Nova: Picture this. You're a nurse on a busy ward, and a patient who just received a difficult diagnosis turns to you and says, "I don't know how I'm going to cope." You're not a therapist. You've got five other patients waiting. But in this moment, you are the person they've chosen to open up to. What do you do?

Nova: : That's a scenario that must happen thousands of times every day in hospitals, schools, social work offices. And if I'm honest, my instinct would probably be to say something reassuring but maybe not actually all that helpful.

Nova: Exactly. And that tension, between wanting to help and not knowing how, sits at the very heart of the work of John McLeod, one of the most influential figures in counselling research and training in the world today. Emeritus Professor at the University of Abertay Dundee, visiting professor in Dublin, with a PhD from Edinburgh and postdoctoral work at Oxford. He has spent decades asking a deceptively simple question: what does it actually mean to help someone through conversation?

Nova: : Wait, before we dive in, I have to ask. When I searched for "Counselling Skills and Studies by John McLeod," I got some mixed results. Is that actually his book?

Nova: Great catch, and you have just identified one of the most common confusions in counselling education. "Counselling Skills and Studies" is actually written by Fiona Ballantine Dykes, Barry Kopp, Traci Postings, and Anthony Crouch. It is published by Sage in association with the CPCAB, the Counselling and Psychotherapy Central Awarding Body, and it is a brilliant training textbook. John McLeod's work is different but deeply complementary. He has written multiple landmark books on counselling skills, most notably "Counselling Skills: Theory, Research and Practice," now in its third edition, co-authored with Julia McLeod. Today we are exploring the rich world of John McLeod's thinking on what it truly means to be skilled at helping others.

Nova: Let's start with one of John McLeod's most important conceptual contributions: the distinction between counselling as a formal profession and counselling skill as something embedded in everyday roles. In his 2007 book simply titled "Counselling Skill," McLeod made a radical argument. He said that counselling skills are not just for counsellors.

Nova: : Okay, so this is about, what, a nurse or a teacher using counselling-type skills without being a counsellor?

Nova: Precisely, but it goes deeper than that. McLeod coined the term "embedded counselling" and it has become a whole field of research. Think about it. A social worker visiting a family in crisis, a doctor explaining a life-changing diagnosis, a teacher supporting a student through bullying. These professionals are not conducting fifty-minute therapy sessions. They are using counselling skills in single episodes, often spontaneously, woven into the fabric of their primary professional role.

Nova: : That sounds incredibly demanding. How is it different from just being a kind person who listens?

Nova: That is the core question McLeod has spent his career answering. He argues that embedded counselling is actually harder than formal therapy in some ways. In a therapy clinic, you have a dedicated hour, a quiet room, a clear contract. In embedded counselling, you might have ten minutes on a hospital corridor. There is no opportunity to inculcate the client into a therapy methodology. You have to work with what is right in front of you. McLeod's research shows that effective embedded counsellors need a very specific and refined set of skills precisely because the context is so constrained.

Nova: : That makes me think of all the times someone has opened up to me unexpectedly and I have felt completely unprepared.

Nova: And that is why McLeod's work matters so much. He has identified that listening carefully, being reliable and trustworthy, instilling hope, and maintaining self-awareness are not soft skills. They are trainable, researchable competences. His studies have even used rating scales to assess the level of counselling skill exhibited in audio-recorded segments of nurses interacting with patients, and the findings show that with proper training, these skills improve measurably.

Nova: In "Counselling Skills: Theory, Research and Practice," now in its third edition from 2022, John and Julia McLeod lay out what I think of as the architecture of a helping conversation. The book has sixteen chapters, each unpacking a different dimension of skilled helping. Let me walk you through the structure because it is genuinely elegant.

Nova: : Please do. I am always skeptical of books that promise to teach something as nuanced as human connection.

Nova: Fair skepticism. But here is what sets this book apart. It starts with listening. Not just hearing words, but what they call "aligning with the client." Chapter three is about listening, but chapter four goes further into attunement, into what it means to truly align yourself with another person's frame of reference. Then it moves to facilitating insight and reflection, which is helping someone see their own situation more clearly without telling them what to see.

Nova: : So it is about guiding rather than directing.

Nova: Exactly. And then the really interesting layers come in. Chapter six covers enabling emotional awareness, expression, and self-regulation. Chapter seven addresses supporting behaviour change. Chapters eight and nine explore sensitivity to language and nonverbal communication respectively. These are not separate from listening. They are the deeper grammar of listening. McLeod argues that skilled helpers notice the words a client uses, the metaphors, the hesitations, the body language, and use that information to deepen understanding.

Nova: : I am starting to see why this is more than just being nice. It is almost like learning to read a second language in real time.

Nova: That is a brilliant analogy. And chapter ten on building strengths, resources, and sources of meaning is particularly important to McLeod. He is not just interested in what is wrong with people. He is deeply interested in what keeps them going. What gives their life meaning. What strengths they already have. The helping conversation is as much about discovering and amplifying those as it is about addressing problems.

Nova: : And then there is the counsellor's own self-awareness, right?

Nova: Chapter eleven. McLeod insists that self-awareness is not a luxury add-on. It is a core skill. If you do not know your own triggers, your own assumptions, your own emotional landscape, you cannot truly be present for someone else. You will unconsciously steer the conversation into territory that feels safe for you, not what the client needs.

Nova: Now let's talk about what is arguably John McLeod's most significant theoretical contribution to the field. In 2006, together with Mick Cooper, he began developing what is now called the pluralistic approach to counselling and psychotherapy.

Nova: : Pluralistic. That sounds philosophical. What does it actually mean in practice?

