One way of assessing your social skills is to come up with a list of activities that are believed to be useful in gaining social acceptance. Engaging in these activities may improve your social skills if you happen to put them into practice right now.

The following activities can help a person gain peer acceptance, belongingness and increased self-esteem:

1. Cooperation. When one volunteers to help, one develops a sense of self-worth and the other party on the other hand benefits from the support extended towards achieving their goals and objectives.

2. Sharing. When you share time and other resources with someone it is a simple way of letting others feel cared for.

3. Participation. Voluntarily submitting oneself to be involved is one way of being recognized.

4. Be a friend. Have you tried being a friend to a friend in need? If gaining friends is one of your goals in developing your social skills, there may be people around you who maybe in need of a companion.

5. Be patient. Stop being temperamental. People will tend to shy away if they find you to be uneasy and irritated with simple matters.

6. Following Directions. Listen first before arguing.

7. Taking Turns. Learn to give way for others. Do not be greedy of attention.

8. Remaining on Task. Stay on the task assigned. Be responsible for the task assigned to you.

9. Accepting Differences. Accept if you are at fault. Avoid arguments and realize your mistakes. Be humble and say you are sorry.

10. Listening. Respect others' opinions as they try to respect yours.

11. Praising others and Refraining from put downs. Negative comments bring negative feelings towards you. See the good of others and avoid finger pointing.

12. Be polite and courteous. It is best to be polite and courteous at all times. Regardless of age, sex and status in the community your show of respect for others also brings out the real person in you.

13. Use good manners. You need to be good mannered in order to be welcomed by your group or environment. A person who loves to pick fights is a person not liked and is considered to be a negative influence to the group.

Now, that you have assessed your social skills it is time to improve your social skills. Use the following strategies to get started today:

1. Role playing. You try to act out a short real life situation that happened to you in your community. Your role playing would show how you look at the situation that just occurred. Observers would be able to ascertain the aspects of your personality that affected the outcome.

2. Warm Up Exercises. This tool is designed to allow you to perform and carry out the different behaviors being taught during social skills learning. Such warm up exercises are not real life related.

3. Modeling. Somebody tries to demonstrate the appropriate behavior for you.

4. Homework Assignments. Homework assignments allow you to try new learned behavior. It is expected that exercises based on real life situations will produce positive results.

5. Instruction. Different behavioral patterns are taught in detail and the importance to social situations is explained.

6. Reinforcement. The knowledge acquired through verbal instruction and modeling is put into place.

Assessing your skills and how you would like to go about it is your choice. You should learn that social skills are used to interact with others. Assessment of our social skills, whatever techniques it might be, will help towards building social interaction and awareness of the social situation. Evaluate yourself and decide what to do next.

BlueWaterArticles.com: - Social Skills Assessment the Key to a Happier Social Life

About the Author

Peter Murphy is a peak performance expert. He recently produced a very popular free report: 10 Simple Steps to Developing Communication Confidence. Apply now because it is available only at: conversation starters