What a Typical Week Looks Like

Once you enrol, your week has a simple rhythm to it. During term time you come in once a week. That is it. No daily commute, no packed schedule. Just one day a week in the room with your group, and some reading and reflection around it in your own time.

Here is what to expect when you walk through the door.

Your first day

Everyone in the room on day one will have first day nerves. The person sitting next to you, the one who looks completely at ease, the one who got there early and has already arranged their pens. All of them. First day nerves are one of the great equalisers, and counselling students tend to be particularly good at recognising them in each other.

What happens over the following weeks is one of the things that surprises people most about the course. As the conversations deepen and you begin to really get to know the people around you, something shifts. The group stops being a collection of strangers and starts becoming something that is genuinely hard to describe until you have experienced it. A community, in the truest sense of the word.

Everyone brings their own personality, their own history, their own reasons for being there. That mix is not incidental to the learning. In counselling training it is part of it. You will find yourself looking forward to the week’s session not just because of what you are going to learn, but because of who you are going to be back in the room with.

“I was absolutely terrified on the first day when I came in. I’ve only missed about three or four sessions in two years and that was because I was ill. I wanted to be here. And that’s kind of really important and it’s a really big deal.”

Paul, UK Therapy Guild graduate

Activity – Join the Conversation

Every person reading this has their own reason for being here. Some will have known for years that counselling was the direction they wanted to go. Others will have stumbled across it unexpectedly. Some will be quietly excited. Some will still be on the fence.

Click Comments at the top of this page and tell us in a sentence or two: what brought you here?

It does not have to be polished or profound. It just has to be yours. Other students and tutors can see and respond to comments, so you might find that someone else’s answer resonates with you more than you expect.

When you are ready, mark this lesson as complete and move on.