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
