S O C I A L S K I L L S: WHAT ARE THEY?
SOCIAL SKILLS ARE SO IMPORTANT, YET WHY THEY AREN’T BEEING TAUGHT ENOUGH?
“To be kind, often is more important than to be right.”
We are created as human beings to live in a human society in harmony with other people. Human societies have hierarchical orders, rules, regulations, laws and culture to obey. In order to live in harmony, we must learn and possess certain social skills.
However, social skills are vaguely defined and are often confused with life skills, which are not very well taught to us by our parents or schools.
Social skills can only be taught and learned with what’s called, “on the job training” methods, through socializing with other kids or peer groups. Children mostly learn their social skills by observing, playing and cooperating with other kids.
Social skills can be difficult to learn if we are not guided and exposed in our early childhood to traditional social groups. Also, if we didn’t have a positive role model to imitate or to follow impacts the development of social skills
That is why many of us learn very few social skills growing up. So, for all of us, it is very important to ask the following questions, ”How do we define social skills? What are they? How can we learn them as adults?”
Wikipedia defines social skills as, ”a social skill is any competence facilitating interaction and communication with others where social rules and regulations are created, communicated andexchanged in verbal and nonverbal way.”
To me, social skills are more interpersonal skills then personal skills.
Life skills, on the other hand, are personal skills and are abilities for adaptive behaviors that enable aperson to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of daily life.
As I see it, social skills are just as important as the 3 R’s (Reading, Writing, Arithmetic) to learn in our early childhood for the future success in our social and professional life. I believe social skill education should start at home, in early childhood, by our parents.
As parents, we should be familiar with a reasonably new concept of Emotional Intelligence ( E I ). I would like to refer the reader to my previous blog article about E I. Simply put, EI is an ability torecognize and manage our own emotions as well as other people’s emotions in social situations. Parents should become role models for their children by properly expressing and controlling their own emotions, as well as, other people’s emotions, in proper verbal and non-verbal manner in front of their children.
Emotions are important as we all have emotions. Emotions are primitive reflex feelings and are important for survival. However emotional reaction and behaviors that defy logic and reasoning are almost always are the source of conflicts, arguments, disagreements and animosities. Only social skills would enable us to handle emotion induced social conflicts with grace and competence.
As I see it, most important social skills to learn and to possess are as follow:
- Try to learn and increase your Emotional Intelligence.
- Have feelings of empathy toward others; try to learn to walk in their shoes.
- Learn to listen carefully before interrupting any conversation.
- Use soft words when you talk, because one day you might have to swallow them.
- Always pay attention to your body language and facial expressions as well as to others.
- Always be honest; the truth matters and sooner or later speaks for itself.
- Establish eye contact and learn to smile often.
Even though most of us didn’t learn social skills growing up, we still can try to learn them from the demands and challenges of daily life, to become a mature, mild mannered and friendly person. But many of us could never be able to master them.
