INTENTIONAL INTERVIEWING

AND COUNSELING:
FACILITATING CLIENT DEVELOPMENT IN A
MULTICULTURAL SOCIETY
8TH EDITION

Allen E. Ivey Mary Bradford Ivey

Carlos P. Zalaquett

Modified by Paul W.C. Wong

© 2014 Brooks/Cole, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. For classroom use only.
CHAPTER 3

Attending Behavior
and Empathy
CONSIDER THE FOLLOWING:

“When someone really hears you without passing

judgment on you, without taking responsibility for
you, without trying to mold you, it feels good.
When I have been listened to, when I have been
heard, I am able to re-perceive my world in a new
way and go on.
It is astonishing how elements that seem insoluble
become soluble when someone listens. How
confusions that seem irremediable become
relatively clear flowing streams when one is heard.”

Carl Rogers
MISSION OF CHAPTER 3
• To present the foundational skills of attending and empathy,
essential to establishing a working relationship with clients and
achieving good understanding of their issues and concerns.
• Attending behavior, empathy, and observation skills are
necessary (and sometimes sufficient) for effective, facilitative
intentional counseling and psychotherapy.
• Together, (1) attending and (2) observation form the
foundation of empathic understanding, the relationship, and
the working alliance.
CHAPTER GOALS AND COMPETENCY
OBJECTIVES
• Establish an empathic relationship with your clients.
• Increase your skill in listening to clients and communicating
that interest.
• Note your own patterns of attending, including selective
attention. We all emphasize some issues while giving less
attention to others, perhaps even avoiding certain concerns.
• Adapt your attending patterns to the needs of diverse
individual and cultural styles of listening and talking.
ATTENDING BEHAVIOR: THE
FOUNDATION SKILL OF LISTENING
• Attending behavior is supporting your client with individually
and culturally appropriate verbal following, visuals, vocal
quality, and body language.
• Listening is the central skill of attending behavior and is core to
developing a relationship and making real contact with our
clients.
• Listening is more than hearing or seeing.
HOW CAN WE DEFINE EFFECTIVE
LISTENING MORE PRECISELY?
• One way to understand good quality listening is to experience
the opposite — poor listening.

• Find a partner to role-play a session.

• Spend three minutes role-playing a poor and ineffective listening.
• After the role-played session, list what went wrong and worked against
effective listening.
ATTENDING BEHAVIOR: THE SKILLS OF
LISTENING
Attending Behavior: Support Anticipated Result: Clients talk
your client with individually more freely and respond
and culturally appropriate openly, particularly around
visuals, vocal quality, topics to which attention is
verbal tracking, and body given. Depending on the
language. individual client and culture,
anticipate fewer eye contact
breaks, a smoother vocal
tone, a more complete story
(with fewer topic jumps), and
a more comfortable body
language.
ATTENDING BEHAVIOR: THE SKILLS OF
LISTENING
• Attention is the connective force of conversations and
empathic understanding.

• We are touched when it is present.

• We know when someone is not attending to us.

• Attending behavior is the first and most critical skill of listening.

• Sometimes listening carefully is enough to produce change.

ATTENDING BEHAVIOR IN ACTION: GETTING
SPECIFIC ABOUT LISTENING AND INDIVIDUAL
AND MULTICULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN STYLE

• Listen before you leap!

• Avoid trying to solve client’s difficulties too soon.

• Clients developed their concerns over time.

• It is critical that you slow down, relax, attend to

client stories.

• Use the three Vs and one B to understand client’s

concerns and build rapport.
 Visual / Eye Contact

Vocal Qualities
3xV+
Verbal Tracking
B
Body Language
3XV+B
CONSIDER THIS LIST ONLY A START ON YOUR MULTICULTURAL JOURNEY…

1. Visual/eye contact.
• If you are going to talk to people, look at them.

2. Vocal qualities.
• Your vocal tone and speech rate indicate clearly how you feel
about another person. Think of the many ways you can say “I am
really interested in what you have to say” just by altering your
speech.

3. Verbal tracking.
• Don’t change the subject; stick with the client’s story.

4. Body language: attentive.

• Clients know you are interested if you face them squarely and lean
slightly forward, have an expressive face, and use facilitative,
encouraging gestures. Be yourself — authenticity in attending is
essential.
VISUAL / EYE CONTACT
• Observe cultural differences in appropriate amounts of eye
contact.
• Maintain and break eye contact as needed for specific results.
• Observe client pupil dilation.
• Choose specific body language for desired results.
VOCAL QUALITIES: TONE AND SPEECH
RATE

• Pitch
• Volume
• Rate
• Emphasis (verbal underlining)
• Breaks and hesitations
VOCAL QUALITIES: TONE AND SPEECH
RATE
Accents
• What are your reactions to the following accents: Australian,
BBC English, Canadian, French, Pakistani, Spanish, New
England, Southern United States?
• Avoid stereotyping people with accents different from yours.
VERBAL TRACKING: FOLLOWING THE
CLIENT OR CHANGING THE TOPIC
Verbal tracking is staying with your client’s topic to encourage
full elaboration of the narrative.
• Identify range of client concerns.
• Note topic shifts.
• Guide focus to critical client concerns.
• Observe your own and client’s selective attention.
BODY LANGUAGE: ATTENTIVE AND
AUTHENTIC

• Maintain culturally appropriate distance.

