Eavesdropping to Enhance Social Skills
by Clifton Mitchell, PhD
...When encountering clients struggling with social skills issues, I often suggest that they do not make any attempts to change their social skills immediately. Instead, I give them the assignment to deliberately eavesdrop on other's conversations during the week and report back to me with their findings...
I once did this with a college student who had joined a fraternity in an attempt to improve his social skills, particularly with women. He was devastated by his perceived lack of skills in talking with women. His perceptions of his ability to converse with the opposite sex had virtually paralyzed him, and he had an extreme fear of attending upcoming social events. Further, he was convinced that his fraternity brothers were much more adept and clever at conversing with women than he. Thus, he was given the assignment to spend the week eavesdropping on his fraternity brothers' conversations. Upon reporting hack, he was astounded at how mundane and juvenile his fraternity brothers' conversations were.
I can still hear him proclaiming to me, "They're not saying anything! They're just talking a bunch of garbage!" Needless to say, his perceptions shifted immensely, and he moved on to doing his own conversing. Thus, the cognitive distortions were refuted by the client in an empirically based manner and without the therapist having to do any refuting of the client's internal logic. If the client were to report that he or she experienced others as having superior social skills, the exercise would simply be framed as an excellent place to start studying what is missing in his or her repertoire...
Excerpted from the book Favorite Counseling and Therapy Homework Assignments, Second Edition
by Clifton Mitchell, PhD
...When encountering clients struggling with social skills issues, I often suggest that they do not make any attempts to change their social skills immediately. Instead, I give them the assignment to deliberately eavesdrop on other's conversations during the week and report back to me with their findings...
I once did this with a college student who had joined a fraternity in an attempt to improve his social skills, particularly with women. He was devastated by his perceived lack of skills in talking with women. His perceptions of his ability to converse with the opposite sex had virtually paralyzed him, and he had an extreme fear of attending upcoming social events. Further, he was convinced that his fraternity brothers were much more adept and clever at conversing with women than he. Thus, he was given the assignment to spend the week eavesdropping on his fraternity brothers' conversations. Upon reporting hack, he was astounded at how mundane and juvenile his fraternity brothers' conversations were.
I can still hear him proclaiming to me, "They're not saying anything! They're just talking a bunch of garbage!" Needless to say, his perceptions shifted immensely, and he moved on to doing his own conversing. Thus, the cognitive distortions were refuted by the client in an empirically based manner and without the therapist having to do any refuting of the client's internal logic. If the client were to report that he or she experienced others as having superior social skills, the exercise would simply be framed as an excellent place to start studying what is missing in his or her repertoire...
Excerpted from the book Favorite Counseling and Therapy Homework Assignments, Second Edition
