Reflective Listening

Today was the very first day of filming the role play sessions for counselling class. I was not that nervous because we had the script for this session to begin. It felt like I was prepared, like I knew what had to be done or needed to be said during these sessions. However, it was not that easy when we began filming soon, the script portion was over and I felt lost in words. I was hesitant to ask, to respond in the beginning because I did not wanted to hurt my client even unintentionally. Soon, the conversation started flowing I did notice that my questions came out fairly complex, they were not well structured thus could have lead to potentially closed ended questions. However, my client did take me along the right path and gave well explained
Accordingly, I thought it was better to spend those ten minutes in listening to her to let it all out even though the issue was not connected to the one we were working on. After refocussing the client on the core issue, I used reflective listening to confirm and clarify the statements. While rephrasing, I managed to reinforce the statements that indicated the client was affirm about change. We explored together the underlying meaning of the certain situations as to why they were bothering or what was the origin of the
My client and I, worked on finding the issue and recasting it so that the client could understand that she was not the issue but the issue was the real issue. I was able to give her silence when needed, followed by reassurance every time she paused and hesitated to proceed while sharing something of great difficulty. I used various ways to express empathy, including empathetic listening and response to understand the emotions, feelings the client is experiencing.
I noticed that my client has slowed down a lot, initially she was laughing out of nervousness which now has decreased a lot. She focuses on the main issue using a much calm tone which gave me a sense of pride that my client is not very nervous during sessions anymore. Her sticking to the issue, actively thinking about ways to change indicates that we were on the right path following the right direction. I did learn to not ask close-ended questions anymore, as this session had almost all open-ended questions. However, I still need to work on the structure of my questions thus to keep them precise and concise which would enable the client to answer