The social skills guidebook pdf free download

While it is recommended that you take a chronological path through the material, the pacing and length of each module allows for flexibly adapting to your individual needs. In other words, you can use this book however you like—whether that means starting at the beginning, middle, or end. Choose what works for you. Why social work and motivational interviewing? This professional edition includes both the Instant Help book and a companion CD that offers the complete book and printable worksheets for your clients.

That doesn't mean it has to have a lifelong effect. The Divorce Workbook for Children gives kids the skills they need to express the grief and anger that go along with divorce, stay on the sidelines of parental fights, and deal with the many practical changes that divorce brings.

It also helps them explore their feelings about parents dating again or remarrying and, most importantly, helps them to realize that the divorce is not their fault. The Divorce Workbook for Children is a tool kit that helps any child come through their parents' divorce unscathed. It is appropriate for kids between the ages of six and twelve.

Using a case-based approach to connect the classroom and the practice environment, Direct Social Work Practice by Mary C. Ruffolo, Brian E. Perron, and Elizabeth H. Voshel incorporates a broad set of themes that include advocacy, social justice, global focus, ethics, theory, and critical thinking.

Integrated, up-to-date content related to diversity, social justice, and international issues helps readers develop the basic skills of engagement, assessment, intervention, and reflective practice, as well as the key skills needed for the field experience. Each chapter of the book is mapped to the latest Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards EPAS to aid schools of social work in connecting the course content with monitored outcomes.

Over thirty years of input from instructors and students have gone into this popular research methods text, resulting in a refined ninth edition that is easier to read, understand, and apply than ever before.

Using unintimidating language and real-world examples, it introduces students to the key concepts of evidence-based practice that they will use throughout their professional careers. It emphasizes both quantitative and qualitative approaches to research, data collection methods, and data analysis, providing students with the tools they need to become evidence-based practitioners.

Skip to content. The Social Work Skills Workbook. Author : Barry R. Author : Linda K. Cummins,Judith A. Social Work Research Skills Workbook. Author : Elizabeth C. The Social Work Practicum. Introduction to Social Work Practice. Critical Thinking for Helping Professionals. Let s be Friends. He struggled with shyness, loneliness, poor self-confidence, and social awkwardness when he was younger.

Once he had put the worst of those problems behind him he wanted to help people with similar issues get through them more easily than he did. He holds a B. Honors in Psychology, and a Master of Social Work, with a focus on counseling. He lives in Ontario, Canada. An excellent in-depth resource By Joanne K Well written, easy to understand and this would be an ideal addition to high school and college resource centers.

The book has value for all ages and stages of life. The author's website has been used extensively at our house and helped our son overcome some of his anxieties in social groups.

As parents it gave us greater insight and was a great starting point for conversations. Happy to see that he wrote this book! Realistic answers to succeed socially By Kyle Y This book won't tell you things like "be a good listener and interested in people" to make friends. Historical Fiction Books. History Books. Humour Books. Law Books. Politics Books. Reference Books. There are lots of free recordings online. It can also help in the short term by releasing mood-enhancing chemicals and letting you burn off some of your nervous energy.

Any kind of exercise can do the job as long as it gets your blood pumping, even a brisk walk around your neighborhood. Listen to your body and stop when you feel yourself calming down. Getting nervous triggers chemicals in your body and puts it into an alert state; sometimes it takes a while for all systems to return to normal.

Coping with nerves before an upcoming social event Anticipating an upcoming social situation can cause you to feel anxious. You start feeling at least a little nervous as soon as you know the event will take place.

The butterflies then build up more and more as the occasion gets closer. As always, you can try the previously suggested distraction and relaxation techniques or try to challenge or ride out your worries. You can semi-prepare for less structured events by coming up with questions or topics you could discuss.

It may not make for the most ground-breaking few minutes of conversation, but it will help you get through an anxious patch. You could also devise a general strategy for approaching the event. These kinds of preparations will never be able to account for everything that may come up, but even planning ahead a little can make you feel more on top of things.

Put your attention on the current moment: Get your focus out of your head. At the moment, this may be easier said than done, but it could become an option in the future. So prepare some standard getting-to-know-you questions. Accept that you may indeed look nervous. You can do this by mentioning your nervousness in an offhand, self-assured way and then get on with the interaction.