Nova: It means rejecting the idea that there is one right way to do therapy. McLeod and Cooper looked at the counselling world and saw something troubling. Different therapeutic schools, cognitive behavioural therapy, psychodynamic, person-centred, each claiming to have the answer, each drawing lines in the sand. They called this "schoolism" and argued it was ultimately not serving clients.

Nova: : But surely some approaches are better than others for certain problems?

Nova: That is exactly the pluralistic insight. Different people are helped by different things at different times. The pluralistic approach rests on three pillars. First, pluralism across orientations, being open to multiple ways of understanding and helping. Second, pluralism across clients, recognizing that each person is unique and needs a bespoke approach, not something off the peg as McLeod puts it. Third, pluralism across perspectives, meaning both the therapist and the client have valuable input into deciding what to work on and how.

Nova: : So the client gets a say in the therapy method? That sounds almost too obvious to be revolutionary.

Nova: You would think so, but in traditional therapy models, the therapist largely decides the approach. The pluralistic model puts shared decision-making and ongoing feedback at the centre. McLeod and Cooper published their landmark book "Pluralistic Counselling and Psychotherapy" in 2011 and it has been cited over three hundred times. It has spawned training programmes, research clinics, and international conferences. The British Psychological Society's Division of Counselling Psychology has been particularly receptive.

Nova: : How do you actually train someone to be pluralistic though? It sounds like you would need to know everything.

Nova: That is the challenge and McLeod's answer is elegant. You do not need to master every approach. You need to know enough to have a menu of options to discuss with the client. And crucially, you need the humility to say, "I do not know what will work best for you. Let's figure it out together." McLeod's own background is deeply rooted in Carl Rogers' person-centred approach, and the pluralistic model is essentially an extension of Rogers' core belief: trust the client's own direction.

Nova: One of the most practical and perhaps challenging aspects of McLeod's work is his insistence that counselling skills must be developed through deliberate practice, not just absorbed through reading or discussion.

Nova: : Deliberate practice. That sounds like something an athlete would do, not a therapist.

Nova: That is exactly the analogy. McLeod and Julia McLeod have incorporated deliberate practice and self-practice into their training model. In the third edition of "Counselling Skills: Theory, Research and Practice," the book is packed with learning tasks, reflection points, vignettes, candidate responses, and questionnaires. It is designed not just to be read but to be worked through.

Nova: : Walk me through what deliberate practice looks like in counselling training.

Nova: Imagine you are learning the skill of paraphrasing, reflecting back what a client has said in your own words to check understanding. You do not just try it once in a roleplay. You isolate that specific skill. You practise it repeatedly with immediate feedback. You might record yourself and analyse the recording. You compare your response to expert examples. McLeod's research with counselling trainees shows that students find deliberate practice very challenging at first. It exposes gaps. It can be uncomfortable. But it demonstrably improves skill performance.

Nova: : Is there actual evidence that this approach works better than traditional training?

Nova: There is growing evidence. McLeod has always been a champion of evidence-based practice. He has written multiple books on doing research in counselling and psychotherapy. His 2022 research programme incorporated self-practice and deliberate practice into a year-long counselling skills training programme. The results showed that while students initially struggled with the structured intensity of deliberate practice, they ultimately reported deeper learning and greater confidence than through traditional methods alone.

Nova: : So this is not just about being warm and empathetic. It is about treating helping as a craft that can be systematically improved.

Nova: That is the McLeod thesis in a nutshell. Warmth and empathy are necessary but not sufficient. You can be the kindest person in the world and still be an ineffective helper if you have not developed the specific skills of listening, reflecting, challenging, and structuring conversations. The good news is that these skills can be learned. And the third edition of the McLeods' book provides the roadmap.

Nova: So let's bring this together. John McLeod's body of work on counselling skills represents one of the most comprehensive, research-grounded, and practically useful contributions to the helping professions in recent decades. From his early work on "Counselling Skill" in 2007, focused on embedded practitioners like nurses and teachers, through to the third edition of "Counselling Skills: Theory, Research and Practice" in 2022, he has systematically mapped out what skilled helping actually looks like.

Nova: : What strikes me most is how this reframes helping from something mysterious or purely intuitive into something that is structured and learnable without losing its humanity.

Nova: That is beautifully put. McLeod gives us a framework where listening is not passive but active and skilled. Where aligning with the client, facilitating insight, enabling emotional expression, supporting behaviour change, attending to language and nonverbal cues, building on strengths, and practising self-awareness are all interconnected dimensions of a single craft. And his pluralistic approach with Mick Cooper reminds us that the ultimate arbiter of what helps is the client themselves.

Nova: : So if someone listening wants to take something practical away from this conversation, what would it be?

Nova: I would offer three takeaways. First, counselling skills are for everyone who works with people, not just professional therapists. If you are a manager, a teacher, a healthcare worker, a social worker, these skills are directly relevant to your daily life. Second, these skills are learnable. McLeod's books provide structured pathways with exercises, reflections, and deliberate practice tasks. Third, the heart of helping is not having the answers. It is creating a space where someone else can find their own. As McLeod would say, be reliable, be present, listen deeply, and trust the other person's capacity for growth.

Nova: : I started this conversation thinking counselling skills were about techniques and formulas. I am walking away understanding that it is about a way of being with another person. Informed, intentional, and humble.

Nova: And that is the gift of John McLeod's work. He has given us the vocabulary and the evidence to understand something that the best helpers have always known intuitively. Helping is not about fixing people. It is about walking alongside them with skill, awareness, and genuine curiosity about who they are and what they need.

Nova: : This is Aibrary. Congratulations on your growth!

Nova: Congratulations on your growth.