Читать книгу 5 Things You Need to Know About Social Skills Coaching - Roya Ostovar - Страница 8

We all know the importance and value of coaching for many different skills—singing, acting, playing a sport, and even teaching—but not all of us know there are coaching resources for improving social skills. Most people just admire those who are comfortable in any social situation and can have a conversation about anything and with anyone. We think of these people as just being lucky and having been born with a wonderful, natural gift. But that is only partially true. Social skills, much like any other skill, can be learned and improved. Now, most of us will probably never be as comfortable in front of crowds as a talk show host, but we can all improve our skills and learn ways to manage different social situations more easily and with more confidence.

Social language is much like any other language, and social language skills are like any other skills—they can be learned and improved with practice. If we think about the skills required for any sport, we know right away that the role of the coach is critical. This is true whether we are talking about first-grade soccer or Olympic swimming. The same is true for social skills. The difference is that the idea of being coached on our social skills is new to us and we have to get comfortable with it, just as we do with any new idea.

In our experience, most people take a little time to get used to the idea of having a coach for social skills. The immediate reaction when we suggest social skills coaching is, “What’s that? You want to teach me how to talk to people?! I don’t need that… I have friends, you know?” But Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian of all time with 28 medals, never thought of the idea of having a swim coach as offensive or a sign of weakness. We must think of social coaches in the way we think about athletic coaches.

If we think about what coaches do and how they help, we will feel much more comfortable with the idea of social skills coaching. Coaches are on your side, no matter what skills you are trying to learn or improve. Coaches help you set your goals and identify areas in which you want to improve. They teach you the skills you need, encourage you to practice what you have learned, fine tune your skills, praise you along the way, encourage you, help you take a different perspective, challenge you, motivate you, help you believe in yourself, increase the likelihood that you will apply your skills, and ultimately help you reach your maximum potential. They are excellent collaborators and work with you to achieve your goals in the way that makes the most sense for you.

Most people can benefit from some degree of social skills coaching, whether it is learning proper greetings, body language and facial expressions, conflict resolution, perspective taking, and saying things more effectively. We know social skills training helps those with autism spectrum disorders, social pragmatics disorder, and non-verbal learning disorder, but any social skill goal can be achieved through social skills coaching.

A social coach is someone with knowledge and experience who understands not only social coaching but also how to teach the skills. Great athletes don’t necessarily make the best athletic coaches. Good coaching is far beyond knowing and playing the game. It also involves the ability to guide players and fine tune their skills. With input from the coach, a great basketball player can make a small adjustment to his/her wrist and make even more shots successfully than before. In social skills coaching, a good coach can, with the right input, help someone with small but critical nuances of social relationships, facial expressions, body language, and more. A small adjustment makes a world of difference.

This guide to social skills coaching offers a quick and informative tour of what this fascinating and rather new information is and how it can make a difference in so many people’s lives.

What Is Social Skills Coaching?

Social skills coaching is simply coaching someone to help themselves feel more comfortable and successful in different social situations. It is a one-to-one skills-based training that addresses specific challenges an individual has in navigating her or his social environment. This service helps develop an individual’s ability to communicate with others more effectively. It is intended to be practical, interactive, functional, and specifically tailored to the individual.

Many individuals explain how they are often caught offguard, confused, and unsure or surprised in social interactions or after a social interaction. This is because they do not grasp the unspoken expectations, cues, subtleties of the interactions or cannot recognize the boundaries and limits to understand everything they need to. One way a client explained it puts how some individuals are feeling in perspective for us. She recalled Elle from the movie Legally Blonde showing up to a normal party in a bunny costume and feeling so embarrassed and surprised that nobody else at this party was in a costume. Can you imagine what that would feel like? In the movie, Elle is being set up and given the wrong information. “I feel like Elle every day of my life,” she said. Our client was letting us know every day she feels like she has been given the wrong information about a social interaction, or she is missing some important information which everyone else just somehow naturally seems to get on their own. “It feels like I am always walking in, in the middle of a conversation … it is so confusing.” She misses something, which can cause her to feel left out, embarrassed, and unaware. These are the individuals whose families are always kicking them under the table to stop talking, telling them after the fact that a joke they said wasn’t appropriate, or something they did or say was offensive.

For those with social skills challenges, there appears to be great difficulty in social situations with taking in all the verbal and nonverbal information and cues, integrating them, interpreting them quickly and accurately, making inferences based on all the information and experiences, seeing the big picture and acting accordingly.

Additionally, individuals will explain how hard they are working within social interactions to understand what is going on, what they should say, how they should say it, when they should say something, what to do when other people laugh, when is it time to stop joking, etc. It is a lot of work cognitively and emotionally and they may end up feeling drained and exhausted after each social interaction. While for those functioning with ease social interactions feel joyful and rejuvenating, for those with social skills challenges they feel tiring and take a lot out of them. For many of us, little thought goes into having a conversation with others. The skills seem to come naturally and effortlessly. And because of the extensive amount of work they do planning and strategizing, they may miss very important information that is being communicated or miss the appropriate opportunity to communicate what they want to.

Teaching these skills should enable the individual to interact more comfortably with both familiar and unfamiliar people. Think about this training as a way to learn or re-learn verbal and non-verbal language. Just as an academic course or an immersion approach can help you learn a new language such as Italian or Spanish, social skills coaching provides the knowledge and skills to communicate effectively with others by learning and practicing in a variety of settings. The more you practice, the better you will get. Furthermore, with a coach by your side, helping you make the necessary adjustments in real time, you can learn to speak the language comfortably and fluently.

