Listening Skills

The New Zealand Suicide Prevention Trust

Key To Hope Opening Doors To Recovery

Volunteer Counselors Listening Pamphlet

Our mission is to provide telephone and face to face counselling to those at risk of suicide, every hour of the day, without prejudice being non-judgemental, respecting their rights to privacy and confidentiality fostering self-esteem and self-worth providing support in the prevention of suicide.

The NZSPT is a multicultural organisation acknowledging the Treaty of Waitangi as a basis for partnership recognising the Te Whare Tapa Wha model of spiritual, mental, social and physical health and wellbeing of all ethnic races of people.

~~ Listening Skills ~~

The key to any counseling is your listening skills, which are used in each step of Suicide First Aid.

Listening Skills Steps

Introduction

Introduce yourself and state where you are from.

Ask the person their name if they have not given it.

Be friendly, smile, have a positive attitude.

The person will be in a stress situation so you need to help them to relax and be more open to interacting with you.

Open & closed questions

Use open questions that invite the person to talk about their situation, not just answer yes or no.

Allow person to respond.

Questions that involve what, when, how, where in their own words to describe feelings, events and situations are open questions. “What would you like to talk about?” Closed questions are ones that draw out short

finite answers like ‘yes’ or ‘no’ like “You’re feeling anxious aren’t you?” or “Who can help you with that?”

Minimal encouragers

Use sounds, words and actions to indicate you are listening and understanding what they are saying. Encouragers are also used to get them to keep talking and to expand on what they are talking about. Non-verbal encouragers can be nodding of the head, leaning forward to show interest etc.

Verbal encouragers can be “oh”, “so”, “then”, “tell me more”.

Paraphrasing

Indicate that you understand what the person is saying by stating a more concise version of what they just said. This also checks that you understand what they just said. These normally start with sentence starters like: “Are you saying..”, “It seems to me that you are..”, “What I heard you say was..”

Identifying & disclosing feelings

Feelings about situations are always the reason for the need for counselling. Feelings need to be described or given a name. You need to talk about the feelings in a metaphoric manner, what urges these feelings cause in you.

Perception check

You will need to check your perception of the persons state or attitude at the time. As an example, if the person perceives you are not focused on them and you are not aware of this then you counselling will have little effect. So if you get a feeling about them you need to check their perception of you, “do you feel uncomfortable being interviewed by a male?”, because in this case the counselling will go no where if their focus is on the fact that you are a male and they are uncomfortable with that. You would first need to change their perception of you before the counselling can continue.

Reflecting feelings

Respond to the feelings expressed in the way someone says something or answers a question. If they sound angry about something check if they are feeling angry by asking. This normally uses sentence starters like “Perhaps you feel …”, “It sounds like …”

Confrontation

This is NOT an attack on the person. The purpose is to break through barriers or defences by challenging discrepancies or contradictions. Challenging someone on the difference between what they say and what it appears they feel, or challenging them on the fact that their reaction to a situation is not how they truly feel because their reaction is not the common reaction or the sort of reaction you would have.

Summarising

Bring together a summary of what has been discussed, the decisions on what actions are going to happen, what the person will do, the way the person currently feels, the direction things will go from this point. Do not introduce anything new. Often starting “We have discussed …”, “You will do …”.