Abstract
The paper describes how the client’s self-deprecations are treated in career guidance. While in everyday talk, a preferred response to a self-deprecation is disagreement, the case can be more complex in institutional encounters, considering, for example, epistemic rights to assess the client. Through conversation analysis of video-recorded data, we will show two ways in which career counsellors respond to their client’s self-deprecations: reframing and empathetic listening. In reframing, the counsellor shifts perspective so that the client’s assessment of themselves is presented in more positive or neutral light. In empathetic listening, the counsellor does not respond in the next turn unit after the self-deprecation, but shows nonverbally acknowledgement of it. In these cases, the client may produce the ‘disagreement’ with their self-deprecation by moving to more positive self-attributions. We discuss these practices in relation to Goffman’s concept of face work.
Introduction
In career guidance and counselling, a major aim is to strengthen the client’s agency (Leiman, 2015; Thomsen, 2012; Toiviainen, 2022; Vanhalakka-Ruoho, 2014; Vehviläinen, 2014, 2021; Vehviläinen and Souto, 2021). In professional practices, this means that the professional should not give ready-made solutions to the concerns of the client but help the client to find their own ways to proceed in what they are pursuing, for example in making their career choices in the case of career guidance. In accomplishing this, it is the task of the practitioner to balance two relevant, but potentially contradictory orientations. On the one hand, the aim is to help the client by mobilising professional knowledge and understandings. On the other, the practitioner should avoid excessively directive actions, in order to foster and maintain the clients’ autonomy and agency. This ‘art of balancing’ occurs in multiple ways in various guidance and counselling settings. It has been analysed particularly in connection to advice-giving and information delivery practices in various health-care related counselling settings (Lehtinen, 2005; Peräkylä, 1995; Pilnick, 2002; Sarangi et al., 2003; Silverman, 1997), career guidance (Vehviläinen, 2001, 2003) and helpline talk (Butler et al., 2009, 2010). Also, questioning (Cantwell et al., 2022), decision-making and ‘focus-establishing’ practices are shaped by such balancing aims (Jautz et al., 2023; Kontunen et al., 2020; Savander et al., 2019; Weiste et al., 2020). In this paper, we will provide a new angle to this notion of balancing in guidance and counselling settings.
While questioning and advice-giving practices in career guidance have been on the list of CA research since the 1990s, assessment or evaluation practices have so far not been in focus. In this paper we are focusing on what professionals do when clients produce negative evaluations of their own selves that is self-deprecate. The clients often complain about their circumstances in a way that makes a supportive response by the professional relevant (Couper-Kuhlen, 2012: Pomerantz, 1986). In these situations, the professional must balance between the principle of not taking positions of epistemic authority and the interactional preferences for support made relevant by the client’s complaint (Couper-Kuhlen, 2012; Pomerantz, 1986; Vehviläinen, 2001). The case is perhaps even more delicate when the client does not complain about outer circumstances, but about their own actions or self, in other words, when the client self-deprecates. These kinds of situations are observed in the current paper.
Self-deprecations occur in various forms in our social life and ordinary conversations, and their various functions have been discussed by earlier research. Self-deprecations have been shown to accomplish face-saving functions – both the other’s and the speaker’s face (Kim, 2014, 2015: Yu, 2013;). Based on her analyses on both ordinary conversations and institutional talk, Speer (2019) points out that self-deprecations work in various sequential positions to deal with interactional trouble and participants’ social identities. They can be used to pre-empt potentially troublesome activities, to advance these activities and alleviate the troubles also in the post-activity position. As Etelämäki et al. (2013) point out based on their Finnish data, self-deprecation can also function as a fishing device for compliments.
In our data, the self-deprecations occur in two main functions. They primarily contribute to the talk where the client presents their reason for being in guidance, that is the problem they need help with. Self-deprecations also occur in some cases in responding activities, where the client responds to the counsellor’s compliments. We will be interested in the facework and identity-related dimensions of our examples, but the preference organisation will also come to play in our analysis.
