Top 10 Essential Social Skills For Kids And Adults To Be A Good And Successful Personality

Social skills are the qualities that enable us to communicate and interact well with others. It is also known as interpersonal or soft skills.

To connect well with people, you need discipline. You should mind your words when you speak, use proper body language, gestures, facial expressions, and maintain good eye contact with the people you are communicating.

For instance, persons with improved social skills are likely to do well in interviews during employment processes. Besides, employers are not only interested in the level of education or experience of those seeking employment, but also their interpersonal skills.

Social skills are crucial when dealing with customers and contact with colleagues at the workplace. The common social skills are; empathy, conflict resolution, cooperation among others, etc.

It is important to understand how essential it is to develop and show strong social skills. Here is the reason. You cannot build and maintain a strong relationship with your family members, friends, colleagues, fellow students, and the new people you meet if you lack strong social skills.

Maintaining a good and healthy relationship can help you to achieve your life goals. There are many more benefits of strong social skills.

Below is a list of the top ten social skills significant to everyone. And especially to the employment seekers, your co-workers, employers, mentors, students, and anyone regarded as a good person.

10. Ability To Solve Conflicts

Conflict resolution is an essential social skill in settling disputes. And as we live, you will agree with me that many circumstances occur where disagreements or fights happened.

When two or more people engage in a conflict, they need someone to intervene, help them, and get the root of the problem and find the solution.

So, to resolve the disputes at home or the workplace, you need good conflict resolution skills to calm the agitated as you settle their differences.

9. Listening

Listening is the ability to pay attention, hear, identify, and understand what someone says.

You’re an employer, a counselor, or whatever you are. You find how necessary it is to listen to your clients’ distress and confirm that you’ve understood what they said. You need to be a careful listener to understand what others say or ask you.

In my experience as a teacher, I interact with my colleagues and students; I can affirm that people will regard you as noble if you’re a good listener. They like you if they feel you’re the one who listens to their concerns.

How to Grow Your Listening Skills

• Concentrate on the speaker
• Avoid disruptions; let nothing make you lose your focus.
• Prepare what to say in advance so that when it’s your turn to respond, your ideas will flow, and you’ll save much time talking; you won’t bother people.
• Then, when you’ve to respond, speak when it’s your time to. Don’t talk while another person is speaking. That’s a lack of respect.

8. Respect

Respect is a courteous act. These are the behaviors intended to please people you interact with.

How to Improve On Your Behaviors

• Don’t interrupt others while speaking; let them finish before you talk. A respectful person knows how and when to start a talk.
• Always stay on topic while discussing serious matters.
• Manage your time, especially during meetings. Don’t annoy people by spending much time while presenting your views.
• Learn to ask logical questions. Don’t pose ambiguous questions.
• In case someone asks you anything, ensure you reply to them all.

7. Empathy

A person with empathy can identify, understand, and show genuine sympathy for another person’s feelings. You cannot interact well with others if you’re not able to understand their moods.

Learn to consider how others feel so you may develop the right approach to their conditions, especially when dealing with depressed peoples who bring their problems for you to solve. Show your sincere concern to them and help to solve their issues.

Sympathizing with a person enables them to identify you, thus building stronger relationships and respect.

6. Cooperation

Cooperation is the key when you have to work as a team or alongside any other person to scope the mutual aim of your company or institution.

It isn’t easy to partner and works with other people to reach a common goal if that person lacked strong cooperating social skills.

• Read Also – Best Tips To Improve Communication Skills and Speak Better Publicly

5. Verbal Communication

Verbal communication is the activity of passing information using clear spoken language that others can understand.

You must follow the grammar rules and maintain respect whenever you speak to people face to face or on the phone.

Remember, you can still translate your speech into written form. Here, you’ve to check your spellings and the format of writing emails, texts, letters, or reports.

4. Gestural Communication

This is a non-verbal way of communicating. It’s a communication mode where you use your body language, eye contact, and facial expressions to convey a message.

For example, if you read your face, you should be able to tell whether you are an empathetic person or not.

Your body language should obey your gender. It’s not appropriate to posture yourself as a woman when you’re a man and vice versa.

It’s also improper to put your face down while talking to others. Maintaining good eye contact is one of the effective ways of communication.

3. Effective Communication

Both verbal and non-verbal communication skills are crucial when you want to share your ideas with others.

If you can express and define your thoughts in an easy-to-understand way, then good for you because you own one of the fundamental skills of a moral leader.

2. Ability To Maintain Healthy Relationships

When you have the right skills to interact, create, and sustain a relationship, you can say that you’re good at relationship management. This social skill is important, especially when you providing services to your regular customers.

Maybe you’re a vendor or a receptionist; it’s your responsibility to promote the relationship between your company and the client. And by doing so, you build and flourish your social-economic status.

1. Sharing

And finally, we’re talking about the willingness to give or receive intellectual or concrete resources. I mean, sharing includes both materials and ideas.

With my eight years as a caregiver for children aged 1-14, I can affirm that children aren’t the only ones to learn and gain ‘sharing’ skill, but adults have to learn too.

Like children, some adults share when they only feel they have plenty of resources. And more especially when the resources come at a cost, people become reluctant or selfish in sharing.

As the saying goes, ‘you cannot receive more than you give.’ Therefore, it’s childish when you only share the information or substantial materials that you no longer are interested in or are outdated.

A good person is one who shares the ideas and materials for the benefit of others.

Benefits of Maintaining Strong Social Skills

Social skills give people a wide range of benefits. Students and employees, for instance, can get linked to greater success in school and the company, respectively.

• Effective communication skills will enable you to express your projects and provide your view on issues for the benefit of others.
• Good relationship management will help you gain and share ideas and techniques from people with different expertise fields.
• Cooperation skills ease the work and save time. Remember, collaboration is the key to success.
• The depressed would be stress-free if they met empathetic people who would provide mutual support by solving their problems.
• Keeping your relationships helps expand your social, emotional, and economic network. As you share ideas, you learn how to pursue new opportunities.
• Demonstrating these interpersonal skills during the hiring process guarantees you a perfect chance to get hired.
• Maintaining strong social skills makes life more pleasurable at home, school, and the workplace.

How to Develop Your Social Skills

The following are, but a few more ways you can improve on your interpersonal skills are:

• Point out areas you’re less skilled in, practice the procedures and tips on how you can improve on your interpersonal skills, and show what you’ve learned as you interact with others.
• Research and even pay for the classes and other resources that contain information useful for learning and the development of your social skills. Including online and hard copy materials.
• Set aside some trusted friends or mentors; people who can provide you with honest information about your areas that need improvement.
• Learn to set SMART (Specific Measurable Achievable Realistic and Timely) goals. SMART goals set an outline that helps track the progress of your projects, thus meeting your life objectives.

There’re other social skills that we cannot conclude without mentioning. For effective communication, proper interaction, and efficiency at work, you’ll need the above social skills and the following;

The ability to follow instructions, keeping a distance from the person you’re speaking to, and using your manners – saying please, thank you, I’m sorry and keeping good table manners.

Social skills are crucial aspects of life. No matter who you’re, your position, or experience level, these soft skills can help you connect effectively with others and grow and maintain the relationships you build with the people you meet.

To gain and fully improve on these skills, you need to put in much effort by changing how you relate with others by practicing what you’ve learned.

It’s also important for parents to help the kids to gain these social skills as they grow up. Parents and teachers should be excellent role models for children. A kid with strong social skills is a child with high self-esteem.