Counselling

I was born into a normal family with Dad, Mum, 3 sisters and younger brother. Life was normal and ordinary until my Dad met with an accident at his workplace, resulted in his left leg being amputated at the knee. I was eleven years old then and in Primary 5.

Thereafter, life was hard. With the condition running into my teenage life, I chose to study in the Polytechnic instead of the junior college as I felt that my industrial and economical worth would be better even if I could not make it to the university.

Being introvert during the secondary school days, I began to open up when I entered the Polytechnic and participated as a member of the Engineering Society. The society was managed all by students in the Polytechnic. I was well recognized for my effort and contributions towards the society and was sponsored by the society for a leadership course at the National Youth Leadership Institute.

During that 25 days’ course, my whole life began to open up. Not only I was trained on self confident, leadership and motivation, counseling was also part of course.

After the course, I started to apply what I had learned to organize activities for members of the Engineering Society. One of the activities organized was a hike in Pulau Tekong over the weekend for 200 freshmen in 1977. The knowledge of leadership and counseling came into play as I started to motivate, encourage and support my fellow schoolmates to join us in our self believed goals and direction. It was very fun thing to do then and I was very pleased, contended and satisfied when all the freshmen gave good feedbacks about how they had enjoyed the trip.

During my national service, I was posted as an instructor to the School of Basic Military Training. Even though in the military, discipline is the key factor to drive whatever needs to be done, occasionally, motivation techniques came in very handy when situations demanded.

One of the most recent encountered of counselling was with my final year students at the Polytechnic doing their final year project. Students with underlining problems exhibit behavioural pattern namely apathy, lateness, ill discipline, no respect for authority etc

Motivating them was a bigger task than the project itself. I could safely state that I saw their motivation came back after 17 weeks of hard work and counselling. Currently, they have the highest respect for me not because I am their supervisor or lecturer but I have earned them.

Real cases but students’ names were changed to keep confidentiality:

Student Ken was appointed the project leader by the team. As usual, he did not performed well in the first few weeks. He even acknowledged that he had been slacking given the fact that all his team members were slacking.

Being the first student in my target for motivation, he began to confide to me about his problems after weeks of small talks with him to gain his confidence. He had problems communicate with his parents and was very bothered. We spent hours together talking about his problems and develop solutions together for him using some of my previous experiences. Combining his effort, he had since been able to communicate well with his mother and will be working on his father. He also displayed a very positive attitude after that.

Another student, Levin was totally not interested in his work in the beginning and would come for the weekly project meetings, treating it as a pastime. I noticed that he was very quiet, kept to himself and had not been socializing with his team mates. He always had no confident in his work and always need confirmation to affirm his decisions. He had been behaving in this way until his group members started to protest against him after 16 weeks together.

From then, he was assigned to set up the Programmable Logic Control (PLC) circuits but he did not know how to do it and had no initiative to seek help. I had given him countless times of verbal warning and two email warning letters. My last stroke of patient ran out and I gave him an official warning.

At that time, I realised from his Care Person that he was actually a reinstated student and his bad academic performance had been related to his mother’s passing on due to cancer in 2005. He had been wondering why these things had to happen to him and had always in denial and depression.

Upon realizing, I immediately talked to him to try to get him out the situation and he was crying during our discussion. I knew that after my emotional talk to him, he had come to terms with his mother’s death and he will continue to move on in life positively. He had even promised me to tell his mother that he will start his life anew at her grave.

The next day, when he came to the Polytechnic, I knew that he was a change man with his cheerful expression and positive attitude. What a relief!

I want to give thanks to the opportunities given to me to be able to use my acquired counselling skills to help others having problems or in distress.