According to Goffman (1955), self is omnirelevant in interaction. In what Goffman called face-work, people communicate that they see and respect the self that a person participating in interaction wants to present to others. Goffman maintains that the self that is presented in the interaction is sacred, but at the same time participants are dependent on the other’s collaboration in the face work. In other words, the self of a participant of interaction is not taken for granted but a practical achievement. While this kind of face work is done all the time, sometimes people make more direct self-attributions that call for recognition from the co-participants. In earlier conversation analytical studies, such self-attributions have been examined in the context of everyday talk (Visapää, 2021) and psychotherapy (Deppermann et al., 2020, Peräkylä et al., 2024). These studies suggest that self can be presented both performatively (through behaviour that implies what the self is like) and declaratively (through a statement about self). In the current study, we are interested in declarative self-assessments, more specifically, self-deprecations. As the self-deprecation ‘threats’ a positive face of the speaker, we assume that face-work is made particularly relevant in these situations (cf. Peräkylä et al., 2024).
Pomerantz (1984) pointed out that, unlike in the case of other types of assessment, a default response to a self-deprecation is disagreement. For example, Pomerantz (1984: 85) shows an extract where a participant says ‘I’m so dumb I don’t even know it’ and the co-participant disagrees simply by saying ‘Y-no, you’re not dumb’. Of course, in many situations, disagreement with the self-deprecation requires some knowledge on the part of the responding actor. In the context of institutional interaction (such as psychotherapy or guidance) the professional may have limited knowledge of the client and there might not be interactionally legitimate ways to disagree, while it would also be threatening to the working relationship to appear to be agreeing. Furthermore, disagreement with the self-deprecation can be in contrast with the institutional aims of the encounter, such as fostering the client’s self-observation or self-reflection (Kotthoff, 1993; Lazaraton, 1997; Speer, 2019).
In the current paper, we are interested in how the client’s self-deprecations are treated in the context of career guidance. We will focus especially on the aspect of empathetic listening, which seems to be a way to balance between supporting the client’s face in terms of everyday talk (Goffman, 1955; Pomerantz, 1984) and the institutional aim of the counselling, that is supporting the client’s agency. In presenting the empathetic responding, we will use one encounter that was held remotely through MS Teams application (video connection). Both participants in this recording are shown seated at their desks, with their upper body and face well available. In the other recordings, participants are caught by one camera, both seated at a table or at comfortable chairs facing each other. While some of the ways in which the counsellor responds may be specific to remote meetings, due to the relatively small data set, we do not assess the differences between face-to-face and remote encounters.
Data and method
The data consist of 11 hours of recordings from career guidance for university or high school students 1 (10 clients and 8 professionals). Two of the encounters were in English, where participants used English as lingua franca, the rest of them in Finnish. The professionals taking part in these recordings were participating a further education programme for career guidance practitioners to improve their expertise in career guidance. Their clients were young adults either about to graduate from their master’s programme or high school or recently graduated. They made the recordings on their own with their clients with one video camera. One of the encounters was held remotely and recorded in Microsoft Teams-application. Written informed consent was obtained from the participants.
The method of the study is conversation analysis (CA; Sidnell and Stivers, 2012). We collected all the cases from the data set (9) where the student self-deprecates, that is presents themselves in a negative or somehow problematic light. These self-deprecations typically occur in situations where the client is elaborating a problem that was the reason behind their contact with the career guidance.
In the analysis we focused on how the counsellor treats the self-deprecation by the client, and what the interactional consequences of such response are. In what follows we will describe two types of responses to the self-deprecation that we found from the data: reframing and empathetic listening.
Reframing
We found that the counsellors can respond to the self-deprecation in the next turn, showing disagreement through reframing the self-deprecation. In this way, the counsellors orient to the everyday preference of disagreement, while they maintain orientation to the institutional aims of the counselling encounter. The extract 1 shows a case in point.
