You are invited to join 3 sessions that will build your skills in client communications.

Session 1: Building Rapport (12 October 9-10:30am)

• Active listening and reflective responses
• Unconditional positive regard
  • The fundamental skills of rapport building, active listening and unconditional positive regard will be discussed in this session.
  • These strategies work on finding commonalities with clients, changing power relationships within appointments (ie. Empowering clients, relinquishing your power).
  • These are ‘non-judgemental’ techniques for gaining information from clients.
  • These are required foundational skills for future difficult conversations.
  • *Essentially “look after your client and they will look after their child/themselves”*

Session 2: Facilitating behaviour change (10 November 12-1:30pm)

Session 1 focussed on listening, non-judgement and information gathering. This session shifts focus to sharing information and facilitating client behaviour change.

• Having difficult conversations
  • The most difficult conversations occur when people are highly emotional-which occurs in many of the appointments we conduct.
  • This section introduces some ways to identify emotions, emotional reactions, and ways to respond.
• Motivational interviewing and behaviours around making changes
  • Motivational interviewing is one strategy that can be used to facilitate client decision making and behaviour change.
  • Strategic questioning allows clients to explore their thought processes and the things that are holding them back.

Session 3: Managing emotional responses (1 December 9-10:30am)

This session builds on information delivery and managing emotional responses.

• Delivering difficult news
  • This section is specifically about delivering difficult news (a diagnosis, a change in prognosis etc).
• Responding to people’s emotions
  • This section builds upon the previous discussions of active and reflective listening. Hopefully people will have had an opportunity to practice some of the skills learnt in the previous session.
• De-escalation techniques
  • This section will explore some of the ways we can recognise that a situation is escalating, and techniques to de-escalate.