#41 | People Skills

Watch the webclass, "4-Part Roadmap to Encourage Adulting Actions."

Get the Preview of the workbook, When Autism Grows Up by Lynn C Davison, Adulting Coach, Available in Fall 2022.

Download, "The Quick Start Guide to STEAR Mapping"

RESOURCES

• SEEING AUTISM by Barb Avila: https://www.lynncdavison.com/pl/2147533610
• AUTISM AS CONTEXT BLINDNESS by Peter Vermeulen, PhD
• STEAR Map Phone Wallpaper
• LivesInTheBalance.org by Dr. Ross Greene
• Reflective Listening Phone Wallpaper
• Proactive Collaborative Problem Solving Process

Today's struggle is from Carolyn at our The Art of Adulting Facebook Group. Her son is struggling with people skills. Here are some of the thoughts that she has about her son's struggles: puberty and social challenges. She's wondering how to address people, how he should address people to make a good impression.

For example, he calls his dad, son. Good question, and we're going to address this with Barb Avila's process of understanding, connecting and then practicing that she outlines beautifully in her book, SEEING AUTISM.

So let's start out with what is going on. Barb is really helpful in helping me understand, you know, why is this such a struggle? I mean, it's a struggle for everyone who's been diagnosed with autism because it's one of the key criteria.

So she helped me understand in her book, that there's a cascading effect that anxiety has on learning. When we're anxious, it's just not a good time for us to learn.

That can affect our the skills that social skills and people skills that our children pick up. They're not going to pick up that social skills, the people skills at the same rate as someone with a non autistic brain. There are plenty of brains that have challenges with social skills. In particular an autistic brain is going to lag behind their non autistic brained peers.

Why is that? And she says, the more anxious we are, the less likely we are to be curious. That makes a lot of sense. I know that when I'm in a heightened state, I'm not so curious. I kind of cling to my own pattern thoughts and responses and, you know, shut, go to that fight flight and freeze limbic system response that we all see often in ourselves and other human beings.

And then again, I think that people skills require a lot of flexible thinking more than any other types of skills. And she helped me understand this with this quote, that "Partnering requires responding to unpredictable bids from others in a contingent manner."

And I want to add, I didn't add this slide at first. Are you all familiar with you might be familiar with Simon? Baron Cohen. He's a well known researcher, please we find his book really fast.

Yes. Okay. Sorry, this is Peter Vermuelen. This is not Simon. And I'll link to this book in the show notes, wrote a wonderful book about autism as context blindness. And what are we in the links in the transcript use some one page summary that I wrote about this book? It's actually one of several one page summaries that I've written about autism books that are in The Art of Adulting.

He helped me understand that it's hard for an autistic brain to gather in the contextual cues from the overall environment and then from what the person is saying, and the nonverbal cues that again, I mean, there's just a lot of assimilating, in the social skills realm that, you know, informs the context from which we reply, or have that ping pong back and forth conversation with the other person.

This, I think, gives us some cues, some clues as to why this is so difficult for people with an autistic brain. So I did want to mention that he's a he's a good resource for you and I'll link him in the transcript. 

So when we get back to the first that helps us understand what's going on why people skills are such a challenge. Then let's connect with ourselves and with them. And Barb again, gives me some wonderful clues. Here where she says, "When we're trying to connect with our autistic adults, we need to get low, get quiet, and get predictable."

And you know what, those things help me, too. So what she means I think, is just you know, take the voice of voice tone down, you know, slow down, break things apart, and be as predictable as possible in our response.

So predictably, I'm going to go right to the Stear Map process because I believe that sorting our thoughts out into these five categories, anything in life can be put into these five categories:

• what's the situation that's the part we cannot control.
• What is my thought, 
• which is inspiring my feeling?
• which informs my action, and
• creates any results that I have in my life.

And this five point process of separating out what's happening helps me problem solve. And so let's look at what could be happening here. What could be happening here with our parent and with our child with Carolyn and her son.

So the first thing that could be happening with Carolyn, let me just add a slide here, so that I can do this live, which is interesting. Hold on. Alright. So the situation is her son, remember that the situation is very neutral. It's just the facts. It's nothing more than the facts. And the thought is, in the case that she gave us was that our knowing here, let's do this. So said, "Hi, son." to his dad.

Now, that is a fact. We can prove that if we had a video camera, we could show that and that would be the proof that we would need to have to the whole world that that is a fact. So that's why I can go in the situation line.

The moms thought is, "That's inappropriate."

And you know what, if it were me, I would my feet my emotion, but certainly cringing is an emotion. I'm going to call it emotions because that's not appropriate.

And the action is to notice Dad's response. And then, maybe worry, because it sounds like that worry could be triggered from that inappropriate response. Like oh my gosh, you know, he's already a teenager and doesn't know how to do that. So that seems like an appropriate action that could have come along.

And the result is that you know, that's an appropriate so what's the the result is I notice, that's what it is. She notices other examples of inappropriate things. Yeah. Other examples, and that's all I have room for on that slide.

So she noticed this other inappropriate examples because our brain sees our eyes similar brains looking for and so she's finding evidence of other inappropriate social interactions that our son has had to prove her thought that that's inappropriate. And makes perfect sense. This is a thought and this is what's going on. Okay. Now, my brain has been looking for those examples, and it definitely will.

And so we have lots of proof now that his social skills need to be more appropriate.

So let's go to the son and, and figure out what could be. I'm just guessing you know, so, but maybe I think after doing this for a while, you had some ideas. What could be going on?

• So this the situation is, there's dad.
• His thought is, you know what, I'm excited. I'm happy to see him.
• His emotion is joy.
• And his action is to say, "Hi, son." No, mom notice that's probably the way that the dad greets him. So he's just imitating what the dad did. That makes sense to me.
• And then the result is, "I connect with Dad."

