Custom «Values and Attitudes: What You Bring to the Helping Relationship» Essay Paper Sample

Human service professionals can work in the diverse areas including healthcare or social institutions with the common purpose of serving humanity and each separate individual. In such a way, various physical and mental disabilities, psychological problems, drugs or alcohol abuse, violence in society are the central issues for them. The aim to meet the needs of the society and provide help to each of its members predetermines the main competencies of human service workers that imply sound professional skills and abilities to create a strong trustful connection with people.

Any human service worker has to be characterized with a strong desire to help people. However, the sole desire is not enough to do the job as people are different and may need specific approaches in different situations. Therefore, psychological skills and good preparedness, patience, ability and desire to learn are the necessary traits of good councilors as well as court liaisons or rehabilitation managers. The psychological knowledge of the human service workers has to be based not only on the theoretical comprehension of the behavioral and cognitive models or differences between individual or group interactions. Instead, the skillful manifestation and dissimulation of emotion is inevitable in many cases. Furthermore, “the ability to manage stress” is important to protect the well-being of the staff and provide good results (Kinman & Grant, 2010). At the same time, it is crucial to possess good communication skills to be able to have effective discussions with clients. According to Suter et al. (2009), “patient-centered collaborative care” is the most effective and can be reached solely by means of inter-team and worker-client effective communication. However, the communicative skills are related not only to the verbal, but also non-verbal aspects. The essential point is following the ethical norms of the society and the organization. The worker has to respect the values and life style of the clients. Additionally, it is important to pay attention to the cultural awareness as it is widely known that the US is a multicultural country. Therefore, the effective assistance to all of the members demands eradication of all possible prejudices or biased attitudes. When doing research on the problematic issues for the human service workers, Betancourt et al. (2007) emphasized “racial and ethnic minorities and diverse cultures” as the most difficult tasks for the tested physicians. Therefore, the “effective cross-cultural care” is a topical issue for the healthcare sphere (Betancourt et al., 2007). In addition, the fact that the work is connected with the problematic situations, being responsible, caring and tactful is of great importance for the effective work.

As for me, I can consider myself as one who has a good background to become a human service worker, primarily for my strong desire to help people. Furthermore, I can easily find common language with new people and tend to understand and support them. Of course, the sphere of psychology, which is very interesting for me, has a great amount of the information that I still should learn. Moreover, I mostly communicate with healthy people rather than those who have some physical or psychological disabilities. Furthermore, my knowledge of the issues of violence, drug or alcohol abuse is mostly theoretical and there are good reasons to learn how to apply it effectively in real situations. At the same time, the human qualities I possess can be regarded as appropriate for this work. However, the emotional aspect is the one that deserves special attention; I must learn how to restrict some feelings or excessive empathy towards clients.

To sum it up, the above-mentioned analysis proves that a good human service worker is more than simply a skilled professional, who is fluent in psychology, cultural issues and communication strategies. Profound cultural and ethical background together with the human qualities and emotions that need to be properly regulated are not less essential features that can become decisive for the effective therapy or counseling.