The person just looks a little tense and preoccupied. Knowing this can reassure you enough to calm down. You can put on an interested face, place your attention on your conversation partner, avoid your worried thoughts, and buy yourself some time for your nerves to settle.

These usually involve approaching people under circumstances where they might reject you, like talking to a stranger at a party or inviting someone to hang out. These situations create an approach-avoidance conflict. Certain factors make you want to do approach the behavior, like a desire to form meaningful relationships.

Factors like a fear of being made fun of compel you to avoid doing the same thing. As you get closer to doing the behavior, the avoidance factors kick in and often make you bail out at the last second. Here I go… Ah! Still too nervous! Here are some ways you can make yourself act.

Give yourself time to calm down If you arrive at an event where you have the option of doing a scary social action, it often helps to take time to collect yourself and let your anxiety fade somewhat. For example, when you show up at a party, you may feel too nervous to join any conversations right away. After you arrive at the venue, start socializing before you have time for the avoidance factors to really kick in.

For example, at a party, jump into a conversation with an unfamiliar group as soon as you put your coat away, if not before. You can warm up ahead of the event by socializing earlier in the day. At the event, you can have a few quick, easy interactions before tackling the ones that make you more nervous. You could continue the process by approaching some non- intimidating strangers and then moving on to more intimidating ones. This is actually a condensed version of the gradual exposure process outlined in the next chapter.

You could promise yourself a reward, like a nice meal, if you go through with it. I may as well just do it! You want to give yourself a gentle push, but still have it ultimately be your decision to act or not. In the longer term, the best way to get used to the things that make you nervous is to expose yourself to them gradually.

The next chapter goes into detail about this. It responds much more strongly to real-life evidence, and wrong or not, as far as your mind is concerned, it has past experiences that show the belief is reasonable. The other problem is that when you have a fear or insecurity, it can generate a nearly endless supply of worried thoughts. The bulk of this chapter covers how to get used to the social situations that make you nervous.

Knowing why you must gain firsthand experiences Real-life feedback can overwrite unhelpful beliefs, but the process is gradual. However, over many small occasions, you can choose to do things you want to do, but may draw some negative responses for example, speaking up with a less-popular belief, wearing unconventional clothes. As you continually experience firsthand that acting that way has benefits and that you can handle the consequences, it slowly reinforces the importance of not being overly concerned with what other people think of you.

Everyone else thought it was really funny. And it just felt good not to hold back my sense of humor like I always used to. This suggestion has limits.

You may feel comfortable outwardly faking some confident behaviors, but others will be too nerve-racking and too much of a leap from how you normally act. However, you may be able to pull off smaller tasks, like introducing yourself to someone at your job when you otherwise would have taken a pass. The importance of facing your fears If a social situation really makes you nervous, you need to put yourself in it until you get comfortable with it. When it comes to situations that make you only mildly uneasy, just knowing this may be enough to get you to start changing your behavior.

Psychologists have found the most effective way to face a fear is to gradually expose yourself to it; this is called exposure therapy. You do the exposure sessions frequently enough that you build up some courage momentum. For example, if you were afraid of standing on balconies, you would start on some lower floors and slowly work your way up literally to higher ones.

Socializing is trickier. You have to interact with them, and their responses can be unpredictable. Your feelings toward them are more complex too. The social situations you need to expose yourself to may not be available when you want them, or they may not last long enough or go well enough for you to experience the necessary relaxation and sense that things are under control.

The progression from one step to the next may not be clear, creating unavoidable large increases in difficulty from one to the next. This is not to say that facing your fears is pointless when it comes to socializing. The principles of gradual exposure are still very useful. The process of applying them is just messier, and it helps to know that going in.

It will take a few months of steady work. Even if they hate how much their fear restricts their life, they still prefer that to the work and discomfort of getting over it. Before facing any fears, get a handle on the distorted beliefs and thinking that contribute to your anxiety in social situations This point is extremely important. Learn and get some practice applying the concepts in Chapter 5 first. Following a process for facing your fears gradually The general method for facing a fear is to break it down into a hierarchy from Least Scary to Most Scary variations, then regularly face the fears, beginning at the easiest tasks and working your way up to the tougher ones.

