Section 10 - Developing Your Counseling and Communication Skills Deliberately
The Guide for the Emerging Lactation Consultant
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The Emerging Lactation Consultant
A guide for preparing to be an IBCLC©, not just pass the exam.
Developing Your Counseling and Communication Skills Deliberately
Section 9 named the soft skills plainly: your ability to counsel, your approach to teaching, your communication skills and methods — the building blocks of skilled lactation care. It also placed you with a mentor, observing and practicing. This section addresses a gap that placement alone does not close.
Soft skills do not develop reliably just because you are present for clinical hours. Proximity to good practice is not the same as acquiring it. These skills develop when you treat them as skills — things to be named, practiced, observed, given feedback on, and improved — rather than as a personality trait you either have or lack.
Why the soft skills get left to chance
Hard skills are defined and settled by consensus. No one expects to absorb lactation physiology by being near it; they read, they take courses, they are tested. The soft skills are quietly treated differently. They are assumed to be either innate or something that simply rubs off with enough exposure. Many emerging lactation consultants leave their clinical experience as competent counselors largely to luck. Maybe they happened to have a mentor who modeled it well or they happened to already be good at it.
You do not have to leave it to luck. The same intentionality you have brought to every other part of this guide applies here. Counseling and communication can be broken into components, practiced component by component, and measurably improved. Doing that deliberately is what separates a practitioner who is reliably skilled from one who is hoping the skill arrived.
Name the skills before you practice them
“Communication skills” is too large to practice. You improve by naming the specific components and working on them one at a time. Skilled lactation communication includes, but is not limited to:
listening in a way that makes a person feel genuinely heard
asking questions that open up a client’s story rather than narrow it
giving information at the right moment, in the right amount, in language the person can actually receive
teaching a physical, hands-on skill so that someone can do it themselves
offering suggestions without sliding into telling people what to do
communicating clearly and appropriately with the rest of the health care team.
Each of those is a distinct, practiceable skill. Some you may already be strong in; others will be weaker. The first move is honest self-assessment — knowing which components are your strengths and which need deliberate work — because that is what lets you practice with precision instead of practicing “communication” in a vague, unmeasurable way.
Practice, observe, and seek feedback on purpose
Deliberate practice of these skills has a few concrete forms during your preparation.
Observe with the skills in mind. Section 9 has you observing a mentor and observing support groups. Make that observation specific: instead of watching the encounter as a whole, watch one component. How exactly did the facilitator ask that opening question? How did the IBCLC deliver difficult information without alarming the client? Naming what you are watching for turns observation into study.
Practice the components, including outside the consult room with other people in your life. Counseling skills are not only exercised with clients. How you listen, how you ask questions, how you give hard information — these can be practiced and noticed in many of your interactions. The point is to practice with awareness rather than waiting for a high-stakes clinical moment to be your rehearsal.
Seek feedback specifically, not generally. “How did I do?” produces little. “Did my questions open up her story or close it down?” produces something you can use. Ask your mentor for feedback on the specific component you are working on, and make that easy for them by telling them in advance what to watch. This is also where the small peer group from Section 9 earns its value — a place to talk honestly about communication challenges and to be observed by people invested in your growth.
Notice your own patterns. The self-awareness work of Section 5 connects directly here. The moments where your hidden ideals or vulnerabilities surface are, very often, communication moments — they show up in your tone, your word choice, the questions you do or do not ask. Watching your communication closely is also how you catch bias doing its quiet work in real time.
Why This Belongs In Your Preparation
These are the skills your clients will feel most directly. A family may not be able to evaluate your physiological knowledge, but they will know precisely whether they felt heard, whether they understood what you taught them, and whether they left feeling more capable or more confused.
Skilled lactation care lives in your physiology and your ethics, but it is delivered almost entirely through counseling and communication.
A practitioner with deep knowledge and weak communication skills will not be experienced by families as a skilled practitioner.
Your clinical experience is a limited, structured window in which you have a mentor, a peer group, and observation opportunities all available to you at once. That combination will not be so neatly arranged again. Using it deliberately to build your communication skills — naming components, practicing them, seeking specific feedback — means arriving at the credential as the kind of consultant a family actually experiences as skilled, rather than one who knows a great deal and struggles to convey any of it.
Counseling and communication are deep skills with their own training and literature. This section is about treating them as deliberate, practiceable skills during your preparation; continuing to develop them is lifelong work.
Add to Your Plan
This section asked you to treat counseling and communication as skills to practice deliberately, not traits to hope for; your plan should record how you will do that.
— Assess yourself honestly across the communication components named in this section: listening, opening questions, giving information well, teaching hands-on skills, offering suggestions without directing, and communicating with the health care team. Note your strengths and the two or three components that most need deliberate work.
— For one component that needs work, write a specific plan: how you will practice it, what you will watch for when you observe your mentor, and the specific feedback question you will ask.
— Note how you will use your peer group from Section 9 as a place to work on communication honestly.
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A note from Christine - This guide reflects my own perspective as a practicing IBCLC. I am not affiliated with the IBLCE or the IBCLC Commission and do not speak on their behalf. Always refer directly to the IBCLC Commission and IBLCE for current certification requirements. You can find official information at www.ibclc-commission.org.