THE CORE SKILLS OF THE HELPING PROCESS:
THE MICROSKILLS HIERARCHY
Interviewing, counseling, and psychotherapy require a relationship with the client; they all
seek to help clients work through issues by drawing out and listening to the client’s story.
Intentional Interviewing and Counseling presents the key skills and strategies used by all three
approaches.
Microskills are the foundation of intentional interviewing. Th ey are communication skill
units of the interview that provide specifi c alternatives for you to use with many types of
clients and all theories of counseling and therapy. You master these skills one by one and then
learn to integrate them into a well-formed interview.
When you are fully competent in the microskills, you are able to listen eff ectively and
help clients change and grow. Eff ective use of microskills enables you to anticipate or predict
how clients will respond to your interventions. And if clients do not do what you expect, you
will be able to shift to skills and strategies that match their needs.
Th e microskills hierarchy (see Figure 0-0) summarizes the successive steps of intentional
interviewing as you will encounter them in this book. Th e skills of the interview rest on a base
of ethics, multicultural competence, and wellness. On this foundation lies the fi rst microskill
discussed in this text: attending behavior. Th is culturally and individually appropriate skill
includes patterns of eye contact, body language, vocal qualities, and verbal tracking. Th rough
this book, you will have the opportunity to defi ne this skill further, see attending demonstrated
in an interview, read about further implications, and fi nally, master the skill in practice
and real interviews. Th e book is supplemented by rich case studies in both the
accompanying interactive Web site CengageNOW and the interactive CD-ROM.