Communication & Interviewing Skills

Exploring

This is the stage were I engage the clients to work with me so that we can start a mutual exploration of the person-issue-situation. The goal is to assist my clients in achieving a greater self-awareness to enable them to go forward in achieving the tasks that will assist in our final goals.

In this phase I will be working through steps that will assist my clients and me in attaining our goals. These steps entail; asking questions, seeking clarification, reflecting content, reflecting feelings, reflecting feeling and meaning, partializing and going beyond what is said. These steps are used in exploring the person, issue, and situation and in looking for and building strengths.

This is the next stage for my youth group, who are at risk as a result of poor attendance and performances in their school. This group was given the ultimatum to either attend and participate in this group or be expelled from their schools. Their parents are also aware of the requirements of attending this group and what the focuses of the goals are. This is to complete their schooling and have potential job skills for their own future growth.

As in the beginning, I feel that I need to remind everyone of the ground rules and what the objective is of the agency, who is the benefactor of the group. Also, I am going to continue to assure them that I am there to assist in guiding each member towards their goals and to keep a focus on the best interest and different potentials of each member. Similarly to a sheep herder who is basically there to ensure the safety and well being of the herd and the end benefits of ensuring their safety, in this case it would be each person achieving their ultimate goals.

Good afternoon, for our new members who don’t know me as yet, my name is Kim Arseneau; I am a Social Service Worker with, Youths Assisting Youths. The purpose behind our sessions together is to try to find different ways that will work for everyone in this group to succeed in completing school and going forward to a career that they want to be doing. This is for our new members and to also remind the rest of us that, if we are to be able to go forward comfortably we need to follow a few basic guidelines. Everything that we say here is just between us and what we say here is to remain between us, and hopefully we will not violate that, because we each feel the same way. All information shared in this group is confidential, I will not share anything with anyone else, and if I need to I will first talk to whom ever it is personally, to get that person’s consent. We are here to also help each other, we are our own unique group, and we are bringing our strengths together to be better able to accomplish what we each set our sites or goals towards. So we must grow to trust each other a little, so that we will accomplish these goals and be able to help others when we see that they might be heading on the same path we were on that brought us to this group. In this group we might make new friends that we will have for the rest of our lives or we might not like each other at all, but don’t let that distract you from the main purpose of our group. I will be taking attendance, and that is shared with whom you were sent here by and with your school principals. Our newer members will also need to each fill-out a general information form, for my own files. Once these sessions are ended, you are welcome to come back, even encouraged to set up a visit, because your experience will help others who join to this group. As I said before, we are a good virus, which we are to spread where ever we go; we are all messengers to share positive information to help others.

Now as always at the start of a session, I would like us each share their feelings about being together, any questions, concerns or what you think you want from these sessions. Remember, even if you are here not because you want to be, but are directed to be, use this opportunity, don’t dwell on that, turn it around, and make it work for you. Again, I will start so you can get an idea of how to start. I was asked by my supervisor to give a presentation to another youth program to introduce this program into their school system. When she told me of this at first I had very mixed feelings. I thought that to better understand why I had these feelings, and in order to deal with these feelings I had to look at them individually in order to understand them. First, I felt excited, this was caused by my feeling the boss recognized my strengths, then I felt scared, this was from the fear of presenting to new people and fearing that they would not understand the focus of our program, and last I felt like a kid, looking forward to sharing with others what I believe is an exciting and beneficial ideal, that I believe this program makes everyone involved eventually feel good about themselves. See, that is how to start just take one thing you can think of and break it down, to better understand it and to easily deal with it. At first the whole picture left me feeling very overwhelmed and anxious.

So now we will go around the group and we will each explore an area that we want to better understand and remember, we are trying to think about how it made us feel and how we are going to proceed from there.

Now that we have

...