In Basic Attending Skills: Foundations of Empathic Relationships and Problem Solving, students learn and master the fundamental skills of listening, including attending behavior, questions, encouragers, paraphrasing, reflection of feelings, and summarization through a straightforward, step-by-step process. Readers discover how the essential skills of listening and interviewing are critical for counseling, psychotherapy, and meaningful interpersonal communication. Over the course of eight chapters, students review basic attending skills, effective listening strategies, the community genogram, emotional regulation, and more. They learn how to leverage and apply only listening skills to complete a well-structured interview with a client that is effective, adapted to the individual, and incorporates multicultural practice. The integration of a client's behavior, thoughts, and feelings into effective treatment is also addressed. The sixth edition includes in-depth explanation of why the community genogram is useful and how to incorporate it into an interview; a deeper focus on strengths, resiliency, and the positive asset search; and information of neuroscience, its relationship to counseling, and what practitioners need to know about the brain to work more effectively with clients. A foundational guide for effective practice, Basic Attending Skills is well suited for introductory courses in counseling.

Basic Influencing Skills and Strategies equips readers with counseling skills designed to produce positive change with clients. The text features an emphasis on communication, preparing future practitioners to become effective communicators and listeners, and then take appropriate action based upon what they learn during practitioner-patient interviews. In Section 1, students are introduced to the microskills framework and its multicultural orientation, and the importance of listening to draw out client stories, issues, and concerns is emphasized. This part also presents two strategies to facilitate practitioners learning and analysis of client interviews: the community genogram and the client change scale. Section 2 presents the specifics of particular influencing skills, including focusing, supportive confrontation, feedback and self-disclosure, and interpretation/reframing. In Section 3, students gain an understanding of how to integrate and apply learned skillsets. They are introduced to the 5-Stage Interview, a framework that effectively applies the concepts addressed throughout the book to multiple counseling theories. The fourth edition includes clear behavioral skill descriptions to enable the interviewer to anticipate client responses as well as outcomes; concrete attention to multicultural practice and social justice; and introduction of the community genogram. Featuring foundational skillsets that are critical to the counseling practice, Basic Influencing Skills and Strategies is an ideal text for introductory courses in counseling.