Social skills are an integral part of our day-to-day living. We use them without even realising, now imagine if you couldn’t. What if you honestly didn’t know how to respond when someone spoke to you or even smiled at you? The impact would be far-reaching, and is for those who feel that they don’t possess the necessary skills to socialise with others.
Being unable or feeling unable to socialise affects your self-esteem, your ability to assert yourself and your self-worth. So we devised a workshop structure that offered as much as it could!
Our workshops offer:
- 1-on-1 support for any members who feel that they need it,
- Out of hours support (usually via e-mail),
- A 2 hour weekly workshop focusing on social skills, boosting self-esteem and improving self-worth,
- Community.
The questions and issues that we have come across in our social skills workshops range from the meaning of banter and understanding humour, to the basics of body language. We have also come across issues with low self-esteem, assertiveness and poor self-worth.
As a social enterprise it is our dream that more organisations run similar services for not only those on the spectrum, but anyone who needs it. Everyone deserves this opportunity and it is up to us, as a society, to make it happen.
If you are reading this as an organisation who would like to run their own social skills workshops (or are even an organisation that already do) then let us know in the comments and we’ll see if we can help. If you are reading as an individual who feels that they would like to improve their social skills, follow us on twitter @9teacups. We post social skills resources in our twitter feed along with updates about future workshops!
A note about professional practice: We feel very passionately about social skills workshops and want as many people as possible to benefit from them, doing anything that could compromise the effectiveness of the workshops is not in anyone’s interest.
In the past we have been approached by people looking to do as many social skills workshops as they can with a number of professionally unrelated workshop facilitators. Whilst we encourage people to attend a variety of social skills workshops to test which workshop works best for them, professional practice dictates that it is not beneficial to a workshop member to attend social skills workshops run by professionally unrelated workshop facilitators.
As workshop facilitators, it is not ethical for us to run workshops with people who opt to attend social skills workshops run by other organisations. This is because approaches between workshops can differ and this may cause conflicts in the information that members receive. This is unfair and can inhibit the member’s progress. As a result we don’t run workshops for people who opt to attend social skills workshops run by other organisations. This is by no means a slight, our intention is to make sure that they get the best service possible.