Some of the social communication skills that are taught through such training include:

 Becoming more aware of and understanding non-verbal communication (e.g., learning to be aware of your own and others’ body language, gestures, facial expressions)

 Practicing active listening skills and engaging with others

 Learning about conversational skills and social reciprocity, such as initiating a conversation, exiting conversations, finding common interests, keeping the conversation going, taking turns within a conversation, and making small talk

 Learning different perspective-taking strategies to help relate to others as well as developing emotion recognition

 Practicing problem-solving and conflict resolution skills

 Understanding non-literal language, such as sarcasm, analogies, and metaphors

 Learning about the process of creating, developing, and maintaining friendships and relationships

 Handling rejection and rumors

 Understanding and improving communication via electronics such as texts and social media

 Lowering social anxiety through improved social skills

Social skills coaching is client centered. This means that each individual comes in with a different set of skills and a different set of needs. The social skills coach tailors the meetings to meet the individual’s needs. This is critical. Here, the client is a very active participant in the process. Good social skills coaching does not involve a one-size-fits-all approach. Generally, the client-centered approach has been found to be more effective than forcing an individual to fit into a highly structured, manual-led social skills training program (Quinn, Kavale, Mathur, Rutherford, & Forness, 1999). The social skills coach uses a variety of methods to teach skills including didactic instruction (psychoeducation), explicit verbal prompting, behavior modeling, in-vivo or real-life practice of social skills, performance feedback, role-playing, homework assignments, video-modeling, and social stories creation, while drawing explicit attention to important social cues and providing multiple opportunities for rehearsal of skills (Beebe & Risi, 2003; Gresham et al., 2000; Laugeson & Frankel, 2010; Rogers, 2000; White et al., 2010). To enhance learning, social skills coaches also utilize Socratic questioning, which is a systematic line of questioning that guides reasoning and is an interactive, collaborative, and non-confrontational method to engage the individual in the process (Laugeson & Park, 2014).

As you may find, the collaborative approach applied in social skills coaching really allows the individual to obtain a full understanding of the skills taught and why they should learn them, all while increasing their confidence to apply the skills they learn on a daily basis and in novel situations. Social motivation may be a necessary (if not sufficient) condition for engagement in successful social behavior.

Furthermore, social skills coaching is to increase the quality of and comfort during interactions through education and practice. The ultimate goal, over time, is for individuals to feel more and more comfortable in different social settings and expand their social circle and opportunities. Many of the interventions are aimed at improving knowledge of discrete skills (e.g., emotion recognition, appropriate social behavior) and concepts (e.g., theory of mind) as well as more complex skills such as accurately processing incoming information and rapidly discriminating subtle emotions in nonverbal behaviors to decide how to interact in a social situation. The following is an example of what a social skills coach may say while watching a video of two people having a conversation:

COACH:	People will often use their bodies to tell you if they are interested in the conversation you are having with them. What do you think we are watching for in this video to know if each person is interested?
JON:	I don’t know, their faces?
COACH:	Right! Our faces do reveal a lot of information. What kinds of things are their faces telling us in the video?

What Is Social Skills Coaching?

Social skills coaching is helping someone learn ways to be more comfortable and successful in different social situations. It is a one-on-one skills-based training that addresses specific challenges an individual has in navigating her or his social environment. This service helps develop an individual’s ability to more effectively communicate with others. It is meant to be practical, interactive, and functional. Social skills coaching is tailored to the individual.

Who Is a Social Skills Coach?

The social skills coach is a professional trained in social communication and pragmatics. These coaches often are psychologists, counselors, or speech and language pathologists who have a high level of understanding of and ability to assess social communication abilities.

Although many of these trained individuals may also provide therapy services in their practice, social skills coaching is not therapy. This is an important distinction. The social skills coach specifically focuses on skills development by helping the individual learn a new set of skills or improve upon a set of skills he already possesses. Similar to sports or athletic coaches, the social skills coach aims to provide support to the individual and to help the individual build on and fine-tune the skills he already has.

The social skills coach works from a strengths-based approach to achieve mastery of social communication skills as well as to build the individual’s confidence in his abilities to use the skills he is learning. The coach works in real-life scenarios, offering explicit verbal cues and in-the-moment feedback, whether the meeting is in a structured setting or in a natural social setting (e.g., library, coffee shop, shopping mall). Furthermore, the social skills coach continually assesses what skills the individual has mastered, what areas need improvement, and which skills need to be developed. The initial and continuous assessment process is imperative to the work and helps the coach individualize the meetings to meet the individual’s needs. The process is collaborative and interactive, allowing for goals to be adjusted as many times as needed to meet the needs of the individual receiving coaching.

What Is a Social Skills Coach?

Social skills coaching is not therapy. This is an important distinction. The social skills coach specifically focuses on skills development by helping the individual learn a new set of skills or improve upon a set of skills he already possesses. Similar to sports or athletic coaches, the social skills coach aims to provide support to the individual and to help the individual build on and fine-tune the skills he already has.

Who Is Social Skills Coaching For?

Other people may describe those with weakness in social skills in different ways. They may say, “Something is just a little off,” “It’s like he got the memo late,” “That wasn’t really funny, why would she say that?” “He just says anything that comes to his mind,” “It’s like he has no filter,” “She just talks too much, it’s like she is talking at you.” On the other side, people without fully developed social skills may think to themselves, “Why are people always annoyed with me?” “Why don’t I have friends?” “Did I say something wrong?” “I thought he liked me.” “What does this text I just got from him even mean?”

We want to emphasize that most people likely benefit from some form of social communication coaching to gain awareness of how they interact with others, how they come across to others, what it is like for others to be around them, and how they may become more effective when interacting with others.