Very Important counselling lesson

Mukesh was here in the morning for speech therapy. We started with story telling by bouncing and prolongation. As I saw and observed, Mukesh was good at both the techniques in the clinic but has never used them outside.So, I thought of taking him out and have both of us practice these techniques in the real world. Mukesh was very hesitant to use the techniques initially, so I had to first give him a demo by taking to a stranger and then to a group of people by using boucing and prolongation. But still he was hesitant to talk to people, so i tried pushing him hard, which as I see in the end was of no use. What I should have done was first of all to be very flexible with our goals. If he was not finding it comfortable to do a planned activity, I should have changed the goal and the task immediately to something which he could have achieved..e.g. Talk to a stranger in whatever way he feel comfortable by keeping eye contact all the time and in the end I could have asked him the colour of the person’s eyes. Because whenever some one goes home after a speech theraphy session, he/she should be in high spirits, full of confidence and with a sense of achievement. These are in themselves very important aspects of theraphy. Will keep them in mind from next time.