What do we mean by “professional dispositions”?

If you have trained as a counselor, you have been evaluated on your professional dispositions. These are the qualities beyond grades and exams that programs expect counselors-in-training to show, such as self-awareness, empathy, and flexibility. Accreditation standards ask programs to assess them, yet the counseling literature says little about how the people doing the evaluating understand them.

That gap is the focus of a new article I co-authored with Dr. Allison Levine and Dr. Susannah Wood, now published in The Journal of Humanistic Counseling. Allison led the study, and I worked on the early rounds of data analysis. Using qualitative analysis, we looked at how counselor educators and supervisors describe professional dispositions in their own words.

Three kinds of dispositions

What emerged was a preliminary three-part model. Rather than one list of traits, educators and supervisors described three related kinds of qualities.

Developmental skills turned out to connect to both of the other categories. Some grow out of qualities students already bring, and others build on what programs teach.

Put together, the picture is developmental. Students arrive with a starting point in areas like self-awareness and flexibility, and training challenges them and helps them grow from there.

What came up most

Many of the qualities participants named most often are humanistic ones: self-awareness, empathy, and a person-centered way of being. That is why our title calls them humanistic pillars. Several qualities also crossed categories: empathy and microskills were coded as both developmental and technical, while self-awareness and flexibility were coded as both developmental and intrinsic.

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The critical conversation

The second half of our title points to a harder question. When dispositions are vague or rest on unspoken norms, evaluating them can become part of a hidden curriculum: the implicit values and expectations a program never states but still rewards. In the article, we examine how counselor education may carry that kind of hidden curriculum in ways that disadvantage marginalized students.

This matters because disposition evaluations have real consequences for students. Naming what we are looking for, and asking where those expectations come from, is a step toward evaluating students more fairly.

Where this leads

The article closes with recommendations for future research on dispositions, for how programs evaluate them, and for making that evaluation more equitable. If you teach or supervise counselors-in-training, I would encourage you to read the full article and to look at your own program’s disposition criteria with these three categories in mind.