Workplace Counselling and Therapy - Essay Example

Workplace Counseling and Therapy Workplace Counseling and Therapy Abdul Aziz Institution Name Workplace counseling Workplace counseling these days is considered to be an essential part of any organization in which a firm takes the help of a trained counselor to help the employees deal with issues they are facing either in the organization or personally which are affecting the productivity level or goal accomplishment of the employee. This report will first compare and contrast two most common approaches to counseling in workplace: psychodynamic tradition and the rational emotive behavioral therapy (RET) of cognitive-behavioral tradition. Compare and contrast psychodynamic tradition with RET Firstly I will discuss the psychodynamic tradition of workplace counseling. This therapy tends to understand people, analyze and treat according to what people have already experienced in their life especially in their childhood. Now this form of therapy presents us with some interesting and offcourse confronting ideas. One of the most important idea is that presented by Freud that almost every individual in this world tend to deny there inner feelings and thoughts that are difficult for them to handle or they believe will be considered obnoxious by the people around them for example the sexual desires of human being. People try to stifle their feelings and try to balance these feelings with adding some little entertainment or pleasure in their life (the id) and duty (the super-ego) in a self (called ego), the state where they believe their real thoughts are achievable. In our life there are many fanatical thoughts tat occur to us during our work especially, at times when we tend to achieve something strongly and tend to move towards the concept of perfectionism with obsessive behavior. At times we have some unpleasant thoughts and retaliating feelings towards about ourselves, our colleagues, responsibilities that tend to create hurdles for us in accomplishing our goals and these feelings can easily be dealt with psychodynamic counseling. This approach can be used in both group-based activity and individual or one-to-one counseling as well. The cognitive-behavioral counseling method is based on the concept of how we think known as cognition, our feelings known as emotions and how we behave with each other. Therefore, negative thoughts can cause us distress and result in problems. (Secker et al, 2004) When we take a closer look at the current trends of human resource environment in any organization we will realize that today there is a shift from the traditional concept of achievement of attaining monetary award to more towards enhancing performance, productivity and flexible working hours, with authority and responsibility of utmost importance. Hence behaviorist ideas are by no means as irrelevant as many managers claim. The reason being that there is increasing competition between peers these days because employees are simply not focusing on working for 8 hours a day getting paid at the end of the month and get satisfy. Employees want to see what their peers are doing and doing the best of the best that they can do to move ahead of their peers. Not only this but the culture of win/loss is also taking pace in almost every company in the world along with blame and workaholism are all fertile breeding grounds for behavioristic practices and responses on all sides of working life. Ellis introduced the first and important form of cognitive behavioral therapy for counseling known as rational-emotive therapy. The rational-emotive therapy deals with the fact that human beings have realistic thoughts have goals to achieve, seek for meaning in their life and want to deal and get away with the irrational thoughts and feelings that create negative emotions within them. Examples of irrational beliefs are “I must be perfect at everything I do” and “I work hard at being liked, so why does John not like me?” (Ellis, 1969) Ellis claimed that these thoughts have some rational meaning to them, something strong and valiant that has an emotional factor strongly attached to it. As I have already discussed before that some people have obsessive feelings about being absolutely perfect, now this may demonstrate some false emotions where employees start to think that being perfect is the only way to be successful and work with others or that Mr. X has some problem with me which should be solved because I consider myself to be right and if he does not like me so it means something should be amended. The disparity between the thoughts and assumptions between these two approaches carries weight and both approaches claim that employees move from self to help. From my point of view rational-emotive approach has turned out to be a little different from the typical cognitive behavioral approach of counseling and from its deterministic features to stressing more on humanism especially achieving the target of self-esteem and self-actualization mentioned at the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Addis, 2002) As I have mentioned previously that for the psychodynamic tradition, the history of the employee, his childhood experiences and past knowledge is of utmost importance. What the person has experienced in the past can come in the present or be remembered in any way and as I have already illustrated that there are 90% chances that these feelings are usually repressed by human beings but with the help of counseling these feelings are discovered and help the employee construe their inner feelings and incomplete images. A critical aspect of this tradition, too, is its emphasis on the client’s childhood. Now offcourse when the employee at work is asked to reveal his true self he will definitely deny all this because this therapy would uncover the covered or unrevealed areas of his life and personality. The emphasis this tradition places on looking at the whole client, psychologically and autobiographically, commends it to me and seems to offer clients a real chance to understand their real selves, whatever the pain. When we compare the cognitive-behavioral tradition including the most important rational-emotive therapy the client viewpoint as already mentioned is that of rationality. When we consider some of the irrational behaviors at the workplace we can think of stress, emotional disturbances which create problems for an employee to adjust in the environment around him in workplace. We know that we can change the habits, likes and dislike of an individual Habits can be changed, thoughts can also be restructured providing the chance to the employees to think rationally, change their irrational thoughts, set their own goals and reinforce behaviors, deconstruct irrational beliefs. When the employee feels embarrassed about his irrational thoughts he will realize for example that these thoughts were destructive for him and were not prolific. There have been strong claims which I as well agree to that the cognitive-behavioral approach directly leads us to the problem without any turnarounds and persuades to perform action. I believe that this is the most appropriate model in the workplace, particularly where large groups are present but in the small organizations this becomes problematic for them because employees start to feel left out, feel less valued within the organization, and retaliates from the monitoring in the workplace. This heavily involves the issues such as fear of change and new technology being introduced in the organization, training, loss and crisis. Employees tend to learn a lot from their counseling sessions be they group based or individual. He counseling sessions at workplace are not intended to make employees hear only positive points about themselves but also the negative aspects of their personality and provides them a chance to face the reality as well as present them with the opportunity to improve themselves and work hard to achieve their targets, goals and objectives in the workplace. For the psychodynamic tradition change is the most important factor and even some conflict at the outer level which is important because initially the client will repress and deny some of the feelings important for him to realize and accept as hardcore realities of his life and rationalize their behaviour in self-deceptive ways. When we take a closer look all this happens in the workplace because there are situations when employees do not accept their faults when confronted upon, introject others’ attitudes into their own interpretation of life and even get indulged in the blame syndrome and gets habituate to taking blame of the mistakes of the other people. During work employees feel the pressure on them but they due to their busy lives do not realize that what is actually going on. These two approaches discussed above basically gives them a chance to take notice of some of the stuff mentioned above. Counseling is a combination of intrinsic (for example response to stress) and extrinsic (for example management style of a section). There are many organizations that have little room for people that are individualist and one of a kind and provide little room to the managers to give their employees the authority and the responsibility for their actions. This kind of an environment provides space for unhealthy conflict, stress, personal biases and the counseling sessions tends to break these walls and tries to encourage participation, group work and coordination between employees. Read More