After the counsellor’s agenda question that quotes what the client has written about his situation before the meeting (lines 1–3, 5–7), the client describes himself as a person with lots of interests and who easily gets excited of different things (lines 9, 11). In this context, this self-attribution can be heard as negative or problematic, as it is offered as a response to a turn where the counsellor refers to something that the client has presented as problematic. There is a place for a response in lines 10 and 12 but the counsellor remains silent, offering the client space to continue responding to the agenda question. Although the implication of problematic characterisation is already available, the gist of treating it problematic to have many interests still has not been pronounced. The client then expands his turn by stating that ‘it is sometimes a bit difficult’ (line 13). This can be heard as a more direct self-deprecation; the client portrays his personality trait in a problematic light. As a summary of his earlier talk, this turn makes a response from the counsellor strongly relevant. In lines 14 and 16 the counsellor then disagrees with the self-deprecation, reframing the client’s personality trait in a positive light. The response is now delivered without delay, as a preferred second action. In his subsequent turn, the client agrees with the counsellor’s point, and then continues with self-reflection (lines 17–22).
By disagreement with the client’s self-deprecation, the counsellor orients to the norms of everyday conversation, protecting the client’s positive face (Goffman, 1955) and responding according to the everyday preference rules (Pomerantz, 1984). In the institutional context of career guidance, this can function as building rapport with the client. Although the counsellor has only just met the client, the consequences of ‘being able to be easily inspired’ is something anyone may have an opinion about. However, it is also something that can be heard as career-relevant knowledge, belonging to the professional’s domain. Importantly, the client’s opinion itself is not contested, but its meaning is shaped into something potentially positive.
The extract 2 shows another case where the counsellor responds to the client’s self-deprecation in the next turn. The counsellor again disagrees with the self-deprecation, but it is done through a reframing formulation.
The client is talking about how he feels about a possible career as a teacher. Prior to the extract, the client has said that he is not interested in being a teacher. In the beginning of the extract, the client presents some negative aspects about being a teacher (lines 1–4), after which he presents a self-deprecation which is offered as an additional item on the list of downsides of teaching: he feels that he is not a good teacher (lines 8–9). This is presented through some laughter particles and also the tentative (‘maybe’), that open up a possibility for treating this description as a tentative and therefore contestable one.
In his response, designed as a formulation (line 10), the counsellor shifts the perspective from the client’s self-deprecation back to the student’s disinterest in being a teacher. This perspective shift is an indirect way to disagree with the self-deprecation in the next turn. Not only is ‘interest’ a neutralising term compared to ‘not being very good teacher’, it is more ‘agentic’ in terms of making career decisions. In general, ‘interest’ a career-relevant topic. It is used very frequently in these data as a cue to something that both professionals and clients treat as worth pursuing. ‘Interested’ points at relevant fields to explore, ‘not interested’ shows where not to look, or what to rule out. The formulation could function as a closing of the topic, but the client continues with further self-reflection, now presenting self in a more neutral light (lines 11–14).
The two extracts above showed a local response in the next turn that disagreed with the self-deprecation through reframing. These turns can be seen as orienting to the norms of everyday conversation, but they also serve the institutional aim of inviting self-reflection.
Empathetic listening
We will next present cases where the counsellor does not respond to the self-deprecation in the next turn unit. In these cases, the counsellor treats the client’s talk as troubles-telling that can be received through empathetic listening. In the extract below, however, the client continues the self-deprecating talk until the counsellor responds with advice. The extract is from an online meeting. Prior to the extract, the counsellor has asked what would be the smallest next step that the client would need or the support she lacks at the moment. The client has said that she should find the courage to send applications to the possible employers. In the beginning of the extract, the client elaborates this.
