More on the Counsellor’s Creed: Clear Values, Professionalism
More thoughts on the Counsellor’s Creed. Item 2: I will make my values known to you, and will endeavour to be professionally competent at all times.
More on the 12-point Counsellor’s Creed, by an unknown author (see “The Counsellor’s Creed, “I cannot be your parent…””):
2. I will make my values known to you, and will endeavour to be professionally competent at all times.
Endeavour? It’s a long word, but it still means “try”. Would I be happy with a surgeon who said he tried to be professionally competent at all times? I would prefer to see that the counsellor adheres to an ethical code. Obviously they might fall short sometimes, but they hold themselves accountable. And the code is specific. To some, “professional” just means clinical and cold, while to others a whole array of different and specific expectations may come into play. At the end of the day the statement doesn’t mean anything at all except “I’m serious! Really! You’ll be safe with me!”
Making values known to the client seems to be a good idea, as long as that doesn’t involve foisting a whole load of personal opinions onto the client. Sometimes we assume that what seems to us to be self-evident is apparent to everybody — counsellors are not immune. But while all counsellors should share the basic value of believing in the client’s powers of self determination, they do carry differing values, one, for example, believing in autonomy and independence at all costs, another emphasising relationships.
Differences in cultural values are immense. Clients and counsellors being of different cultural backgrounds is the norm rather than a special case; in the final analysis each family carries its own culture, its own ethnic, social, religious mix, maybe especially the ones who think that they don’t. It would be scary if counsellors were to form such a family, working in the service of unexamined values, not made explicit and therefore open to all varieties of interpretation by clients, who are then unable to make fully informed choices.
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This article was last reviewed by on Friday, 14th December 2007. You can leave a response below.
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18th December 2007
thanks again for a thoughtful examination of this.
being a bit of a word fanatic (i guess the importance of language is one of MY values :) may i point out that the word endeavor doesn’t really mean “trying” in the sense of “ok, mom, i’ll try to be home on time”. the word “endevor” is often seen as “attempt”, but in the sense of “making an earnest attempt”. taking it from its word origin, it means, “to make it one’s duty”.
so how does this sound: “… and will make it my duty to be professionally competent at all times”?
what would you say is the difference between an ethical code and this counsellors creed?
20th December 2007
From one word fanatic to another :-)
I hear endeavour just as a formal way of saying try. So try, plus trying to impress with formality, is to put up a bit of a screen, which is how I went on to consider “professionalism” and what that means to us, the connotations it has.
“make it my duty to be professionally competent” does sound a lot better. But still the questions remain. Just saying you work to an ethical code is professionalism in action.
An ethical code I would say is more concrete, and more useful to the client as a basis to make complaints, this creed seems to me to be aimed more at counsellors to clarify the spirit of what they are doing…