UPAD Psychology & Coaching: "Achieving social success means achieving personal success".

Fernando Callejo and Carlos Rey talk to us about personal development through social skills.

Social relationships constitute a large part of what allows us to perform as people; in other words, personal development is never an individual process, but also takes place in our relationships with others.

That is why improving and "polishing" our social relationships is essential both to achieve specific goals and to feel good about who we are and what we do.

This is the subject that we are going to address in the following lines, with an interview with Carlos Rey and Fernando Callejo, from UPAD Psicología & Coachinglocated in Madrid.

Interview with Fernando Callejo and Carlos Rey: personal development through social skills

Fernando Callejo and Carlos Rey are expert psychologists in personal development and coaching, and sports psychology, in addition to directing and being founders of UPAD Psicología & Coaching. They work helping all kinds of people to boost their personal and professional projects. Here they will talk about how personal development connects us to other people.

Personal development is often talked about as if it were a process that involves only the individual, but to what extent does it also involve the way we learn to relate to others?

In UPAD we understand personal development as a process of integral growth, where the person learns to manage through various strategies and concepts, their own psychological skills to optimize their levels of performance, satisfaction and well-being.

When we talk about performance, we refer to all the behaviors that the person carries out throughout the day, that is, what "I do". What I "do" generates a certain level of satisfaction or dissatisfaction. This is defined by those thoughts in the form of valuation, which we people elaborate when we carry out different actions.

It has to do with what "I think". Over time, depending on how we think / value the way we do things, associated feelings of well-being or discomfort are generated. What "I feel". This last one would be the third wicker of what we understand in UPAD to be a process of personal development.

We work on these three fundamental pillars: behaviors, thoughts and feelings. In short, "what I do" affects "what I think" and this in turn affects "what I feel", and "what I feel" again affects "what I do", often becoming a kind of loop from which it is difficult to escape.

From there, we work to develop greater self-management by the person, focusing on certain basic psychological skills for its achievement such as motivation, activation, attention, cognition and emotions, among others.

In order to be able to relate effectively with other people, it is first important to know how to do it with ourselves, and for this it is important to know ourselves, accept ourselves and overcome ourselves.

Learning to communicate assertively with ourselves will allow us to develop an optimal and effective language to relate to others.

Is it common for people with technical knowledge to fail to progress professionally or personally because they have learned dysfunctional dynamics when socializing with others?

The level of knowledge does not have to be linked or at odds with social skills. We usually find a profile of people who come to UPAD with high levels of technical knowledge in their field.

It is quite common that the same level of demand and expectations that they have had with themselves to develop in their work, they turn it to their next challenges and their environments, which can produce high levels of frustration, and instead of analyzing their individual responsibility in the possible improvements to be made, they try to blame their difficulties to the environment or to the other people with whom they interact regularly (external locus of control).

We are even talking about bosses and company managers who instead of analyzing how they can improve their own communication skills, try to find a way to change others, and as is logical, high levels of stress and anxiety are usually produced when they have no control, often leaving them with the dubious consolation that it is someone else's fault... But I don't feel well.

Often, these feelings of ineffectiveness prevent them from progressing in their respective professional fields.

What aspects of social skills are most important on a day-to-day basis?

At UPAD we try to teach the person who comes to our office to understand their difficulties, to reach the level of well-being necessary to express themselves in social situations in a more satisfactory way and to manage their communication, both internally and externally through various strategies.

Achieving social success means first achieving personal success in terms of what we have been talking about (performance, satisfaction and well-being).

It is difficult to be good with others if we are not good with ourselves. From there, we can focus on developing social and communicative skills, both verbal and nonverbal, that help the person to improve his or her communication style. For example, by working on assertiveness, we can achieve high levels of personal satisfaction and social adaptation.

What can be done from psychology to help people interested in enhancing their personal development through their skills in relating to others?

First of all, it would be essential to know their demand, analyze their needs, and from there, draw an action plan that allows the person to enjoy the journey during the process. Strengthening their self-esteem, self-concept and self-confidence, for example, through decision-making and assertiveness, will allow the user to generate greater satisfaction when facing their reality.

Of course, implementing a sense of continuous empowerment, allowing the person to generate significant learning about their own capabilities. After that, the work of managing thoughts and beliefs will be fundamental for your own personal development process.

What are the most common techniques and strategies used in consultation in cases where, for example, shyness limits the way a person communicates?

First of all, it would be interesting to analyze whether this shyness extends to all personal spheres of this person's life. If not, it would be good to reflect if it is a kind of selective shyness, because in that case, there will be something behind this shyness that would be interesting to analyze, understand and propose certain objectives to gradually overcome this circumstantial feeling of shyness.

In relation to the above, we could work initially on their assertive communication and decision making, to generate a higher level of self-confidence when putting their communication skills into practice.

Logically the process would be gradual, small steps generate big changes, as long as we learn consciously. This will generate a strong base for the development of the person's self-esteem, which will allow him/her to face new challenges of greater complexity every day.

And in cases of poor anger management or aggressiveness in situations in which we argue or negotiate with others, what can be done?

Similarly, it is important to work on their emotional intelligence to learn to manage their emotions. For this we emphasize their attitude, as this is the key that will define how we deal with each situation.

From there we work on the thoughts, on the interpretations that sustain such negative situation, on the emotions and sensations associated with such thoughts and with all this information, we generate new strategies to face such situations. Where there is a crisis there is always an opportunity for improvement. The most important thing: in order to internalize the new coping strategies, it is convenient to raise the levels of consciousness about how we carry them out.