Gerard Egan’s Skilled Helper Model of eclectically based counselling provides a structured and solution focused basis for counsellors, psychotherapists and hypnotherapists. It is a three stage model in which each state consists of specific skills that the therapist uses to help the client move forwards. Egan considered his method to be more about prevention than cure. By mastering the process of using these basic skills in an appropriate manner the talking therapist may be able to increase their efficiency and structure their work in a more logical way, thus helping clients in a more consistent manner and being less reliant upon their fluctuating ‘therapeutic inspiration’.
Theoretically the Skilled Helper approach draws on Carkoff's theory of high-level functioning helpers (which explains that helpers with the skills of empathy, respect, concreteness, congruence, self-disclosure, confrontation and immediacy are most effective); Strong's Social influence theory (which explains that helping is a process whereby clients are influenced by others because they perceive therapists as having particular attributes and with this influence being most powerful when the therapist avoids both laxity and coercion and is instead collaborative, empowering and democratic) and Albert Bandura's Learning theory (in which clients are seen as acquiring skills through coming to understand the processes of learning and developing appropriate self-efficacy expectations - expecting to achieve their goals by learning useful behaviours).
The Egan Skilled Helper approach encourages clients to become active interpreters of the world, giving meanings to actions, events and situations, facing and overcoming challenges, exploring problem issues, seeking new opportunities and establishing goals. Quite simply, success usually comes when human beings become active in