You can use rewards and debriefing sessions to stay motivated and on track. Go to a party and briefly nod and smile at several people. Go to a party and ask several people a quick question, politely listen to their answer, and then excuse yourself from the conversation.

Go to a party and ask a friend to introduce you to several people. Go to a party and join a group of approachable people. The idea is just to join them. Go to a party, join a group, and try to talk to them a bit more. Go to a party and join a more intimidating group. Similar fears can be tackled similarly Social fears come in many forms, and some of them need to be tackled on a case-by-case basis. In this case, your goal for each fear-facing session is to put yourself in that environment.

Eventually you want to be able to stay there long enough that you start to calm down and realize that nothing bad is going to happen. Fears about certain types of interactions, like making conversation, approaching strangers, or inviting friends to hang out.

The interactions themselves are often on the shorter side, so in each fear-facing session, you should try to carry them out multiple times. The first conversation you have might be nerve-racking, but the seventh may feel quite tolerable. If you shy away from inviting people out, you may not have enough friends and acquaintances to invite every time you want to practice facing that particular fear.

Do the same action as your fear, but cut it off early for example, asking someone a quick question and making an excuse to leave vs. Do something different from, and easier than, your fear, but that brings up similar feelings for example, instead of chatting to strangers at a music festival, chatting to shop clerks or asking people on the street for directions.

Practice the exact thing you fear, but in a controlled, artificial setting for example, role- playing assertiveness techniques with a therapist or in a social skills training group. It can also help to start dealing with other non-social fears you may have so you can build your confidence in your ability to overcome your anxieties for example, facing a milder hesitation toward learning to drive.

Here are a few more examples of fear-facing progressions: Feeling uncomfortable in nightclubs 1. Go to a non-intimidating, low-key pub in the afternoon on a slow day. Go to a non-intimidating pub in the evening on a slow day. Go to a non-intimidating pub at night on a slightly busy night.

Go to a non-intimidating pub at night on a busier night. Go to a somewhat intimidating nightclub early in the evening on a slow night. Go to a somewhat intimidating nightclub at night on a somewhat busy night. Go to a quite intimidating nightclub early in the evening on a slow night.

Go to a quite intimidating nightclub at night on a somewhat busy night. Feeling uneasy with speaking up in groups Have several hierarchies going at the same time: Start with short, simple contributions and then work your way up to more lengthy, involved, or controversial ones. Start by speaking up in smaller groups, and build up to sharing in bigger ones.

Start with groups that are low key and easy to chime in to, and work up to rowdier discussions where you have to be assertive to be heard. Start with friendly groups that don't scare you, and work up to speaking in ones that intimidate you more.

Work up to dropping your safety behaviors Safety behaviors see Chapter 3 get in the way of overcoming fears. It was just the safety behavior that got me through it. If you use any safety behaviors and they seem to help you, by all means stick with them at first.

But as you make more progress in facing your fears, try to drop them and go it alone. If I can get used to going up to random people and acting like a chicken, then anything else, like talking to guests at a party, will be a cakewalk. Start facing your fears, beginning with the least scary items The item in your hierarchy you decide to start with has to feel manageable.

It should push your limits, but only a little. You need to begin with something simpler. Do I even need to do this? Maybe I should start with something harder. You may reach this point for some steps in a day. You may have to stick to other steps for a few weeks. The end of the previous chapter covered some ways to get yourself to act. The previous chapter covered this as well. However, on the first night you were only 40 percent of the way there.

On the second night you were 70 percent close, and 90 percent on the third. Maybe on the fourth night you finally did it. Why do I even bother? Use the principles from Chapter 5 to address that thinking properly. Remind yourself of what went well too. Did you face the fear with a lot less hesitation compared to last time? Did you find yourself thinking in any constructive ways that helped you feel more confident?

Build up a written record of your small and large successes. This is another effective behavioral psychology principle that makes the process easier. Something can seem less scary if you know a treat and sense of satisfaction are waiting for you on the other side. This approach can be extremely effective if you pick the right carrot for yourself. Not every fear lends itself to daily practice, but you can improvise.

You may not be able to go to a party six days a week, but you could pledge to practice starting conversations by going to some Internet meet-ups.

