More handpicked essays just for you.
Fostering emotional and social intelligence
Essays on how to improve emotional intelligence
Essays on how to improve emotional intelligence
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Fostering emotional and social intelligence
Self-awareness and self-knowledge are important in any community services work. Many people who are drawn to this kind of work are naturally compassionate and have a strong desire to help others. Ideally, this trait is best if united with an ability to be objective, maintain professional boundaries and avoid stress-related conditions such as burnout. Community services work can be complex and challenging, and may involve working with people who have different value systems, beliefs, life experiences and personal circumstances. In order to carry out your work effectively, you need to understand how your own personality, beliefs, values and behaviours impact on others and influence your practice. Realising how you gained your belief systems
In social work profession, it is notably important that a practitioner be able recognize aspects of their decision making that may be motivated by uncontrollable circumstances such as past experiences, family values, and personal values. Uncontrollable circumstances, such as the examples listed above, all attribute to personal biases a practitioner may display when working with individuals, groups, families, or communities. A personal bias is the negative or positive perspective or demeanor, both knowingly and unknowingly, of any particular individual, or group of individuals, based on different diversity factors that may skew the way that an individual interacts or perceives an individual or group (Miller, Cahn, Anderson-Nathe, Cause, Bender, 2013). Therefore, as a social worker, the importance of practicing self-awareness is that it helps the practitioner to shuffle through personal biases, and in return, aid in social justice and be effectively responsive to diversity factors in the practice setting (Bender, Negi, Fowler, 2010).
Social workers deal with intense situations daily. It is important that social workers are aware of how they are affected by these interactions. Priscilla Dass-Brailsford explains in her book, that countertransference, vicarious trauma (VT), secondary traumatic stress, compassion fatigue and satisfaction, and burnout are all different ways that counselors can be affected (Dass-Brailsford, 2007). This is where it is important for social workers to have a plan of self-care and stress management resources to use.
Human Service professionals are responsible for many tasks over a course of one’s position as a professional. One part of what is required of a Human Service worker would be the understanding of the individual, family and community that they are serving, respecting the diversity that would be amount us, and being able to make professional judgments whenever one is needed to.
I believe that self-awareness is not only important but also obligatory to professional helping. While professional knowledge base is more about the techniques and skills that can be learned, self-awareness comes from inner experiences and defines the professional practice of the helper as strongly as the skills and knowledge obtained. Self-awareness influences thoughts, emotions of the personal helper, and thus impacts their connection to the others and their ability to reflect. I believe that, in order to help other, it is crucial to know yourself and be aware of your own beliefs, values, worldview and perspectives on different
Professionalism in the social work field goes beyond licensure and expertise (Cournoyer, 2014). According to Cournoyer (2014), social work professionalism encompasses the concepts of integrity, self-efficacy and knowledge, self-understanding and self-control, and social support (Cournoyer, 2014). Embedded in social work professionalism is the person-environment perspective, which posits that our personal attributes, interactions and relationships with others, and environment influence a social worker’s practice. Cournoyer stresses that it is a social worker’s responsibility to acknowledge and regulate his or her personal biases, ideologies, and beliefs when working with clients in order to prevent them from negatively impacting the therapeutic
I have always been a person that must help, it is difficult for me to sit idle and to do work that is meaningless. I left a safe and secure career in retail when I did not find the meaning the profound affect my work had upon another. A year and a half ago I began that journey to help others through starting my role as a therapeutic staff support. I was able to learn many things, and at the ...
