The ICCI is aiming to provide accessible high-quality professional and personal development in English in The Netherlands and Online.
At The ICCI we believe that every person deserves to grow, no matter what background, upbringing or life experience they had.
We have confidence in the ability of people to help themselves and thrive, and in human resilience and strength.
We believe in the ability of people to help other people.
In our view, everyone who is open to do so, can develop skills which will aid them to be there for another person by building up good listening skills and learning how to support and help another person.
No matter what your life story is, we have faith that it can inspire another person.
Our goal is to help create good, confident professional helpers, who’ll then be creating a positive impact on the lives of people in the community.
A professional helper in our view, is someone who puts the needs of someone else in the centre of that person’s healing or developing process.
It’s someone who knows how to create a stimulating and inspiring development in another person in order to increase their awareness, empower them and make a positive change in their lives. A development which is built on their personal and professional abilities and strengths.
Our work is based on Humanism and the Person-Centred approach to helping people.
Humanism can be seen as a psychological perspective that emphasises the study of the whole person.
The Person-Centred approach was developed by Carl Rogers, who has been an important figure in introducing a form of helping people in distress with an approach that was novel at the time, called client-centred or person-centred, of which one of the revolutionary ideas was: the client knows best. This was a radical move away from the medicalisation of distress and doctor knows best or psychoanalyst knows what is wrong with you towards working from the frame of reference or the experience of the person needing help.
This brought important changes, like calling people seeking help clients instead of patients, and learning to work from a client’s frame of reference, meaning aiming to understand what the client is experiencing and how that affects the client and then – importantly – feeding back some of that empathy back to the client – as opposed to remaining a blank screen and providing occasional analysis or interpretation of what’s ‘wrong’.
This is still one of the 3 so-called core conditions for forming an effective or beneficial relationship with people, together with the other two: being genuine, honest and open or congruent and offering a genuine respect or appreciation for another person or unconditional positive regard – not necessarily for their behaviour, but for their human-ness.
We subscribe to Rogers’ view that personal growth and development can be seen as an inherent lifelong goal and we would like to continue to facilitate that.
Obviously, in the decades since Carl Rogers, many other people have introduced worthwhile ideas and we can become more integrative and select from different theories and methodologies what works best, but the basic approach towards human beings in distress and helping professions remains very important and this will be explained thoroughly in our training.
Above all, we see most human beings as capable and interested in further development and growth: a drive to make the most of oneself and of what might be achieved in life which is called self-actualisation, meaning: aiming for psychological growth, fulfilment and satisfaction in life or achievement of one’s full potential as much as possible.
