Peer Helping Skills Model

While reflecting back on the very first day of the RA Workshop series, I remember being full of nerves and a little confused about how I was going to progress through the series. I was very outgoing from the beginning, but somewhat reserved and timid at the same time. In addition, I felt that I also notably lacked confidence in my ability to be a strong leader due to my laid back and non-assertive outlook. However, through his process, I have been able to gain a greater self- awareness of myself, learned to accept how I relate to people, and am leaving a lot more confident in who I am as a leader and developing educator. As I move forward in my professional life as a teacher, I realize that for the rest of my life one of the main purposes

Through learning the Peer Helping Skills Model, I feel much more equipped to be able to effectively guide and help my residents. Within the Peer Helping Skills model, I feel that my strengths include SOLER , being able to recognize and respond to feelings, and brainstorming solutions as well as making a referral. In general, I feel that I am pretty personable which helps me to feel comfortable and allows me to be able to smoothly continue a conversation with my peers. This will be good for when I am talking to residents about a need or struggle that they are having. Likewise by me being a Niner Guide for the school, I am able to easily list out the many different resources that are available to students on campus which will help me tremendously in the brainstorming options/ solutions part of helping if the issue is school related. Within the Peer Helping Skills Model the two areas that I need to work on include using gentle confrontation and not self- disclosing too much. As a person, I am pretty non conformational and so I am still a little unclear about how I could best confront someone without seeming like I am attacking them or coming off harsh. Likewise, when practicing my helping skills, I noticed that I sometimes talk about my own experiences a little too much and I need to work on only sharing the parts of myself that are truly necessary and are important to the problem at hand. When it comes to rather or not I feel comfortable managing conflict, I am not really sure. On one hand, I feel that I am comfortable managing conflict as long as the conflict at hand isn’t too tense or hostile. If the conflict is very hostile in nature, I might feel a little uncomfortable depending on what it is being said. In general, when it comes to conflict