• Note client movements in relation to you.
• Note posture and when posture shifts.
• Maintain authenticity in the client relationship.
 Visual / Eye Contact

Vocal Qualities
3xV+
Verbal Tracking
B
Body Language
THE CENTRAL ROLE OF SELECTIVE
ATTENTION
• Selective attention is central to counseling and psychotherapy.
• Clients talk about what counselors are willing to hear.
• How you attend determines the length of the session and if
client returns.
THE VALUE OF REDIRECTING ATTENTION
• There are times when it is inappropriate to attend to client
statements.
• For example, a client may talk insistently about the same topic over and
over again.

• Through failure to maintain eye contact, subtle shifts in body

posture, vocal tone, and deliberate jumps to more positive
topics, you can facilitate the interview process.
MAINTAIN NONATTENTION
• Reduce eye contact.
• Shift body posture.
• Shift vocal tone and quality.
• Change subject to other, more positive topic.
• Observe silence.
THE USEFULNESS OF SILENCE
• Clients can’t talk when you do.
• Percentage of talk time for most adult clients should be more
than interviewer.
• Silence can be the best support.
• During client emotional expression.
• During client thought processes.
Section II

EMPATHY
EMPATHY
• Empathy…
• Is experiencing the world as if you are the client, but
remaining separate.
• Is communicating to the client that you understand.
• Is key in all human communication.
• Is central to the relationship and the “working alliance.”
• Forms part of that 30% of common factors that make for
successful interviewing, counseling, and psychotherapy.
EMPATHY
Empathy: Experiencing the Anticipated Result: Clients will
client’s world and story as if feel understood and engage in
you were that client; more depth in exploring their
understanding his or her key issues. Empathy is best
issues and saying them back assessed by the client’s
accurately, without adding reaction to a statement and his
your own thoughts, feelings, or her ability to continue the
or meanings. This requires discussion in more depth and,
attending and observation eventually, with better self-
skills plus using the understanding.
important key words of the
client, but distilling and
shortening the main ideas.
THREE TYPES OF EMPATHIC
UNDERSTANDING
• Subtractive empathy: Interviewer gives back less or distorts
what the client has said.
• Basic empathy: Interviewer responses are interchangeable
with the client.
• Additive empathy: Interviewer responses add to or link to what
the client has said
SUBTRACTIVE EMPATHY
• Interviewer response is distorted, inaccurate, or less than the
client’s response.
• When this occurs, listening and influencing skills are used
inappropriately.
BASIC EMPATHY
• Interviewer responses are very similar to the client.
• Interviewer accurately feeds back to the client.
• Accurate use of BLS demonstrates basic empathy.
ADDITIVE EMPATHY
• Interviewer responses may add to the client response.
• Addition may link to earlier client response or provide bridge
to new perspective.
• Skilled use of listening and influencing enables interviewer to
become additive.
RESPECT AND WARMTH
• Most easily rated from kinesthetic and nonverbal perspective.
• Demonstrate by open posture, smiling, and vocal qualities.
• Be congruent with your body language.
CONCRETENESS
• Seek specific feelings, thoughts, descriptions, and examples of
action.
• “Could you give me an example of ...?”
• Interviewer responses need to be very specific.
• Directive
• Feedback
• Interpretation
IMMEDIACY
• Be in the moment with the inteviewee.
• Most useful response is generally in the present tense.
• Change of tense may speed up or slow down the interview.
• Shifting to new tense from inteviewee’s constant tense may be
useful.
NONJUDGMENTAL ATTITUDE
• Suspend your own opinions and attitudes.
• Assume a value of neutrality.
• Expressed through vocal qualities, body language, and neutral
statements.
• There are no absolutes on how to use non-judgmental attitude.
• Interviewers may be challenged by dishonest, violent, sexist
and/or racist clients.
AUTHENTICITY OR CONGRUENCE
• Are you personally real?
• Authenticity and congruence are the reverse of discrepancies
and mixed messages.
• Counselor remains congruent and genuine.
• Counselor flexibility responding to the client demonstrates
authenticity.
SUMMARY: THE SAMURAI EFFECT, NEUROSCIENCE, AND
THE IMPORTANCE OF PRACTICE TO MASTERY
• Learn skills through repetition.
• Break skills into small components.
• Study each component one at a time.
• Can be awkward and constraining.
• Awareness interferes with coordination.
• Intentional practice.
• Persevere.
• Persist, practice, and seek excellence!
SUMMARY: THE SAMURAI EFFECT, NEUROSCIENCE, AND
THE IMPORTANCE OF PRACTICE TO MASTERY
• Intentional practice is the magic!
• Recognize and enhance your natural talents.
• Greatness only happens with extensive practice.
• Practice is the breakfast of champions.
• Skipping practice means mediocre performance.
SUMMARY: THE SAMURAI EFFECT, NEUROSCIENCE, AND
THE IMPORTANCE OF PRACTICE TO MASTERY
1. Practice changes your body. Both the brain and body change with
practice.
2. Skills are specific. Each skill must be practiced completely before it can
be integrated into superior performance.
3. The brain drives the brawn. Changes in the brain are evident in scans.
4. Practice is crucial. One can understand intellectually, but practicing the
specific skills of attending is what makes the difference.
5. Short-term intensity cannot replace long-term commitment. Take all the
counseling skills you learn and use them regularly.
6. Practice provides a continuous feedback loop, which leads to even
more improvement. Feedback from others is especially beneficial.