About this course

Learning Objectives

• Describe active listening as a multi-dimensional clinical skill that involves attending to the client's verbal content, tone, body language, energy shifts, trends, and what is left unsaid.
• Differentiate between acknowledgment and praise, and identify the clinical purpose of each in solution-focused practice.
• Apply the six core listening skills — noticing, acknowledging, summarizing, reflecting, ensuring clarity, and ensuring understanding — within solution-focused therapeutic conversations.
• Demonstrate the practice of customizing questions to the client by attending to and using the client's own language, metaphors, and meaning-making.
• Analyze common pitfalls that compromise active listening — including listening with an agenda, premature interpretation, and habitual questioning — and identify clinical strategies for preserving the client's voice.

Learning Levels

• All

Course Instructor(s)

• 

  Dr. Liz Lasky, PhD, LCSW, ACC

  Dr. Liz Lasky, PhD, LCSW, is the founder of The Coach Training Program For Helping Professionals™ and lizlasky.com. She is passionate about teaching therapists how to coach ethically and well. Dr. Liz Lasky is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (NY State, MSW from Yeshiva University). She holds a PhD from Yeshiva University in Social Welfare. She is also a New York University Certified Coach and holds the International Coach Federation credential of Associate Certified Coach (ACC). She is an adjunct professor at Fordham University. She is a published author (both in peer reviewed academic journals and her own book), a professional expert for Bravo TV, and presents her research on coaching single women internationally, most notably at Harvard University. She is also a proud Fellow of The Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital, Harvard University.

Disclosure

References

• Hill, C. E. (2020). Helping skills: Facilitating exploration, insight, and action (5th ed.). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000147-000
• Lee, G. C., Platow, M. J., & Cruwys, T. (2024). Listening quality leads to greater working alliance and well-being: Testing a social identity model of working alliance. British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 63(4), 573–588. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjc.12489
• Norcross, J. C., & Lambert, M. J. (Eds.). (2019). Psychotherapy relationships that work: Volume 1: Evidence-based therapist contributions. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/med-psych/9780190843953.001.0001
• Elliott, R., Bohart, A., Larson, D., Muntigl, P., & Smoliak, O. (2023). Empathic reflections by themselves are not effective: Meta-analysis and qualitative synthesis. Psychotherapy Research, 33(7), 957-973. https://doi.org/10.1080/10503307.2023.2218981
• Wampold, B. E., & Flückiger, C. (2023). The alliance in mental health care: conceptualization, evidence and clinical applications. World Psychiatry, 22(1), 25-41. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.21035