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.