, A., & Stratton, P. (2016). Interacting selves: Systemic solutions for personal and
professional development in counselling and psychotherapy. Routledge.
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Wosket, V. (2016). The therapeutic use of self: Counselling practice, research and supervision.
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