Helping the Client: A Creative Practical Guide

Helping the Client is the best-selling text, which has long been used as the basis of interpersonal skills training in a wide range of professions from medicine to management. Based on John Heron′s well-known six category model, the book presents different forms of helping behavior which can be adopted by any practitioner working face-to-face with a client. Drawing on his many years of experience as a therapist, consultant and teacher, the author explores the contexts and issues associated with these different forms of helping and, for each, describes a wide range of practical interventions for the practitioner to use. He examines the objectives of helping, states of person-hood, the many ways in which helping can degenerate, the preparation and training of the practitioner, and examples of how the interventions can be used by different occupational groups. Helping the Client is the Fifth Edition of the book originally entitled Six Category Intervention Analysis. Revised and enlarged throughout, with a new chapter on co-working, the book remains essential reading for the development of interpersonal skills, in counseling, management, health care, social work, youth and community work, education, and many other professions.

John Heron founded the Human Potential Research Group at the University of Surrey, and later pioneered personal and professional development programs for doctors, as Assistant Director, British Postgraduate Medical Federation, University of London. He now runs the South Pacific Centre for Human Inquiry, New Zealand.