Where do your social skills rate?
Before attempting to help your kids expand their social skills, you’ll want to make sure you have a fairly full set of these skills yourself. Go ahead and rate yourself on the following social skill deficits. These are behaviors that can cause people not to like you. You can give yourself a “not one of my problems,” “sometimes do this but not regularly,” “do this more often than I should” rating. Use the list to help you improve your own game even as you begin to teach your kids how to up theirs.
Saying nothing, giving one-word answers, failing to ask questions, and failing to react to what the other person has said, are all examples of “not saying enough.” This behavior makes your conversational partner do all the work. She’ll feel tired, strained, or drained from the effort of communicating with you. In healthy conversation, people take turns contributing and responding to each other.
This involves talking at length about whatever interests you and ignoring cues that others want to speak. It may also involve talking over other people, interrupting the speaker, and ignoring topics the other person introduces in favor of constantly promoting your own. Another variation of this style is the tendency to compete with the speaker, again returning the focus to yourself (“You think you had a bad experience with ABC Airline. Wait till I tell you what happened to me!). Monopolizing forces other people to be your audience when they actually want to be participants in an exchange of ideas. Your conversation style offers them few rewards and plenty of work.
When you leave yourself out of the conversation by failing to share your true thoughts and feelings, your conversational partner feels like she’s engaging with someone who is hiding behind a wall or a facade. It leaves her feeling alone instead of connected. A rich conversation involves sharing your own experiences and unique thoughts and feelings while also showing a sincere interest in your social partner’s experience and perspective.
Create a free account to keep reading.
