Why Holding Great Sessions Starts Before the Client Arrives.
“What parts and aspects of ourselves we bring into the room affects how we listen, what we notice, what we miss and how we respond.”
— Madelaine Vallin
There are many models used in counselling and coaching to help practitioners structure their work. Some help practitioners understand a client’s current situation, identify goals and find ways to create change. Others focus more on problem solving, strengths, possibilities or exploring a preferred future.
Egan’s Skilled Helper Model, for example, provides a three-stage framework for helping clients understand and manage problems, identify opportunities and move towards action (Egan, 2014).
Hackney and Cormier’s counselling process similarly provides a structure for the counselling relationship, from establishing rapport and understanding the client’s concerns through to intervention and eventually ending the counselling relationship (Hackney & Cormier, 2009).
There is naturally a lot of overlap between these and other counselling and coaching models. Practitioners may explore what is happening now, what the client would like instead, what might be getting in the way and what could help them move forward.
And whilst the POET 4-Stage Model (Vallin, 2021), shares some of these elements, its clearest difference is where the model begins: not with the client, but with the practitioner themselves.
What are we as practitioners bringing into the room?
Practitioners don’t arrive in a session as neutral observers. They bring their training and experience, but they also bring themselves: their beliefs, values, assumptions, emotional triggers, blind spots and life experiences. They bring their strengths and limitations. They might arrive stressed by something happening in their own life, feel uncomfortable with particular emotions, have ideas about what progress should look like or have a desire to help that sometimes becomes a desire to fix.
This doesn’t make someone a poor practitioner. It is part of being human. But what practitioners bring into the room can affect how they listen, what they notice, what they miss, the questions they ask and the direction they encourage a client to take.
Reflective practice and practitioner self-awareness are already well-established within counselling and psychotherapy. Reflective practice encourages practitioners to examine both their professional practice and the personal self they bring into therapeutic relationships, helping them become more aware of how they think about and respond to their work (Senediak, 2013).
POET takes this idea and places it directly into the structure of the model. Before moving into any of its client-focused stages, the first stage, the Pre-Phase, asks the practitioner to look at themselves (Vallin, 2021).
The POET 4-Stage Model
Pre-Phase: The inner work of the practitioner
The Pre-Phase isn’t simply about taking a few moments to prepare before a session. It is about the ongoing inner work of the person doing the work.
What are the practitioner’s own values and beliefs, and how might these affect their work with clients? What emotional triggers do they carry? Where are their blind spots? What happens when a client touches something unresolved in them? How well can they stay present when they feel uncomfortable, challenged or emotionally activated?
It is also about knowledge and capability. A practitioner will inevitably come across things they don’t fully understand or situations that stretch the limits of their current knowledge. Being able to recognise those limits is important, as is continuing to develop their skills and having people they can turn to for guidance, reflection and support.
Within POET, personal and professional development aren’t treated as completely separate things. The Pre-Phase includes self-awareness, personal development, self-care, mentors and support, continuing education and reflection on how the practitioner’s own experiences may influence their ability to be present and non-judgemental with clients (Vallin, 2021).
This is also why practitioner development doesn’t finish when formal training ends. Working with people will continue to show practitioners the edges of what they know, what they can hold and what they may still need to explore within themselves. Further education can deepen knowledge and skills, while supervision, mentoring, reflective practice, counselling, therapy and other forms of personal support can help practitioners continue developing the person behind those skills.
Practitioners spend a great deal of time creating space for other people’s experiences, so they also need places where they aren’t the person holding everything together. They need somewhere they can reflect, receive support, be challenged, learn and continue their own inner work.
The aim isn’t to become a perfectly healed or completely objective practitioner. That isn’t realistic. It is about developing enough self-awareness to notice when something belonging to the practitioner may be entering the work, and enough professional awareness to recognise when further knowledge, reflection or support may be needed.
Two people are developing
Practitioner self-awareness isn’t unique to POET. Reflective practice, supervision and personal development have long been part of counselling and psychotherapy. What is different within POET is that this work is made an explicit part of the framework itself.
