Being okay with ‘good enough’.

There’s a fairly consistent theme that I’ve heard from my fellow counselling students, and one that I’ve also brought up: Confidence in counselling.

How can we be confident that it’s working for the client, and more importantly, should we be striving to be the best?

From my own experience, I’ve found it difficult to accept failure as part of the learning process, because failure brought consequences, and those consequences were to be feared. Naturally, that led me to link both of those together. I have a different outlook on failure now. I take it as an opportunity to identify mistakes I’ve made, learn from them, and try again. In my counselling journey so far, I’ve been able to gain so much insight with the help of a team of other students, as well as facilitators and lecturers. However, when it comes to client outcomes, I have a harder time deciphering what is successful for me. Maybe it’s because of my fear of failing them as a counsellor or some other aspect I may write about in the future but it’s been on my mind for some time: Can I be okay with ‘good enough’?

And the answer is most likely found in the models that I’ve been learning so far, that we as counsellors should acknowledge that the client is the expert in their own lives, and we should really be asking them what success is in their eyes.

Accepting that even the slightest change in how to view the problem could be a success for them in that session, as well as being aware that every client is different and has their own story to tell is a step in the right direction, and that is good enough for now.

This was originally published at npaatan.wixsite.com on July 9, 2018.