In: Psychology
Identify the professional qualities or aspects of human service practice that you would need the most important and why.
A social worker needs many qualities while engaing in his job. Empathy should be in greater amounts than anyone for engaging in such activities. Empathy helps them feel sorry for another person so that they can help them to the level best. Sympathy is just feeling sorry for someone's troubled condition. But empathy is trying to view the other person's problem in that person's perspective to understand it more deeply.
Other qualities include Boundary setting, active listening, social perceptiveness, self awareness, organization, coordination, persuasion, caring attitude, patience, effective communication, analytical skills, good judgement, etc.
For a social worker to understand effectively what a person says about what troubles he is going through, the social worker should be an active listener. He should listen carefully, about every aspect,should be able to connect with each problems of the person while listening to what he says. By that way, one can find more about the causes and conssquences ,also results in a better outcome. The social worker must be non judgemental to what the client says. He should not judge nor should he interupt and talk often. There should be an effective communucation in between. The social worker should listen patiently and be able to provide solutions, or even provide the client with a sense of recovery or calmness.
A boundary should be there in between. This helps the client build himself, not clinging on to the social worker,let it be a psychologist. The social worker can listen to all the problems of the client, but should not allow them to become overly close with the social worker. This creates dependency in the client and does not result in better outcomes. He/she should be having social perceptiveness,should perceive every cues inorder to help the client. He should also be having self awareness,having a better awareness about oneself helps in understanding others too.
He/she should be having a caring attitude that the client would feel comforted. The client is presenting problems and when the social worker empathetically and with patience, hears them ,that itself gives the client a sense of well being. Thus, helps alleviating his problems.
A social worker, let it be a nurse, a psychologist , a clinical social worker, whoever it would be, these qualities in them helps them suceed professionaly and above that alleviates the client's worrries.