Counselling Diploma: Earn a Living While Helping Other People
One would say that people who have experienced a lot in their lives could be the best counsellors in the field. People who survived terrible accidents, who coped with emotional and physical abuse, people who had to live on the streets and raise a child and similar unfortunate situations. While experience is the best teacher in life, it’s not necessarily the only one. Some people are born to be counsellors as they have the needed character and patience that would make them be a good one. 
Naturally, the first thing is to have it in you. To have a character that is all about people, to be someone who likes talking and listening, and someone who emits the energy that draws people in and provokes them to confide in you. Along with the basic personality traits, one should have a solid theoretical knowledge of how to employ all those personality traits and put them to good use to their community. While it’s a good thing to be a natural in counselling, having a diploma in the area is a much bigger plus.
You can gain your certificate and acknowledgement by signing up to obtain a counselling diploma online, through an online course. Online studying is a wonderful combination that mixes the flexibility of studying at your own pace and time with the ongoing support of a team of assigned mentors. Make no mistake though – just because you’re not physically in a classroom, doesn’t mean you’d be skipping the interactive assessments, the online tutorials and the participation in discussion boards. All this along with your desire to succeed will lead to you gaining your counselling diploma online. Additionally, owning a few of the following personality traits can show you whether you’re born to be a counsellor or not.
Caring about people
There are two types of people according to this criteria: people who are able to feel deep and honest empathy about other people’s problems, and people who react rather cruel to problematic situations, with a simple “get over it” type of reaction. The second group of people lacks the emotional softness that contributes to compassion towards people, which is the backbone of the psychology industry. A good counsellor has to be at least a basic psychiatrist.
Being naturally inquisitive and knowing when to stop
When talking to people, do you know when and how to pose the right questions? Do you know how to get information out of people so you can help them? If you do, then they would find it easy to confide in you and would generally like to talk to you because they’d feel understood. If you only nod and interrupt them with random talks, questions and observations, you’re not a good communicator at all and you probably shouldn’t pursue a career in counselling.
Tolerance
Having a high level of tolerance is very important in this career. Recovering from emotional distress and trauma is a long and hard journey, which means that probably the progress would be slow. Therapy would most likely include you listening to some claims that normally one would judge them severely, but you need to hold your opinion since it’s not yours to judge, but to listen and try to help.
