• Learning how to watch a client's body language is an important counseling skill.happy business lady image by Paul Moore from Fotolia.com
  
  Counseling becomes an attractive and necessary option when people find themselves unable to handle the speed and complexity of modern life. Counselors use several different techniques---such as closed and open-ended questions, active listening and paraphrasing---to evaluate the situation, while searching for ways to change the behavior. In other cases, the counselor may have to use more aggressive methods to break a client's limited thought patterns.
  
  

Open-Ended And Closed Questions

• Learning how to draw clients out through open-ended and closed questions is an important tool in a counselor's arsenal, according to the website basic-counseling-skills.com. Open-ended questions require no "correct" answer, and are especially useful in helping to elicit information. The closed question, on the other hand, is better suited to getting short, succinct answers to basic questions, or when the counselor senses the need to bring chatty clients back on track.
  
  

Recording a Thought Journal

• Cognitive behavioral therapists will ask clients to put down their thoughts in a journal. This stems from a belief that thoughts cause feelings and emotions, says askmikethecounselor2.com. Clients are typically asked to write down whatever situations they encounter, summarize their feelings on a scale of 0 to 100, and identify what caused them. Over time, it should become possible to categorize certain thoughts, and develop ways to counter or replace them.
  
  

Active Listening

• In this technique, the counselor makes a point of saying little, while conveying attentiveness, empathy and acceptance. The counselor focuses on the client's body language, phraseology and speech style to gain a deeper insight into particular behaviors, according to basic-counseling-skills.com. If the client is not talkative, the counselor may have to ask more open-ended questions to help them make a proper assessment. As its title implies, active listening requires great concentration and attention to detail.
  
  

Paraphrasing

• Sometimes it becomes necessary to paraphrase, or succinctly restate what the counselor believes the client has just said, to ensure that the situation is understood correctly, according to basic-counseling-skills.com. This technique is considered particularly helpful in eliminating or reducing the importance of extraneous material that may cloud the counselor's assessment of the situation. Moderation in vocal tone is essential to making this technique work. Often, the way things are said is remembered longer than how they were said.
  
  

Identifying Limited Thought Patterns

• Counselors learn to recognize patterns of limited thinking that may prevent clients from living to their full potential, says the website, askmikethecounselor2.com, which identifies eight different ways that this can happen. Filtering, for example, is characterized by an overemphasis on negative experiences to the exclusion of positive ones. By identifying these types of thought patterns, and showing how they impact the client, the counselor hopes to make a breakthrough and change the behavior.