6 Quotes by Jeffrey A. Kottler

But what he meant is that we must always keep one foot in the client’s world.

I also think that human behavior is so mysterious and unpredictable that if you are not humble about it you are bound to be insensitive to a lot of the dilemmas and predicaments that people are facing.

Change usually begins with someone feeling a level of desperation that leads him or her to take constructive risks and experiment with alternative ways of being that previously felt inaccessible.

We thought back to previous research we’d been involved in with so-called difficult clients. One conclusion was that there really are no such things – all clients are really doing the best they can – just doing their jobs coping in the only way they know how.

What the client brings to us in a session is so overwhelming and so full of content and feeling that we can’t hold it all. So we have to find ways to live with that – to live with all this uncertainty, all this mystery, all this ambiguity. At the same time, our clients are demanding answers and solutions.

We are playwrights in that we spontaneously compose and direct dialogue, acting out various roles of a nurturer, an authority, or a character from a client’s life.