Counselling Tips for Students (7 Useful Suggestions)

In this blog, we are going to provide counselling tips for students. We will describe eight useful suggestions that can improve the quality of a student’s journey to establish their career. These tips will be explained in detail with the latest information on what research suggests.

What are some Counselling Tips for Students?

• Setting Good Goals
• Build Self-Awareness
• Learn How to Organise
• Identify Resources
• Be Patient
• Time Management
• Keep Learning
• Take Care of Yourself

Counselling Tips for Students

When counselling students, professionals keep in mind their career plans and dreams. They help them understand these better to get a clearer picture of their future and objectives. In this section, we are going to discuss eight useful counselling tips for students.

Setting Good Goals

You may have a broad goal of which field you wish to work in or what type of work you enjoy doing. But a good goal needs to be way more specific. One needs to break the goal down into short-term and long-term sub-goals.

For example, if you wish to be a doctor someday, your long-term goal could be getting into medical school. Goals that need to be met in the near future depend on your level of education. Based on which grade you’re in or the qualifications required for studying medicine in your country, you’ll have to set a sequence of smaller goals.

Then, you’ll have to break these down further into daily or weekly goals, which can be adjusted based on your pace and performance. It helps to set SMART goals, which is an acronym for the following:

• S for Specific
• M for measured
• A for attainable
• R for realistic
• T for time-bound

Build Self-Awareness

It’s hard to figure out what you want to spend the rest of your doing if you’re not self-aware enough. Many students have a tough time understanding what they want for their future. You might struggle with picking the right field for you. Or you might have certain reservations about how to proceed.

It’s always a good idea to get to know yourself better when deciding these things. You can do so by taking personality assessments, attending workshops, and filling out worksheets designed to build self-awareness.

Once you understand your likes, dislikes as well as your approach to conflicts, problems, and group dynamics, you’re at a better position to judge what you expect your career to be like.

Learn How to Organise

When we say organise, we don’t just mean your desk, books, files, and stationery. You also need to sort out other areas of your life to maximise your productivity. Some of these areas include your routine, lifestyle, choices, and work schedules. 

More micro-areas are how you plan your day, your to-do lists, and prioritising tasks. As you get used to adulthood, you’ll realise that life doesn’t throw problems at you one at a time. They usually come altogether, at an overwhelming pace, and without much instructions.

Because of this, it’s useful to organise your tasks into categories based on the level of importance and urgency. Things that are important and urgent need to be dealt with first. Then, you can set your own timelines for what’s important but not urgent. 

Figure out how to delegate or deal with unimportant tasks that are urgent. And finally, do the unimportant, non-urgent things when you need a break.

Identify Resources

It’s not easy for anyone to take on this process on their own. Always look for help when needed and don’t shy away from opportunities to get aid. This support can be financial, emotional, physical, or social.

Seek out experts and professionals who can guide you with your prospects. Network to build relationships with people with experience in your fields of interest. Look up online for organisations that provide scholarships and funding.

There’s no shame in asking for support because building a career doesn’t happen overnight. It requires patience, hard work, and lots of exposure that you can only get if you invest in identifying resources.

Be Patient

As mentioned in the previous paragraph, patience is a virtue when thinking about your career. You might feel a certain level of anxiety or worry about how things will turn out for you. That’s natural since life can be pretty uncertain.

When one is anxious, they expect immediate answers to all their doubts and apprehensions. But, unfortunately, that’s not the way things work. You will have to wait patiently for results to come forward and it’s alright if things don’t always go as planned.

Most of all, it’s important to be patient with yourself,e specially if you’re struggling with something. Have faith that you will learn from your lessons and march on with your career goals with a solution-focussed approach.

Time Management

This is something that was briefly mentioned when we talked about learning how to organise. Time management is crucial for anyone who wants to build a successful career. It’s very tempting to get carried away with the challenges right in front of you.

Doing so tends to make you lose sight of the larger picture and your personal goals. But if you stick to an optimised routine and show flexibility whenever you can improve it, it’s a much smoother ride.

Have fixed times for recurring activities that you need to get done pretty much every day. Create windows for work by dividing your days into four quarters. Make sure you give enough time to each area of your life, especially rest and motivation.

Keep Learning

Continued learning is what sets apart excellent professionals from the rest. It’s very easy to get stuck in a rut and find yourself in professional stagnancy. To avoid that, it’s imperative to keep an open-mind and always be willing to learn more.

It doesn’t always have to be something related to your field. You can also focus on developing skills that make your life easier or more interesting. Self-awareness helps in this process because you become cognisant of your strengths and weaknesses.

Work on sharpening the strengths and getting rid of the weaknesses. There are various courses, workshops, and online learning resources that cover a vast area of interests, including life-skills, soft-skills, and newfound knowledge about the world.

Take Care of Yourself

Taking care of yourself is probably the biggest thing you can do to ensure a fruitful and prosperous career. Think of yourself as your smart phone. If you don’t charge it, the apps stop working properly and soon enough, the screen goes blank.

Similarly, if you don’t charge your own batteries, you won’t be able to pull off any of the things listed above. Self-care first! Always keep that in mind.

Self-care includes getting enough sleep, eating nutritious food, regular physical activity, investing in social connections, pursuing creative interests, and looking for inspiration. If you take care of yourself in all these ways, nothing can stop you from making your dreams come true.

Conclusion

In this blog, we provided counselling tips for students. We described eight useful suggestions that can improve the quality of a student’s journey to establish their career. These tips were explained in detail with the latest information on what research suggests.

The counselling tips for students mentioned here were Setting Good Goals, Build Self-Awareness, Learn How to Organise, Identify Resources, Be Patient, Time Management, Keep Learning and Take Care of Yourself.

FAQs (Counselling Tips for Students)

What are Counselling skills and techniques?

Counselling skills and techniques are specific ways to counsel someone so that they feel comfortable to open up, do not feel judged, and can arrive at solutions to their problems. They include things like:

• Listening
• Attending
• Building rapport
• Silence
• Questioning
• Paraphrasing and summarising
• Reflecting

What are the 5 Counselling skills?

There are many skills and micro-skills involved in counselling so they can’t be limited to a number as small as five. Having said that, here are some essential skills that are required of anyone practising counselling as a profession:

• Attunement
• Self-awareness
• Establishing rapport
• Active listening
• The use of appropriate questions
• Refraining from making judgemental comments or body language
• Empathy 

What are the 6 methods of counselling?

There are various methods of counselling but the core groups of approaches include the following schools of psychology:

• Humanistic psychology
• Existential psychology
• Behavioural psychology
• Psychoanalytic approach
• Cognitive psychology
• Gestalt psychology

References

• https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ506242
• https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0950422216664422
• https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.1089.9658&rep=rep1&type=pdf 
• https://www.wheredatapp.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/ABCs-of-Time-Management-for-website.pdf
• https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10639-021-10548-6