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Expressing Feelings
To briefly recap on the last issue - it is important to remember that to be assertive, a child or adult will need to have relatively good non verbal and verbal skills and so if you are unsure whether your child can cope with this work, then go back to your assessment and check that they have good or adequate non verbal and verbal skills to enable them to succeed with this more complicated work (see issue 4).
There are 5 main steps to expressing feelings effectively and appropriately:
- Recognise the feeling
- Stop and plan
- Use assertive body language
- Use ‘I’ messages
- Show respect for the other person
1. Recognise my feeling
This first step will mean helping children to identify different feelings and to think about what happens to our bodies when we are experiencing these feelings.
It is also important to recognise the link between our thoughts, our feelings and our actions. You may choose to look at different situations that have affected their feelings and work through what happened.
A worked example might look like this:
What was the situation? ‘My mum asked me to tidy my bedroom when I had arranged to meet my friends in town’
What did you think? ‘She’s mean; this is unfair; she hates my friends’
What did you feel? ‘Angry’
What did you do? ‘I shouted at my mum and slammed the door’
What were the consequences? ‘I got grounded and couldn’t see my friends for a week’
What could you have done differently? ‘I could have stayed calm, told her how I was feeling and offered a compromise like doing a bit of tidying before I go and then the rest as soon as I got back’
Working through real life situations can help children identify the feelings they experienced, the choices they made and the consequences of these.
2. STOP and have thinking time
The second step is to use a ‘STOP’ plan. You may have already introduced this to the children in previous sessions, but if not it includes the steps: Stop, Think, Others and Plan.
Stop is all about stopping and taking a minute to recognise your feeling.
Think is about weighing up your choices.
Others is about considering what other people will do and say and also if you need another person’s help.
Plan is about making your decision.
This can be a lot to go through with some children so in these cases I would simplify it to just ‘stop’.
3. Use assertive body language
The third step is to remember our body language. In particular an assertive person will stand upright and will look at the other person, so it’s important to recap on good posture and eye contact.
4. Use ‘I’ messages
The fourth step is to teach the children to use ‘I’ messages when expressing their feelings. This means saying ‘I feel… when you… because…’ This simple technique or formula can be a powerful tool to help children work out what they are going to say and then say it.
I may spend some time helping them plan exactly what they could say in a specific situation and then help them role play these to try them out and develop their self confidence in using this skill. Using ‘I’ messages is a skill that is used in teaching other assertiveness skills, such as making suggestions and disagreeing, so it is worth spending some time on this to get it right.
5. Remember to respect the other person
This final point is about helping children remember that they are not responsible for the other person’s behaviour but that they should try to remain respectful at all times.
To help the children practice these skills it is always a good idea to offer them the opportunity to watch group leaders model different scenarios and then to role play situations for themselves. Ideally, this would be situations that they can relate to and may have already experienced, but you could also start off with a few made up situations. These could include:
Situations for discussion and role play
- Your best friend has told another class mate something you told them in confidence.
- Your friend has just been mean about your new hair cut.
- Your best friend is leaving to go to another school.
- You have just been selected to be in this year’s team but your best friend hasn’t.
- Your boyfriend / girlfriend has been ignoring you at school. They seem fine when it’s just the 2 of you but when other people are around, they behave as if you are not important to them.
So hopefully that has given you a few ideas on how you could tackle teaching someone to be able to express their feelings assertively.
In the next issue we will take another assertiveness skill - refusing.
Alex Kelly
Speech & language therapist and social skills consultant www.alexkelly.biz
Alex Kelly is the author of Speechmark's best selling Talkabout series.
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See the Talkabout online assessment tool at www.alexkelly.biz
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