The emotional drain, slow pace of client progress, low pay, and excessive paperwork make a counselor’s life hard.
Some challenges, like the slow pace of client progress, are inherent to working with clients. Low pay is a systematic issue that needs structural changes.
However, a challenge that can be easily tackled is excessive paperwork and admin tasks. The answer lies in the power of technology, with custom made tools for counselors.
Why Is It Important To Use Tools in Counseling?
- More time with clients — By taking on routine tasks and making the overall process more efficient, technology tools will save time for counselors. Time that you can spend with clients on their problems and solutions.
- Easy analysis and tracking — Counselors can use tools to track the progress of clients electronically. Some tech solutions also have built-in reports that let counselors analyze client progress and extrapolate the overall success of the engagement.
- Client relationship management — Managing client relationships between sessions is critical to the success of the client engagement. Counselors send reminders, encourage clients, and educate clients as part of managing the relationship. Technology will let counselors automate workflows when managing client relationships, saving time and effort.
- Automate paperwork — Tools can let counselors automate routine tasks. Clients and counselors can fill online intake forms and store them for easy retrieval and edits.
- Access to best practices — Most tools have a collection of built-in expert tools and best practices. Using a quality tool, you can access these best practices and contribute your thoughts to the body of collective counseling knowledge.
Counseling Techniques & Tools: 8 Examples
- Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) — This is an evidence-based model that explores a client’s thoughts to understand how these thoughts lead to feelings and actions. The counselor encourages clients to adopt new beliefs and experiment with changes in their behavior.
- Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) — This is a type of CBT, with a focus on mindfulness and other ways of improving the client’s wellbeing. The main goal is to help clients find ways of accepting themselves, feeling safe, and managing destructive behaviors.
- Talk Therapy — In talk therapy, the counselor has the client explore his life and struggles through conversation. The counselor asks questions and offers reflections and feedback to create new awareness and perspective for the client.
- Psychodynamic Therapy — Here, the focus is on how the client’s past is impacting the present. We all have many unconscious needs and learned behaviors that we have picked up from our childhoods. When the client gets an understanding of how the past is adversely affecting his presence, new behavior becomes easier.
- Creative Therapy — Creative outlets like painting, writing, or dancing are used to release negative emotions and explore client struggles through creative prompts and conversations. Some clients who don’t enjoy talking about their feelings prefer creative therapy.
- Positive Counseling — During positive counseling, the counselor explores what the client wants with a futuristic focus. Visualizations can be used to create a more tangible future for the client. The client is also encouraged to focus on his strengths instead of weaknesses.
- Existential Therapy — We all wonder about our existence at least once in our life. Why are we here? What is our end goal? The existence question can be answered through religion or spirituality. The counselor facilitates the discovery of the client’s purpose and existence.
- Constructionist Therapy — This type of therapy focuses on how culture and interpretations of our culture can shape the client’s struggles and meaning-making. Special attention is paid to how a client uses language and what certain terms and idioms mean to the client.
How To Use Technology Tools in Counseling
Let’s be honest here. Nothing can truly replace face-to-face time with your clients because there is so much a counselor’s intuition picks up on when you’re sitting across from your client.
With online counseling becoming more of a necessity because of social distancing requirements, teletherapy, especially via video calls, is a close substitute for face-to-face counseling. But it still doesn’t come close to being in the same room with your client.
Besides conducting counseling sessions, counselors have many other admin responsibilities that fall outside of a session. Although following up with all your clients between sessions, tracking their progress, and encouraging them is critical to the client’s wellbeing, it takes a lot a lot of effort, especially if it’s done manually.
This is where you can thrive on the power of technology and put it to its intended use. Technology tools can complement your counseling practice and make your work more meaningful.
Must-Have Online Tools For Counselors
Counselors can use technology in many stages of the client’s journey.
- Online therapy: Many counselors have turned to technology to provide counseling services. Online therapy removes the need for commuting and can be a permanent way of providing services, especially if there is a geographical barrier. A counselor needs a secure, HIPAA-compliant tool that allows for high-quality video calls.
- Client relationship management: After the session with the client, the counselor needs to maintain the client relationship between sessions. Clients process the discussions they had with the counselor and try out new behaviors during this time, and it’s critical for the counselor to be available. A tool that can automate these interactions will be ideal for the counselor, as client relationship management can be exhausting if done manually.
- Logistics: Counselors need a tool that can handle the logistics of scheduling sessions, invoicing, and accepting payments. Time spent on such activities can become significant as your practice grows.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all these tools come bundled as one tool? This is exactly what we’re trying to do with Quenza.
Quenza has an ambitious roadmap that would make the platform your go-to solution for all counseling practice needs.
How To Use Therapeutic Tools with Quenza
Activities
Activities are tasks that can automatically be sent to your clients at a pre-scheduled time. These can be used as reminders or as a way to educate and encourage clients between sessions. The Activity Builder enables the creation of new Activities.
Expansions
You can access activities created by our experts on the Quenza platform. These readymade activities are called Expansions and are kept in the Expansion Library and can be re-used by any counselor according to client requirements.
Pathways
Pathways are a collection of activities that can be sent to your client in a certain order. This automates end-to-end interaction with clients and saves time for value-added tasks.
Assessment Tools in Quenza: A Guide
Wheel of Life
In an initial discovery session with a client, you may want to get a pulse on all aspects of the clients’ life so you can work with them more holistically. The wheel of life lets clients select the dimensions they want to focus on and self-report their satisfaction in each area.
[New Feature] Make Your Own Wheel of Life Using Quenza.
The Wheel of Life is one of the most popular coaching tools out there.
Dashboard
The Quenza dashboard provides you with a quick view of the current status of your practice. At a glance, you will see the progress your clients have made in terms of activities and pathways assigned to them.
Because clients are aware that you monitor their progress, they will be more accountable for completing their exercises and reflections in a timely manner. This will enable them to obtain the best results from counseling.
Trackers
The trackers feature can be used to set client goals and track habits. Client progress is demonstrated in a visual graph on the client dashboard as well.
Advanced Linear Scale
This feature will let you create your own scales, questionnaires, and surveys for a more customizable service. Once you create your own scales, you can re-use them as needed. You will also get a visual view of all the submitted data.
Final Thoughts
By using a technology as a tool for counselors, it can help you cut down on paperwork and manual processes and you get to spend more time actually counseling clients.
Let technology help you help your clients.
Want to learn more about using Quenza for counseling? Try out the $1 trial for 1 month to see all the advantages of this powerful platform.
