Obviously, there's a a lot of knowledge and skills and ways of being that are very important for professional counselors to have.
And in our program, we have really tried to focus on what are those key things that will really help them to be the best professional counselor they can be based on our training.
And and we think about these in three categories, knowledge, skills, and ways of being, know, do, be.
Another way to think about this is the head, the hands, and the heart.
And so knowledge for us is really based on this key understanding of the basic human sciences, the the social behavioral sciences that really help us to understand what makes people tick, how to help them.
But that's also framed within our Catholic Christian model of understanding those things that we know to be true, that are consistent with science, but might not be fully revealed in science.
We're also very concerned that people know how to really reason things out, how to understand research, how to be good consumers of research, how to do research on their own practice to know that what they're doing is really helpful.
So those are the kinds of core knowledges, areas that people need to to walk away with that we help provide for them.
The the second thing is this doing.
And again, there's many things that professional counselors do.
Probably the heart for all of this is knowing how to listen in such a deep way that people feel fully heard, fully understood, and if you will, fully emotionally held.
There's like, this person gets me.
They they understand what it means to be me.
We also want them to take the knowledge that they have and to really develop comprehensive conceptualizations of who this person is in their entirety.
And that's where, again, we go back to both the basic social and behavioral sciences, and that which we also know by faith that's consistent with reason, that gives us this fuller picture to look at to understand people.
And the third area is the heart, is how to be.
We really want people to be vibrant and excited about their career as a professional counselor, and that they really live out the the aspirational ethics of what it means to be a competent professional counselor.
The other thing is that we really want people to practice and live a life that inspires, really, themselves and inspires their clients to have the courage to trust, to love, to hope, to live a flourishing life.