Metacognition Article

  First off, I do not think there was enough time last week to process our in class activity. I gained a lot of knowledge using the different websites to find career information regarding our assigned case study. I wish that I would have known about the websites while I was in high school and undergrad because there is just so much useful information contained within those websites. I also liked the way we had a visual organizer to compare and contrast different occupations that fit within the individual presented to us. Again, this would have been useful at an earlier age in my life to help weigh pros and cons of different occupations.

    As for the article this week, Byars-Winston & Fouad (2006) discussed career counseling with a focus on ethnic minorities. As a student currently enrolled in multicultural counseling, I found the information to be overlap the chapters that I am currently studying. As we are progressing into the semester I am learning more and more about becoming more culturally competent as a future therapist and also about the discrimination that is still going on in the world today.

                One of the most valuable pieces of advice that I have gained from this article as well as multicultural counseling is how to be a culturally competent therapist. Counselors are encouraged to understand their awareness of their own cultural assumptions and how to address those assumptions. Therapy would be detrimental if a counselor was not able to understand the client’s way of life or way of thinking because of a cultural barrier.  A culturally competent counselor is also one that is able to monitor their own cultural understandings during sessions, as well as allow the client to explain and define themselves in regards to their culture. A counselor should be curious and ask questions about the client’s background to understand them better but also to help build rapport.

                Lastly, I liked that the article touched on ways to make career counseling more effective such as incorporating life experiences and world view of the client into the different interventions. I learned that another way to be more effective when working with clients is to self-disclose. In Multicultural Counseling we learned that another way to be more effective, when working with minority clients, is to self-disclose. I was confused about that because in Psychotherapy and Interventions we were told never to self-disclose unless the helper is 100% comfortable with doing so, and that the self-disclosure will aid in the interventions/recovery of the client. However, I think that self-disclosure is a way for the therapist to seem more “human like” and make the client feel more comfortable speaking with you.