Fulfilling Your Dreams

Counseling is often thought of as a form of repair work applied to deal with something wrong. Few people recognize the potential person-centered counseling offers to improve your life, even when your life isnt broken. Whether your goals have to do with your education, your career, your relationships, or your sense of stability and control in your life, counseling can provide both guidance and support.

While counseling can certainly help resolve a range of serious problems in peoples lives, it may serve most effectively as a way of empowering yourself to become the person you dream of. If you feel youre not focused, that you self-sabotage, that youre not reaching out for a bigger, better life; the many forms of personal growth counseling could be just what youre looking for.

Going into counseling to improve your life skills can be a matter of simple training in technique, or it can be a matter of profound self-examination. Which you become involved in will depend on your goals, your personality, and more. Much counseling aimed at personal development goals can be less involved and intensive, because many counselors in this area are focused on practical changes in behavior and self-presentation.

Life coaches come in all forms and styles. Often a blend of career counselor, surrogate mom helping you sort your life into shape, and cheerleader, life coaches focus on finding the bits of your life that arent working quite right, the parts that are, and trying to improve the first while expanding on the second. Life coach counseling is focused primarily on where you want to go in your life. Goals are set, plans laid out, skills worked on. Some degree of self-examination is involved, but in a very goal-oriented, directed sense. Life coaching may ultimately lead you to choose personal growth counseling, as you determine you want or need deeper examination of your own nature.

One of the most common forms of personal growth counseling, career counseling is used by men and women, young and old, those just entering the job market, those looking for career changes, and those simply wanting to advance within their current careers. Career counselors focus on your strengths and weaknesses in the job market, your goals, and the options open to you. Career counseling is seldom the intense self-examination personal growth counseling can be.

Hypnotherapy can be a direct, goal oriented process aimed at dealing directly with minor problems, or it can be a supplemental form of therapy for those involved in more broad-reaching forms of counseling. Underestimating the value of hypnotherapy to support life change and self-realization is a mistake. An equal mistake, however, is to treat the process as a sort of magic wand which allows you to change your life without the examination and conscious exploration true change demands. Under most circumstances, hypnotherapy supports and augments other counseling functions, serving as reinforcement rather than as a fully developed form of counseling in its own right.

Perhaps the most traditional of the growth and development counseling forms, personal growth counseling involves a classic evaluation of your life, your goals, and the tools youve assembled to proceed in life. A good personal growth counselor, while future-oriented and focused on helping promote growth, takes the time to integrate past and present in the service of a better future. This form of counseling is often offered by classic psychiatrists, incorporating the techniques and approaches of life and career counseling into the more exploratory work done in traditional personal counseling.

Whichever approach to growth you choose, finding a capable and effective counselor for you can be a challenge. Try to put together a list of possible counselors, and several different approaches you would consider. Getting a referral from a reliable referral service can help. By making use of referral services you can ensure that potential counselors have been filtered for professionalism at least once before you make contact. Once youve got a good selection to choose from, interview them carefully and choose the one with whom youre most confident.

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Personal Development - AllAboutCounseling.com