Become a Science-Based Practitioner! The Positive Psychology toolkit is a science-based, online platform containing 200+ exercises, activities, interventions, questionnaires, assessments and scales. What is the Definition of Interpersonal Effectiveness? Interpersonal effectiveness, at its most basic, refers to the ability to interact with others. It includes skills we use to: • Attend to • Balance priorities versus demands • Balance the “wants” and the “shoulds” • Build a sense of mastery and self-respect (Vivyan, 2015) Our ability to interact with others can be broken by the goal we have in mind for our interactions. There are three main goals to interaction: • Gaining our objective • Maintaining our relationships • Keeping our self-respect Each goal requires interpersonal skills; while some interpersonal skills will be applied in many situations, some skills will be especially important for achieving one of these goals. When we are working towards gaining our objective, we need skills that involve clarifying what we want from the interaction, and identifying what we need to do in order to get the results we want.
When is our first priority, we need to understand how important the particular relationship is to us, how we want the person to feel about us, and what we need to do in order to keep the relationship going. Finally, when our goal is to keep our self-respect, we will use interpersonal skills to help us feel the way we would like to feel after the interaction is over and to stick to our values and to the truth (Vivyan, 2015). Interpersonal Effectiveness & Dialectical Behavioral Therapy Interpersonal effectiveness is the main focus of (DBT). In fact, it’s the second core skills module in classic DBT, with tons of materials and resources dedicated to improving the client’s interpersonal skills.