This would then help the student nurses “to develop more positive, but realistic, attitudes and empathy towards people with mental illness” (Blackhall et al., 2012, pg.23). A service user is defined as “patients, carer’s and the public” (Smith et al., 2008, p. 298). The group of nursing students were to complete a questionnaire before and after they partook in their studies (Blackhall et al., 2012). This questionnaire before they started studying found that students based their judgement towards people with mental illness positively and based off their personal encounters (Blackhall et al., 2012). Three years later another questionnaire was given to the same students which found common themes (Blackhall et al, 2012). The first theme was that “personal knowledge or experience continued to inform attitudes towards mental illness” (Blackhall et al., 2012, p. 24). The second theme was “most of those who attended service user-led sessions found it was effective in challenging their beliefs and attitudes about mental health” (Blackhall et al., 2012, p. 24). In conclusion, the study found that it was beneficial for the students to learn from the service users. It allowed the students to “see service users as ordinary people and witness
42). Dialogue and conversation will increase the likelihood of accepting social responsibility and providing outreach. Understanding the team dynamics of outreach can also increase the likely hood of positive outcomes. Perception and the interpretation of self and other people will impact our relationships and behaviors with other people. Sensitive to cultural differences such as receiving soft versus hard commands at work from ethnic supervisors. A young individual develops views of self and self in the community, then emerges the lifelong fight for independence and
Chapter 1 first starts of by describing the content of the book as a journey and how throughout the chapters we will be able to apply what we are learning on human behavior and the social environment to social work practice and ultimately our lives. There are many basic assumptions that will help guide us in this journey. One assumption that stood out to me was how our lives are interconnected with the people we work and interact with on a daily. However we do differ in many ways and it’s with those differences that we as social workers must respect and learn from. The chapter then went on to discuss the purpose of the social work profession which is to promote human and community well-being. There are 10 core competencies that social work students will be able
If I begin to think in those terms I will lose the ability to see issues form the perspective of others. For example, I may value helpfulness, but if there is a place or time in which I am not properly trained or informed then I am not operating with competency. How helpful am I being if I provide inadequate service? I must always reevaluate my role, and the way my values impact my practice. There could be serious implications in my work as a social worker if there is conflict that arises between my values. I feel that considering if harm would come from me acting on one value instead of another in a time of conflict may be what informs my choice. For example, if my value of respecting the dignity and worth of a person means respecting an individuals cultural norms, but this cultural norm is threatening the safety of an individual then I will have no choice but to go against that value, and protect the safety of the person who is being threatened or harmed.
Working with others and improving own learning and performance are highly essential skills in social work. In this essay I will reflect on how well I have developed these two skills and what I need to do to improve them.
Being a social worker entitles being able to identify those who are in need and helping them to respond to particular crisis such as abuse of a child and or spouse and helping the clients to get use to certain changes in their lives. For example, social workers promote change, problem solving in human relationships and they also enhance the well-being of individuals. To become a great social worker one must first have a heart. A social worker should care about an individual’s well-being and have problem solving skills to be able to help or guide an individual to get help with the everyday stresses of being in bad situations financially as well as mentally and psychologically. Being that social workers deal with individuals that do not necessarily have it easy in life, an individual should come into their life with open arms, ready to accept all the flaws and baggage this individual may have. Life is not easy for anyone, but we all have to remember an individual somewhere has it worse than most.
Standard 2: Self-Awareness of the NASW Standards for Cultural Competence in Social Work Practice explains the importance of self-awareness in Social Work practice in. It reads,
The field of social work is one that requires much self-reflection on the part of the worker. In doing so, it helps the worker better understand his or her own emotions and the thought processes that these emotions come from. The goal of this paper is to provide my own self-reflection, relating it to my own emotional intelligence in the domains of relationships, tolerance, flexibility, self-management, and emotional awareness, and my future plans and goals in Widener University’s MSW program.
Social Workers also approach the clients to not only resolve personal conflicts but to allow the client to function best within their environments. Social Work distinguishing characteristics include the emphasis on the person-in-environment model as well as its emphasis on social justice. Compared to other similar professions, Social Work has differing professional values and ethics that include appreciation to human diversity, understanding of social welfare policy and services, emphasis on both social and economic justice, as well as a strong foundation in education. The importance of Social Work includes numerous of explanations. Social Workers help countless of people navigate through major life challenges or setbacks to find hope as well as options to achieve greater things. Not only do Social Workers help individuals overcome problems but they also stand up for human rights and social justice to assist