Social skills are a very useful tool that people develop to be able to relate to other people. Those people who lack them, we observe that they have difficulties when establishing links with other people, it is difficult for them to assess the situation with the person in front of them and know how to act or what is the best way to interact, if it is time to be more cordial because the person in front of you is, for example, your boss or a friend with whom you can be more conversational. The objective of this Psychology-Online article is to offer activities to work on social skills in adults .
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Index
- What are social abilities?
- Why are social skills important?
- Dynamics and exercises to work on social skills
What are social abilities?
Social skills (HHSS) are a set of habits that allow us to communicate and relate to other people in a healthy and satisfactory way, they help us to make our interpersonal relationships fruitful and make us feel good. The lack of social skills leads us to conflicts and to maintain relationships that present many deficiencies with other people as well as discomfort with ourselves.
These habits that encompass social skills are attitudes that we adopt around interpersonal relationships based on our beliefs, thoughts, emotions and way of acting in different situations. It is worth mentioning that the HHSS include components such as verbal communication (tone of voice, etc.) and non-verbal communication (posture of our body, gaze, smile, etc.).
To have good social skills it is also necessary to show:
- Empathy
- Assertiveness
- Good self-esteem
- Self-knowledge
- Emotional intelligence
Why are social skills important?
Social skills are essential to interact with other people, establish bonds and be able to maintain them . They are the engine of human relationships and of our day to day, since we are social beings by nature, that means that we need to relate to live. Being a person with social skills not only increases the quality of life and a good development and maintenance of self-esteem but also protects us from suffering from certain psychological disorders such as anxiety and depression. The lack of social skills makes the person more prone to have reactions of anger, anger and frustration, generates feelings of rejection and undervaluation that affect self-esteem and mood .
Do you know how well your social skills are? With this social skills test you can know the level of your social skills.
Dynamics and exercises to work on social skills
As mentioned above, social skills (HHSS) also involve empathy, assertiveness, self-esteem, beliefs, emotional intelligence, self-concept and self-esteem, so if we want to work on HHSS we must also work everything above, for this we are going to propose a series of exercises that allow to know each other more and at the same time reinforce social skills through self-knowledge.
- Make relationships more flexible
This exercise for adults of social skills consists of drawing a pyramid, dividing it by two and putting “I” on one side and “others” on the other. Once this is done, you should reflect on your relationships and in the part where it puts others you should reflect on the level of commitment that your relationships have with you and mark it in the pyramid. In the section where it says “I” you should reflect on the level of commitment that you have acquired towards others.
This activity will allow you to make your relationships more flexible , it can be useful for all those people who have strong beliefs about certain values such as friendship, etc., and are very rigid before all their relationships or before a relational situation that is blocked. Being graphic, it allows you to make a much more visual analysis . This part of this task is related to positive psychology and was designed by Hervás (2008).
- Clean up blocked relationships
Perhaps a fact that is damaging our HHSS is a blocked relationship, something that hurt us and we have not yet managed to recover. For this, this task presented from the narrative approach can be very useful. It is about writing down the feelings that the relationship you want to clean up generates in you.
- First of all, everything negative that it causes will be written down until you feel that everything has already been expressed about it.
- That is when you can move on to the next point, write down everything positive about the relationship.
Performing this exercise to work on social skills in adults helps regulate negative emotions towards other people. In this article you can see 15 techniques to manage emotions . It is worth mentioning that this activity is indicated in cases where you want to continue or resume the relationship with a person or in the event that the loss of that person affects your day-to-day life and affects your mood with rage or anger.
- Addressing problems from needs
One of the most useful things so that people can understand a problem and these are not a source of conflict is to approach it from the needs. In general, depriving someone of what is needed is not something very common, so the proposal of this activity is to raise and address problems and conflicts from needs. In addition, this exercise also allows us to explore our interior and get to know ourselves better. Before starting this activity it is important to bear in mind that there are 6 needs for psychological well-being :
- Control of the environment (knowing that not everything is under our control and referring to what the person can be proactive about)
- Personal growth
- Autonomy
- Purpose in life
- Self-acceptance
- Positive relationships
When the needs are strengthened, the problem is less weighty. From here on, when faced with a problem, the person should reflect on the following questions:
- What things make me feel good?
- What are my needs?
- How do I see the problem in relation to my needs?
- What can I do to meet my needs?
When expressing everything found to another person, remember to do so assertively: ” I understand what you are saying, when you do this I feel … ”
- I am the other person
Another element that we cannot forget when we talk about social skills is empathy, which is why I propose this dynamic to work on social skills. The goal of this dynamic is to appreciate the feelings and emotions of another person . At the same time, seek common ground in the face of the conflict and reinforce coexistence, respect and tolerance.
To make it easier to integrate into the skin of the other person, it is necessary to choose a complement or an item of clothing of the other person (necklace, scarf, hat, sweater, jacket, handkerchief, tie, etc.), with the garment on the person will be asked to describe what they feel and the sensations they have being the other person.
- Active listening
One of the activities to work on social skills in adults is to raise awareness and practice. Active listening is one of the most basic and important HHSS present in any social skills workshop or social skills training. With your closest environment, spend some time practicing active listening , this will allow you to get to know your environment better as well as show a closer person.
- Self-registration of social skills
Another activity to work on social skills in adults is to keep a record of the HHSS that are used or would like to be used. In this way, we can graphically detect what behaviors have caused a conflict, why, and seek a solution. When beginning self-registration, it is important to first remember a situation that created discomfort or did not make you feel good. It is important that once it is remembered, the day is noted and when it happened and the context. Once you have all this information, it is important to remember how it was resolved or how to act in the face of it (assertively, evasive, aggressive, etc.).
When you have seen the coping style that was used in that interaction, in the event that it was not assertive, it would be good to consider how you could have acted so that that conflict was less, generate alternatives to how to face the conflict .