Rather than beginning entirely with the client, POET recognises that the practitioner’s own development matters too. The client and practitioner remain separate within the professional relationship, but the practitioner’s ongoing self-awareness, learning and personal development influence the capacity they bring to their work (Vallin, 2021). This means that before asking what is happening for the client, the practitioner is also asked to consider how they are showing up to meet them.
From there, the model moves into its three client-focused stages.
Operational: How are they operating now?
The Operational Phase explores how the client currently operates and shows up in the world. This includes the beliefs, thoughts and behaviours shaping their experience, but also their strengths, what supports them, what doesn’t, how they respond to challenges and the patterns that may be showing up across different areas of their life.
POET takes a whole-person perspective, considering physical, emotional, mental and spiritual wellbeing alongside relationships, work, self-care, community, connection with nature, purpose and meaning (Vallin, 2021).
Exploring a client’s current experience isn’t unique to POET and appears in many counselling and coaching models in different forms. Within POET, it provides an understanding of how this particular person is currently operating before exploring how they might want to operate differently.
Explorational: How do they want to operate?
The Explorational Phase shifts the conversation from how the person is currently living towards how they would like to live. This might include exploring how they want to experience their life, who they want to become, what they want to create, the strengths and abilities they already have and the beliefs or behaviours they may need to let go of.
The aim isn’t simply to identify what is missing and then create a plan to get it. The Explorational Phase looks more broadly at who the person wants to be, what is already available within them and how they would like to experience their life (Vallin, 2021).
These ideas can also be found within humanistic, strengths-based, positive psychology and other approaches. Within POET, they are part of the movement from understanding how someone currently operates towards exploring how they want to operate and who they want to become.
Transformational: What needs to be integrated?
The Transformational Phase looks at what needs to be strengthened, changed, released or integrated for the client to begin living in the way they have been exploring.
This could mean reconnecting with strengths they already have, developing particular qualities, letting go of limiting beliefs or patterns, making changes within relationships or their environment, or beginning to act from a different understanding of themselves.
Within POET, this is connected to the Personal Point of Power (PPOP), which is about supporting the client to connect with their own capacity to take charge of their life and create meaningful change (Vallin, 2021). Action is part of this, but it isn’t the whole process. The focus is on helping the person begin to integrate and live what has been explored, rather than simply leaving with a list of things to do.
“Our training might give us the tools, but our inner work shapes how we bring those tools into the room.”
— Madelaine Vallin
What makes POET different?
Many of the individual elements within POET can also be found across counselling, psychotherapy and coaching. Exploring strengths, beliefs, preferred futures, behaviour, self-awareness and personal change aren’t new ideas, and POET doesn’t need to claim that they are.
Its clearest structural difference is the Pre-Phase, because it places the practitioner’s inner work inside the model itself. The practitioner isn’t positioned outside the framework as someone who simply applies it to another person. Their self-awareness, continuing education, personal support and willingness to keep developing are part of the foundation from which the client work takes place.
The model then moves from the practitioner to the client. The Pre-Phase considers how the practitioner is showing up. The Operational Phase explores how the client is currently operating. The Explorational Phase looks at how they want to operate and who they want to become, and the Transformational Phase explores what needs to be integrated for them to begin living in that way.
Practitioner development isn’t only about learning more things to do with clients. It is also about continuing to develop the person doing the work. That means deeper education, reflective practice, supervision, mentoring and personal support all have a place. So does continuing to examine assumptions, limitations and blind spots, because working with people will continue to ask practitioners to develop themselves as well as their skills.
This philosophy also sits at the heart of InteMind Institute and its focus on further practitioner education. Advancing practice isn’t simply about adding more tools. It is about continuing to develop knowledge, discernment, self-awareness and capacity, while recognising that practitioners themselves also need places to learn, reflect, grow and be supported.
The client may be the person coming for support, but the work starts before they enter the room.
References
Egan, G. (2014). The skilled helper: A problem-management and opportunity-development approach to helping (10th ed.). Brooks/Cole, Cengage Learning.
Hackney, H., & Cormier, S. (2009). The professional counselor: A process guide to helping (6th ed.). Pearson.
Senediak, C. (2013). Integrating reflective practice in family therapy supervision. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy, 34(4), 338–351.
Vallin, M. (2021). POET 4-stage process model. Australian School of Holistic Counselling.