The State-Wide Counselling and Research Center
Individual counselling supports clients in finding solutions to their individual problems and in their long-term development in a talent domain. As each individual counselling relationship varies in nature, effective counselling strategies need to be highly flexible.
Giftedness counselling offices located at various universities have developed theoretically sound counselling strategies designed to ensure high-quality professional giftedness counselling. As various theories of giftedness exist side by side, the chosen theoretical approaches vary considerably from office to office. Most counselling centers still focus on personality traits and work with multifactorial models of giftedness, i.e., models which assume that more than one personality trait contributes to giftedness. Over the last few years, however, systemic counselling approaches, which are highly interactionist and holistic (assuming bidirectional interactions between all personal and environmental factors as well as within each), have become increasingly common (Stoeger & Ziegler, 2009). In our counselling center we use the holistic process approach to identification developed by Ziegler, Grassinger, Stoeger, and Harder (2012). It allows for the construction of an individual learning path in a talent domain towards individually set goals.