Discuss how you will develop your own cultural competency so that you are prepared to work with individuals who are different from you.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

?What is of real value in any of this discussion is the degree to which it leads you to question and consider your own relationship to issues of difference, particularly the ways in which you are different from your clients.
?Much of the value in this discussion is about increasing self-awareness. What are your personal attitudes, biases, even prejudices that affect your ability to build relationship?
How do your own values and beliefs reflect real differences? How much are they simply old messages from your past? How much interest do you have in learning about people who are different?
?Bringing attitudes that lie darkly under the surface into the light of awareness is a major piece of work that you can do to increase your cultural competency as a counselor. You can choose to put yourself into situations that will challenge your comfort level, and this will bring your own biases into sharper perspective.
?You can also choose to expand your cultural awareness and desire for greater under-standing to the world outside your counseling office and make promotion of multicultural perspectives in counseling part of your broader professional activism.
?Self-awareness is part of the means of increasing cultural competence, and you can also become more competent by increasing your knowledge base of cultural and diversity issues.
?Read the research about multicultural counseling, and read what the emerging research suggests is best practice. You can read about cultural groups other than your own, and you can sample the literature of those other cultures.
?You can seek out training opportunities that will increase your sensitivity to issues of culture and diversity.
?More than this, you can begin to broaden your sense of citizenship to include more than nationality.