Strengths

I redid the strengths assessment form, and I was not surprised at what I found to be my strengths.  As interesting as it would be to have them always changing, I've found that the strengths I have and the skills I am most comfortable are thus far very consistent.  This is likely due to the fact that I have not had the opportunity to go into the field and practice them, which could potentially lend itself to the development of different strong points.  For now, I am comfortable with the strengths I have, and am confident they will be sufficient to get me started as a group facilitator while I'm still learning new ones.
One strength I know I have is empathizing.  I think this skill is part instinct and part learned behavior, but I think that anyone could be taught empathy.  As a social worker, I've had multiple opportunities to respond to life situations with empathy, which makes me very comfortable in this ability.
The next skill is Clarifying.  It can sometimes be intimidating to stop someome when they are talking to clarify something they said, but I can appreciate how extremely important it is.  It's much better to stop and clarify than to not know what they are really trying to say.
Active Listening is extremely important to make the patient feel cared about and attended to.  If you do not do this, they will likely think you aren't paying attention and will be hesitant to continue telling you important details or emotions.
Lastly, I think I'm very effective at summarizing.  If you are a good listener and are engaged in the conversation, then you can attest to this by summarizing with your client.  This, again, will show that you are giving them 100% of your attention and care about what they are saying.  It also helps to clarify for the clinician.  I have found that I am very comfortable summarizing, and use this skill all the time.

Blog 12/5/13

I'm going to use this blog post to talk about the experience I had working on this group project.  I have to start by saying that I was much closer to my group members before we even started (as opposed to the role-play group) and I think that was very beneficial to how we worked together.  I've had groups in other classes recently, and one of my professors said that our presentation felt scattered and disjointed.  While our presentation could have been better, I felt like that was a silly observation, because we didn't get to pick our groups, which caused a lot of difficulty trying to coordinate everyone.  This is a nice way of saying that many of my group members simply never showed up.  Anyway, I'm glad that we were able to pick our groups, because it really did seem to help our sense of teamwork.  Everyone worked really hard with our presentation, and we were able to basically finish everything way ahead of time, which was a huge relief with all the other work we had to do this week for other classes.  I'm confident that our presentation will be informative and will flow well.  Additionally, and most importantly, I think this protocol will actually end up being very useful to Von, who we are giving it to.  I'm proud of what we created, and I hope it proves to be relevant and effective for the kids that participate in the group.