The more often you work on exposing yourself to your fears, the better, because it keeps the momentum going. Building up your courage is like exercising to increase your physical fitness. Facing your fear for the first time is a huge accomplishment, but you need to repeatedly face it to solidify your progress. If you want to be able to consistently move a certain amount, you have to regularly exercise with it.

You have to face your fear again and again and again to overcome it. You have to be flexible and make adjustments as you go. You may find you have the order of the steps wrong. You could complete one rung and find the next step is too challenging, so you need to find a task to bridge the two.

The key is not to get discouraged when these hiccups happen; just keep making tweaks so the overall project stays doable. Finally, your progress may seem to slip at times.

This is completely normal. For example, someone with fears around initiating conversations and inviting people out gets comfortable with those skills, makes a bunch of friends, and no longer needs to meet anyone new. Having high self-esteem gives you strengths that will override aspects of shyness, anxiety, insecurity, and pessimism.

People with high self-esteem feel good about themselves and what they have to offer, are more optimistic and more prepared to take risks, and are better able to tolerate uncertainty, discomfort, and rejection. Having a healthy level of self-esteem does not mean being arrogant, boastful, and entitled. Having situational confidence is similarly helpful. Rather there are many things you can do that add up to feeling more sure of yourself.

Setting realistic standards for yourself and letting go of perfectionism. Being nice and compassionate to yourself.

Accepting yourself means being on your own side. If you mess up, you can look at the situation with an understanding eye, rather than tearing into yourself.

People are sometimes wary about the idea of being self-accepting. However, you may find yourself losing interest in goals that were mostly a means of gaining faux self-esteem. The messages can also take the form of ubiquitous, taken-for-granted cultural values about what it means to be a worthwhile person. However, many of these messages are inaccurate and harmful. These messages are wrong and potentially damaging. Whatever negative messages they received, people with low self-esteem believe them in a very strong, unthinking way.

You can bolster your self-esteem if you identify, question, discredit, and stop living by the negative statements you follow. Some of them will stop affecting you as soon as you stop and think about them for a few minutes. Others will be harder to shake. Many socializing-related messages are so entrenched that they just feel right.

If you had a particularly rough childhood, you may need to see a counselor or support group to dismantle the negative core beliefs about your value as a person that were instilled during your upbringing. Self-esteem comes from within. On the other hand, self-esteem is partially affected by how you behave. If your life is not in a place you want it to be, your self-esteem will decrease.

However, you can change your behaviors to boost it. One of these missing pieces could be poor social skills. They could also be problems in other spheres, like your finances, health, or career. Whatever your issues are, you should feel better about yourself once you get them under control. It can be tricky to approach this point with the right mentality. You need to directly address your core lack of self-esteem.

This is not to say you should put all of your goals on hold until you become percent self-accepting. Try to cultivate your goals at the same time as you work on accepting yourself. Someone else may be happy to take any old job and put more importance on thinking for themselves. Take time to develop your existing positive traits, or work to attain new ones. This could involve trying to cultivate certain aspects of your personality or learning a new skill.

You should be able to brush aside the inaccurate, hurtful things they say. Try to improve or discard your toxic relationships, and seek out friends who make you feel good about yourself.

Use short-term self-esteem boosts when appropriate Some suggestions for raising your self-esteem provide only a short-lived boost to your mood. Here are some ideas: Take time to remind yourself of your positive traits and accomplishments. Demonstrate happier, more confident body language. Dress up and make yourself look nice. Do something to treat yourself.

You have to use them in moderation. The methods above are harmless, but have diminishing returns if you do them too often. There are two other techniques that are fine in small doses but unhealthy if taken too far. Doing this frequently will get you in the habit of tearing others down in order to feel better about yourself.

The second is seeking reassurance or compliments from others. Overuse will make you needy and dependent on others to shore you up. Increasing your self-confidence in particular social situations If you have solid overall self-esteem, it can trickle down into your situational social confidence. Other people feel good about themselves on the whole, but still feel anxious and out of their depth in specific social situations.

Situational confidence comes in two flavors. The first is a calm, logical knowledge that you have the ability to handle yourself in those circumstances.

