Humanistic person-centred set facilitation

ABSTRACT

This paper poses the question ‘What can we learn from the person-centred counselling literature which could be used by the action learning facilitator to help benefit the set?’. This question may be particularly important to facilitators seeking new ways to run their sets and to facilitators who would like to introduce a more humanistic and less mechanistic way of working with set members. Person-centred counselling is an approach to helping which aims to foster human growth and wellbeing. The person-centred approach was developed by Carl Rogers in the 1950s and has a number of similarities with Revan’s original ideas. Although Revans was insistent that action learning was not counselling there are several facets of person-centred theory which align with Revans underlying ideas and philosophy. The paper concludes with suggestions of how to incorporate Rogerian ideas into facilitation, namely those of empathy, congruence and Unconditional Positive Regard.

KEYWORDS:

• Facilitation
• humanistic
• person centred
• Rogers
• Revans

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gary Shepherd

Gary Shepherd is a Senior Lecturer and Research Lead in the Counselling Department at York St John University. He has used Action Learning within Anger Management groups for the past 10 years. Currently Dr Shepherd is developing humanistic person-centred set facilitation within Higher Education professional practice based sets.