That way, when he connects with me, and my assumption is it's a good connection. And he's happy about that connection. So I think that this could be good. Let's I mean, this finding the good and that is that he was able to connect with his dad. So I mean, he's looking for connection, and he made it and it may not be socially appropriate yet, but we can work on that.

So how do we work on that? So this is where we practice our proactive partnering with our children, which gives them all kinds of feelings of feeling of being seen, and safe and soothe with us, so that they feel secure with us and will come to us for, you know, asking what they should do next. And they're consulting with us. And this is a part of practicing this practice partnering is a real gift to all of us.

So we're going to follow Ross Greene's process he outlines this beautifully at his website, LivesInTheBalance.org and I link to that in the in the transcript. We use the proactive partnering process and then we get a little bit bigger.

That's where we, what are the facts? You said Hi, son two data the other day, what is your STEAR Map. Now is when we take the time to really listen to see if we can figure out with that situation. I said, I sent my dad, what were his thoughts, his emotions, and obviously, you know his actions, what was his thinking and feeling behind that?

And you might even notice that you might be a little bit concerned because you're actually bringing this up. So let's make sure that we reflect you know his concerns and say no, we've done anything wrong. We just want to see what we can do to make things better. I mean, we're always doing experiments in our house, right, on how to improve stuff? And we're just thinking that this is an area that would be good for you to you know, become aware of,

Because let's say you get a job. You don't want to greet your boss with High Septon that's, you know, we're telling you that that's inappropriate. I mean, that I skipped I went over to the next step. That's your STEAR Map. So the first step is trying to understand what's going on with him. And then the second step is to share with him your thoughts.

I just love Barb Avila's three Steps:  Get low. Get quiet. Get predictable.

So the more we can do that when we're in this proactive problem solving process, I think the better results are going to get. So that would be what I would do.

Then the last step will be once an experiment, can we can we come up with three ways you might read us? That one would be you know, for your family. Another one would be for friends, and maybe another one could be for someone that you are in a professional relationship, like work. So maybe we need to experiment with what's a good greeting that you can use to connect with that important person in your life. And go and experiment and go do it together and see how that works. So that would be my recommendation is to try.

I know I've talked about this in other videos, that in my opinion, it's the listening skills that are the most important people skill that we need to teach. But it's amazing. The right theoretically, 50% of the time when we're in a one on one conversation with another person, we're going to talk 50% of the time and they're going to talk 50% of the time we call that the 50/50 rule, the 50% rule. Let's do 50% of the talking like the other person.

And we know that that's all a challenge can be a challenge, especially when one of our artists young adults is in into their interest or their or their disclosing how they're thinking and feeling and they just want to get it out. The 50/50 rule is hard for them to abide by. At the same time. It's a critical I think it's the number one social skill that they need to learn is how to listen.

And that's when we start out with the opening of it sounds like or you seem or I'm seeing and then we connect that with with an emotion

So it sounds like you're upset or I'm seeing excitement. Or you know, I think I think you might be and then connect the emotion for sometimes.

In fact, in my opinion, that's the first to teach. Just see if they can identify if the other person is comfortable or uncomfortable. Or one of the six main, you know, happy sad, disappointed, frustrated.

The emotions that you know that your autistic Imago can identify in another person and have that as a handy shortlist of what they could reflect back. And when you do that with your autistic young adult when you just reflect back their emotion, you'll watch their eyes connect, often their eyes will connect with you or you will often see sort of a relax happening in their body just a relaxation response happening. So that they indicating to you that they feel seen when they when you describe their emotion to them.

I think it's wonderful. It's really a powerful tool. If you I continue to even say you know it's about in just give them a quick you know, again, a quiet, low, slow, just a quick soundbite of you're frustrated cuz we can't buy that whatever it is that they want, or because something in your routine change or because our scheduling changed I mean all those things happen.

The three step reflection process is something that when parents can practice and we want to teach it one step at a time, so that we get our autistic young adults to connect better with other people.

We solve the problem with what what's the appropriate greeting. We're going to practice that we're going to practice the reflective listening, and there are plenty of other things to practice.

Inside the art of adulting. Here's what we do we look at what's the identity that our children want to create in the world who are made of their core, what's most important to them?

What's their mindset, we need to help them use their mind to train their brain to work harder for them. And that's getting all of the STEAR Mapping and awareness of what the thoughts are that are creating results.

And then getting the commitment to take the actions that's where we get the GPS by GPS and action, and really identifying each of the 10 domains, which is part of their identity, what do they want to create and what's the next step to create that?

And then the last part is what we're just talking about here is the people skills. That's where we teach them to listen first to be to understand, and then proactively partner to be understood and solve problems together.

This is a roadmap inside The Art of Adulting. And I really hope you'll you'll join me there because what we want to do is move our children from dependence on us to independence, which is where they start taking action and understanding that the consequences the results from those actions. Modifying and changing, keep trying and experimenting to figure out what works for them at their pace and then of course, the final step, and this is all from the final step is interdependence, where we they are a part of our family for the rest of our lives. We are all one loving unit and we're so excited that we have the opportunity to live in love together.

This all comes from Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. And I just want to make sure that hold on how do I get myself back into this into the picture? Oh, there I am. Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. Such a good block and it's a classic. It's been around for many years, and I highly recommend that.

So I do hope you'll join me in I noticed I didn't even put my website here, LynnCDavison.com/blog is where you'll find the transcript of this converse of this video and links all the resources I've already mentioned in several other videos addressing struggles that we parents of autistic young adults often face. I hope you'll join me there and join me at The art of Adulting at Facebook, and I hope we can tackled all of our challenges together.

Bye for now.