Social Skills

Building good relationships with other people can greatly reduce stress and anxiety in your life. Actually, improving your social backing is associated to better mental health in general, since having good friends can act as a “safeguard” for feelings of anxiety and low mood. This is especially true if you are socially anxious and desperately want to make friends but are either too fearful to do so or are unsure about how to reach out to others. As a result of these anxious feelings, you may even be avoiding social situations.  It is important practice to develop strong communications skills that would increase the chance for successful relationships.

Social Skills Training Should:

  • Focus on facilitating the desirable behavior as well as eliminating the undesirable behavior.
  • Emphasize the learning, performance, generalization, and maintenance of appropriate behaviors through modeling, coaching, and role-playing. It is also crucial to provide immediate performance feedback.
  • Employ primarily positive strategies and add punitive strategies only if the positive approach is unsuccessful and the behavior is of a serious and/or dangerous nature.
  • Provide training and practice opportunities in a wide range of settings with different groups and individuals in order to encourage students to generalize new skills to multiple, real life situations.
  • Draw on assessment strategies, including functional assessments of behavior, to identify those children in need of more intensive interventions as well as target skills for instruction.
  • Look to enhance social skills by increasing the frequency of an appropriate behavior in a particular situation. This should take place in "normal" environments to address the naturally occurring causes and consequences.
"The most basic of all human needs is the need
to understand and be understood."

-Ralph Nichols

Helpful Resources For Social Skills

NASP Center. Information on improving social skills to help promote positive behavior, academic success, and school safety.
VeryWell. Great overview of social skills training to help adults who suffer from social anxiety disorder.
HelpGuide.org. A trusted guide to mental, emotional & social health that deals with social anxiety disorder and social phobia.