The second is a bold, psyched-up feeling. You have a well-tested skillset or some other reliable advantage. Your certainty comes from a string of past successes. This kind of confidence has to be earned. It usually works out. Feeling psyched In contrast to feeling calmly assured about your abilities, the confidence that comes from feeling psyched is very emotion-based. An untested beginner could experience psyched-up confidence, but so could a veteran going into an unusually tough or high-stakes situation.

What fires you up the first time never seems to work as well again. Chasing psyched-up confidence often sidetracks people. If you want to become more consistently confident in an area, you have to put in the time and effort to build your skills. However, some people get sidetracked while working on their social skills by thinking they should solve their confidence issues first. You can do quite a lot to improve your social prospects without having rock-solid confidence. At times, being more self-confident will improve how you act and come across around people.

On other occasions, your success will depend more on having particular skills, like knowing how to make appropriate contributions to a conversation.

Confidence has to grow slowly over time. Any attempt to increase it quickly will only result in a short-lived psyched-up feeling. Even people who are naturally outgoing and seemingly can talk to anyone occasionally get tongue-tied.

How well your interactions go depends on three factors: 1. Your technical ability to make conversation: Technical ability includes your capacity to come up with things to say, your level in skills like listening and empathy, your body language, your knowledge of appropriate topics for a given situation, and so on.

This section focuses on these skills and more. Your overall personality, interests, values, and opinions: The choices you make in your interactions flow out of who you are as a person. Chapters 21 — 23 touch on some personality traits. Even if you became the most charismatic person in the world, a percentage of your conversations would not go well because some people would feel jealous or intimidated around you. Every person you talk to is different, and your conversations with them can go in any number of directions and still be a success.

Advice on interacting with people has to be general by nature. No book can tell you exactly what to say in every situation. No matter what kind of conversation you find yourself having, the ideas in the rest of this chapter should give you a better idea of what to say in them.

When you naturally get along with someone and the conversation flows effortlessly, many of the processes below happen automatically. Some people go blank in conversations for the same reason. If you find yourself blanking, you can quickly remind yourself of one of the goals, and that should help you think of something to say.

The quintessential example of this is having to make friendly chit-chat at a cocktail party. Learning about someone shows your interest in getting to know them, and it allows you to get a sense of how much you have in common and if they could be compatible for a closer relationship. Your conversation partners want to know what makes you tick. Maybe after that we can talk about what kind of art we each like. Tune in to what each person wants out of the interaction Every individual brings their idiosyncratic goals to each conversation or to smaller sections of it.

If you can tune in to their objectives, it gives you more information about where you could steer the exchange. Be aware of any personal goals you have that might harm the conversation We sometimes want things out of conversations that serve our own needs, but getting them would make the interaction less enjoyable for everyone else.

If you met someone you had nothing in common with, maybe you could have a long interaction if you faked an interest in their hobbies and told them exactly what they wanted to hear about everything.

But after the exchange was over you might look back and realize you go nothing out of it. Go in with an overall approach for making conversation The approaches below often come naturally to good conversationalists. You can use the same strategies more deliberately. You can also switch up broad approaches within a single conversation as it evolves.

It comes up again and again, going back to classic books on people skills like How to Win Friends and Influence People. The idea is primarily to be someone who asks questions and listens to the answers, which leads to focusing the discussion on the other person. Generally focus the conversation on your partner, but not to the point where you share nothing about yourself and become a forgettable nonentity that just helps other people talk.

This approach predisposes you to adopt a positive, friendly frame of mind. Its basic premise implies that everyone is worth talking to if you dig past any preconceptions you may have of them. This approach is not exactly the same. You take an interest in their interest, ask thoughtful questions, and listen as they tell you about it.

At the same time, their effectiveness is sometimes oversold. Approach 3: Figure out what topics you have an easy time talking about, and then try to steer the conversation in that direction Having a conversation about your own interests is considered a more self-centered approach. However, this strategy may help you organize your thoughts and simplify how you approach an interaction. You just have to be sensitive to other people and take care not to bore them or monopolize the air space.

Know how to ask good questions and make good statements To use a common analogy, having a conversation with someone is like working with them to rally a tennis ball back and forth.

At the most basic level you can: Ask them a question, which directly calls on them to contribute. Make a statement of your own, which will hopefully lead them to think of something they want to say in response.