Breaking the glass ceiling
Laone’s Get Well Counselling Centre belies her age
If anyone told Laone Moruisi ( 26) that she would one day make a great counsellor, let alone run a successful counselling centre, she would have probably taken it as a big fat joke.
Top of her priorities five years ago was studying a business-related course at the University of Botswana and making a small impact in the business community.
Coming from a small village of Lehututu in Kgalagadi district where residents mostly do pastoral farming, did not help much. Counselling as a career was a foreign topic made all the worse by her reserved character. Well, Fate had other plans for her. She could not do her preferred course at the university. This left her feeling rejected and miserably inadequate. It was either she returns home or settles for a different field of study.
“I was not ready to explain to people why I was home when my friends were going to University so I found myself settling for a course I did not want.
“I did not know people actually studied counselling, it was always more of a free period during our secondary school days and we just never took it seriously,” Moruisi said.
It was this misguided perception that made her not enjoy her early university days. She felt trapped. Was this some kind of punishment, what wrong had she done to be rewarded with such an empty academic discipline?
However, as time ticked, she began to warm up to counselling. It was as if something had suddenly awakened in her. She was dancing to a different tune and discovering what she never knew existed in her. “It was like discovering me for the very first time.”
She began enjoying this career path so much that she even returned for her Masters degree in Counselling and Human Services - an honour that richly decorates her curriculum vitae.
Nonetheless, it does not only take a rich educational background for one to venture into counselling.
One needs to also have a listening ear, be firm and sure of what to say and what not to say.
These are the qualities which Moruisi was not sure if she had in her but just to test waters, she volunteered her services at Botswana Baylor Children’s Clinical Centre of Excellence.
Here, she found an out of school programme tailored for the youth in an effort to equip them with career development and leadership skills among others.
She became part of the coordinating team as well as facilitator and this saw her confidence grow on a daily.
She also enrolled in Standard Chartered Bank and Young Africa Botswana’s ( YAB) Future Makers Aspiring Entrepreneurs programme.
At the time, she had registered her counselling centre business with CIPA but it was not operational.
“I was not sure if I could run a business but the entrepreneurship programme assisted me with skills needed to run a sustainable business or at least get the business idea from just an idea to a fully functioning profit making enterprise and it has led to the birth of Get Well Counselling Centre,” she shared.
Moruisi wishes to help young learners identify their career paths and interests through psychometric assessments, placements and collaborations with other stakeholders in the community.
Her recent research has proven that there is a gap in schools with career counselling neglected and much emphasis placed on whether a student has garnered enough to get them into university or not.
Nonetheless, her services are not only limited to career counselling. She has clients from all walks of life. Moruisi also has to contend with clients who contend that she has no experience. “They ask why I would advise them on relationships when I have no man by my side and honestly, I always worry when such is brought up because automatically it suggests that the client has no faith in me. “But I always explain to them that I am qualified because of my educational background, I may have not gone through what they are going through but I have been trained on human behaviour.
“Nonetheless, when they remain unconvinced, I am refer them to someone else,” she said.