The client talks about how she is afraid of disappointment in job hunting. The self-deprecation comes in this context, in line 2–3: ‘I am really bad in dealing with disappointments’. The word ‘disappointments’ is delivered with laughter particles, which invite an affiliating response from the counsellor. Unlike in the extracts shown above, here the counsellor does not respond in the next turn unit (line 3). However, the counsellor smiles during the self-deprecation in lines 2–4. The counsellor thus nonverbally acknowledges the self-deprecation but does not comment it explicitly. The counsellor’s silence in line 3 is ambivalent; it is not made clear if the counsellor agrees or disagrees. This can be heard as orientation to the broader activity in the student’s talk that is troubles-telling: the counsellor empathetically recognises the self-deprecation as a part of talk about fear of disappointment. In the face of no response, the student, however, continues to self-deprecate (lines 4–5), which the counsellor then receives minimally in line 6. The student continues to talk about how she is afraid of disappointment (lines 9–13, 15), which the counsellor receives again minimally (lines 14 and 16). At this point the client has made it clear she is indeed afraid and should be able to be rid of this fear. Thus it is hearable as troubles talk (Jefferson, 1988).
In lines 17 and 20–21 the student summarises her talk by stating that she should ‘perform overcoming fears’. Through summarising, this statement makes a response strongly relevant and emphasizes the troubles-telling nature of the client’s narration. The counsellor begins to take a turn already in line 19, giving up the turn, and taking it then in lines 23–24. Now the counsellor responds with advice. To our interpretation, here the counsellor’s advice is prompted by the client’s continuing self-deprecation. In other words, as the client does not change the perspective towards more positive self-attributions, but continues to complain about her fear of failure, a full response by the counsellor is made strongly relevant. In the institutional context of guidance and counselling, advice is a relevant response to a complaint or troubles telling (Vehviläinen, 2001). Through the advice, the counsellor suggests an optimistic stance towards the problem (fear of failure); the client might find help through talking to people working in the fields she is interested in.
The Extract 4 shows another case where the counsellor does not respond to the client’s self-deprecation in the next turn unit. In this case, the client does face work to protect her own positive face (Goffman, 1955). The extract is from the same online meeting as the earlier extract. As a response to the counsellor’s advice shown in the previous extract, the client has continued to complain about her insecurities in job hunting. In the beginning of the extract, the client again indicates how she is afraid of how her application would be responded to.
In lines 2–3 the client describes herself as ‘a bit lazy on the paper’, which we hear as a self-deprecation. There is a place for a response from the counsellor in line 3, but she does not take a turn. The counsellor, however, responds nonverbally with a smile during the self-deprecation in line 3. The silence in line 3 is in the same way ambivalent as in the previous extract, and the counsellor again treats the self-deprecation as a part of a troubles talk that can be received through empathetic listening. The client goes on to complain about her insecurities, inviting response from the counsellor (lines 5–8, 10–11, 13–15). The counsellor, however, responds only minimally (lines 9, 12, 16). She also responds nonverbally with a smile in line 5 when the client complains about her CV. This indicates empathetic listening: the counsellor’s smile can be interpreted so that she recognises the experience of the client while she also displays disbelief on the self-deprecation. As the client’s self-deprecation is produced through laughter, a smile is a relevant, empathetic way to respond.
In line 17 the client changes the perspective from self-deprecation to talking to herself supportively. In this way, she produces the ‘disagreement’ with the self-deprecation by herself. This can be seen as face-work: the client saves her own positive face after the self-deprecation (cf. Koskinen et al., 2021). Through empathetically listening but not responding to the self-deprecation in the first possible place, the counsellor gave to the client space to reflect the different sides of her experience, thus supporting the client’s agency.
The next extract shows another example of self-deprecation that is met with no disagreement but empathetic listening. In this case, the counsellor provides a supportive response later in the encounter. We will show this supportive response after the analysis of the segment where the self-deprecation occurs. The extract is from the same online meeting as the earlier extracts. Prior to the extract, the counsellor has asked about the client’s major subject and the client has told how she changed her major and the reasons behind that.
