Life skills and Assertiveness Training

Live skills training, taught by non-professional "coaches" (They are NOT qualified counsellors or therapists) is based on the premise that many behavioural problems are due not  --or not only--to deep-rooted emotional conflicts but to a lack of expertise in dealing with certain interpersonal situations (giving and receiving criticism. accepting and offering compliments, approaching members of the opposite sex, and so forth.
In life-skills training, useful responses to such situations are taught through what is called behavioural rehearsal, in which the coach tells clients how to perform the target behaviour, models the behaviour for them, and then has them practice the behaviour repeatedly in little skits that stimulate the situations they find troubling.
Life-skill training may be conducted an either an individual, or a group basis. When it is conduced in groups, the participants are people presumed to have similar interpersonal problems, and the training focused on those particular problems. With a group of juvenile delinquents, for example, the coach would concentrate on how to respond to authority figurers, how to react to aggression, how to act in a job interview, , and so forth.
With clients whose major complaint is shyness, sessions would be devoted to practice in starting a conversation, asking for a date, responding to a request for one's phone number, and other shyness-provoking situations.
One form of life-skills training that has become quite popular in recent years is Assertiveness Training. Assertiveness is often defined as the ability to stand up for one's rights without violating other people's rights. It is actually somewhat broader than that however. It can perhaps best be characterized as a style of behaviour based on the assumption that ones own feelings and opinions count.
The most commonly used life-skill program in Canada is the Saskatchewan New-start, and, while it can be very useful, in many respects;it also has some very serious flaws:

• The people that most often take the training to become Life-skills coaches are the very people who most need help with these problems themselves.
• Failure of the Life Skills Coach training course is almost unheard of.
• Graduates of The Saskatchewan New-start Coaches program are not trained Behavioural Technicians, Councillors, Diagnosticians, or Therapists; but they most often tend to act as if --and often actually believe that they are. When dealing with serious cases of mental depression this can be very dangerous and it MUST ALWAYS BE REMEMBERED--these people are only coaches, taught to present ONE particular program and there is absolutely no guarantee that they are truly qualified to do even that.