As McLeod stated in his Workbook, participating in a learning group helps the participants to share experience, to explore difficult topics in more depth, to have an idea of how he or she is viewed by others, and many other vitally useful skills for counselling practice (McLeod, 53).
My personal experience of working in a group at my practical classes helped me a lot in deeper understanding and mastering the theory of counselling and, as a result, gaining the professional skills necessary for my future counselling practice. One of the most important experiences I have had at my practical classes was giving an oral presentation in front of the class. The task was to share our personal experience of being understood and misunderstood in a difficult situation to other students. The most challenging for me was speaking in front of the audience in English. I am an international student and English is not my native language that is why it was difficult for me to give a true and emotional presentation and to mind my grammar mistakes at the same time.
Stepping back and critically analyzing my speech I can remember now the trembling of my voice, awkwardness in my gestures and uneasiness of the whole situation. I could see the eyes of my fellow students staring at me and it seemed to me as if they were scrutinizing me all the time and were ready to notice the smallest mistakes in my language. At the same time I felt that regardless of my grammar mistakes my story was good, very emotional with many details. At the end of the speech I noticed that many students looked at me with sympathy and approval. After the class some of the students came up to me and expressed their admiration. I understood that in spite of my bad English and my nervousness my fellows liked my presentation. This means that I could make myself sound sincere, emotional and benevolent. These qualities will be very useful in the process of interviewing my future patients.
To my mind my oral presentation was a great opportunity for me to test my personal skills of speaking out in front of the audience. Being an international student is very difficult but this fact helped me to reveal my complexes and now I know how to overcome them. Nowadays one can meet students from all over the world almost in every educational establishment and I will try not to bother so much about my national identity, instead I will have to spend more time practicing my spoken English. Fritz Perls, a noted German-born psychiatrist and psychotherapist, spoke English with a heavy accent but this did not prevent him from becoming one of the greatest Gestalt therapists of all times.
References
McLeod, J. The Counsellor's Workbook, 2nd ed. Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2010.
Running head: REFLECTION ON MY EXPERIENCE OF ORAL PRESENTATION
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