In lines 1–5 the student talks about how after changing her major she felt she can take time to see how her studies begin to proceed. In this context, the student self-deprecates by saying that she does not know if she has any skills (line 2), and that she ‘generally has a low self-esteem’ (line 3). There is a place for a response after the first self-deprecation (line 2), but the counsellor does not take a turn. In line 2 the during the 0.4. second pause the counsellor smiles shortly. After the student’s word ‘tota’ (translated as ‘erm’), the counsellor looks down. The second self-deprecation in line 3 is produced with laughter, but the counsellor does not react nonverbally to the self-deprecation, but looks down. The counsellor smiles in line 4 when the student says ‘hang around’, and looks up (to the camera in the online meeting) again from the line 5 when the student says ‘ponder’. Again, by not responding verbally but nonverbally showing empathetic listening, the counsellor gives to the student space to further reflect her experience. In her subsequent talk, the student moves to a positive perspective: she tells about success in her studies (lines 6–12), thus saving her positive face after the self-deprecation.
The Extract 6 shows how the counsellor gives a supportive response later in the encounter. Prior to the extract, the counsellor has suggested that the client is a ‘generalist’ and explained what she means by that.
In line 3 in the extract, the counsellor restates the point she has made; being a generalist is the client’s strength. In this context, the counsellor refers to the client’s earlier talk about success in her studies (line 8). The client receives this by ‘apparently’ (line 9), with laughter. The counsellor smiles during the client’s response and the counsellors subsequent confirmation in line 10. Thus, here the counsellor supports the client against her ‘low self-esteem’ later in the encounter (cf. Voutilainen and Koivisto, 2022). This response deals broadly with the client’s troubles talk, but it also is responsive to the earlier self-deprecations, displaying disagreement with them.
We show another example of this kind of later supportive response in the two extracts below. The Extract 7 shows the client’s self-deprecation and subsequent face work, and the Extract 8 shows the counsellors later supportive response. The extract is from the same online meeting as the earlier extracts. Prior to the extract, the client has talked about how she can understand other people’s perspectives and how they may be going through something difficult in their lives. The counsellor has pointed out that that is also one of a supervisor’s skills. As a response to this, the client mentions that she would have interest in supervisory tasks.
The client says she is interested in supervisory responsibilities, but that she may not be capable for them, because she is a ‘micro manager’ and bad at delegating things (lines 6, 7–8). This can be heard as self-deprecation. There is a place for a response after the self-deprecation (line 7), but the counsellor does not take a turn. The counsellor, however, smiles in line 5 when the client says ‘I am not able to do it’, in line 6 when the client says ‘micro manager’ and in line 7 when the student says ‘bad at delegating things’. The counsellor also nods in line 8 after the client has said she is bad at delegating things. While the counsellor does not explicitly disagree with the self-deprecations, her facial responses and the nod indicate empathetic listening of the client’s troubles-telling.
The client continues self-deprecating talk, but as the counsellor responds only minimally (line 12), she changes the perspective to positive talk about herself (lines 19, 21, 23–24, 27, 29). Thus, also here, through empathetic listening, the counsellor gives space to the student to self-reflect, and the student saves her own positive face after the self-deprecation.
The Extract 8 shows the counsellors later supportive response. The extract continues directly from the previous extract.
The counsellor formulates what she has heard the client saying about her style to manage things. She says the client’s style is ‘more towards details’ (line 2), and then describes a situation in which this kind of management could be seen in a positive light (lines 5, 7–10). Through supporting the client’s interest for supervisory responsibilities, the counsellor responds to the broader troubles-telling but is also responsible to the self-deprecation, displaying disagreement through reframing the micro-management positively.
The 8 extracts above showed two ways in which the counsellor can respond to the client’s self-deprecation: with disagreement through reframing in the next turn or through empathetic listening and possibly then a supportive response in a later turn. In the case of empathetic listening, the counsellor gave space to the client to further reflection. In these cases, the client may find ways to do the ‘disagreement’ by moving towards more positive self-attributions, and so protect their positive face.
