Are you looking to use counselling skills to enhance your existing helping role?Are you taking the first steps towards becoming a professional counsellor?This practical guide will provide you with the ideal introduction, showing you what helping and counselling is all about. Part 1: Counselling Skills will introduce readers to the underpinning knowledge and practical tools needed to develop a range of helping skills for use in a variety of helping roles, showing what it means to work safely and ethically. Part 2: Counselling Studies will help them take their understanding further by considering in detail important theories and professional issues, preparing them to work as a professional counsellor. Part 3: Counselling Study Skills will offer practical advice and hints and tips to help them make the best start on their counselling portfolio, including journal and essay writing skills, research skills and how to get inspired and overcome blocks to learning. The Third Edition includes new content on counselling skills competencies; working with diverse client groups; online counselling; new case studies, tips and activities. Packed full of practical activities and written in a supportive conversational style, this book is essential reading for anyone wanting to learn counselling skills or embarking on their first stage of training to be a counsellor.