Discussion
In terms of everyday talk, the client’s self-deprecations invite a supportive response (disagreement) from the counsellor (Pomerantz, 1984). However, a supportive response is not always in line with the institutional aims of career guidance. The self-deprecations often express a contradiction that the client experiences, for example between career ambitions and the client’s self-image. When the counsellor withholds taking an immediate stance to the self-deprecation, the client expands the talk into what amounts to a more positive, and thereby opposite opinion of themselves. Such expansion of client talk – responding to one’s own self-criticism with an opposite point, and thereby gaining a distance to the initial opinion – allows self-dialogue or self-reflective talk to develop (Logren et al., 2017). In guidance, such talk is treated as a means of strengthening agency via creating flexibility in the client’s perspectives. Thus, direct immediate disagreement with the self-deprecation could disregard a contradiction that is meaningful to the client, and thus, this would block their further self-reflection. Giving space for self-reflection would be important for getting a bigger picture of the client’s situation and the ways in which the client positions themselves, for example regarding their career choices (cf. Kotthoff, 1993).
Furthermore, not responding to the self-deprecation in the next turn unit challenges the client to further self-reflection that can take a form of face work: the client saves their positive face through moving to more positive self-attributions. This can increase the client’s agency – the client does not need help in the face work from the counsellor but finds a way out of the self-deprecation by themselves. Therefore, we would like to suggest that the practices of everyday talk – preference organisation (Pomerantz, 1984) and face work (Goffman, 1955) – can be in the service of the institutional aims of counselling. They are resources through which the counsellor can guide the client to perform self-reflection, positive self-image, and agency. This, however, asks sensitivity and professional emotion regulation from the counsellor, as silence in the place of response is interactionally challenging (cf. Voutilainen and Koivisto, 2022). Furthermore, in remote settings, silences can be more delicate, which highlights the importance of facial expressions. Further comparative studies on remote vs. face to face encounters could discuss the differences in nonverbal empathy in the case of responses to self-deprecations, as well as the way in which client’s nonverbal behaviour is oriented to by the counsellor. It should be noted that the counsellor’s empathy in the extracts shown above was not very substantial but rather ‘weak’, expressed only through quick smiles and minimal responses. It may be dependent on the client’s characteristics if this kind of ‘minimal empathy’ is enough to secure the working alliance (cf. Voutilainen and Koivisto, 2022).
In the context of everyday talk, the self-deprecations are offered to be questioned. However, usually in career counselling the client comes to the meeting with some kind of ‘reason for call’ that is something problematic and difficult. This often involves some kind of negative attribution of self. In this context, the self-deprecations are rather openings of discussion than something superficial that can be dealt with by simple disagreement. Furthermore, it may be not possible to the counsellor to respond with a strong disagreement in the first meeting when there is no earlier shared knowledge between the participants. Normalising the self-deprecation would be one option, but that was not found in our (small) data set. In our data, the counsellors deal with this epistemic challenge through reframing, for example by reformulating being ‘not good’ as ‘not interesting’. Another way to is to listen the client’s telling further and then, based on evidence offered by the client, offer a later supportive response that disagrees with the self-deprecation (e.g. ‘you are a generalist’).
Based on our study, it seems than rather than overcoming the self-deprecation, the institutional aim of the counselling is to give space to the client to explore their thinking and experience. Then a reasonable, professional and neutralistic way to deal with the self-deprecation would be not to respond in the first possible place, but to give the client a possibility to self-reflect. From this perspective, disagreements in the next turn can be seen as less extensive and more momentary interventions.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Ethical considerations
In Finland, an ethical review statement from a human sciences ethics committee is needed if the research contains any of the following (
):
(a) Participation in the research deviates from the principle of informed consent,
(b) the research involves intervening in the physical integrity of research participants,
(c) the focus of the research is on minors under the age of 15, without separate consent from a parent or carer or without informing a parent or carer in a way that would enable them to prevent the child’s participation in the research,
(d) research that exposes participants to exceptionally strong stimuli,
(e) research that involves a risk of causing mental harm that exceeds the limits of normal daily life to the research participants or their family members or others closest to them or
(f) conducting the research could involve a threat to the safety of participants or researchers or their family members or others closest to them.
This study did not contain any of these expectations from the standard research ethics in humanities, and a review by an ethics committee was not required.
Consent to participate
A written informed consent was obtained from the participants.
Consent for publication
Not applicable.
Data availability
Due to confidentality, the data cannot be shared.