Talkabout for Adults: Developing Self-Awareness & Self Esteem

Talkabout for Adults is a practical resource to help therapists or support staff to develop self-awareness and self-esteem in adults. It has been particularly aimed at adults with an intellectual disability (learning disability) or older children with special needs.

It has been adapted from Talkabout for Children: Developing Self-awareness and Self-esteem to be suitable for an older audience. This means that some of the activities are almost identical but a number of them have been adapted to be more appropriate. There are also some new activities such as the ‘A book about me.’ which enables the adults to make up a book over the course of the sessions that will summarise some keys personal facts. This can work well as an addition to a communication passport or equivalent, or can stand alone as an alternative.

Talkabout for Adults is a stand-alone resource with approximately a year’s worth of activities to develop self-awareness and self-esteem. It has 50 activities to do with adults and it has been successfully piloted at Speaking Space. It includes:

– a short assessment of self-awareness and self-esteem
– a year’s worth of work on self-awareness and self-esteem including 50 activities and some worksheets
– practical suggestions to make your group work successful including 25 group cohesion activities
– a plan for intervention, and forms for monitoring and evaluation.

This resource continues to use the Talkabout hierarchical approach to teaching skills, that is, basic self-awareness skills are taught prior to more complex skills such as social skills and friendship skills. This also means that this resource is designed to be used logically from topic 1 through to topic 8. Most of the activities are more suited to working in a group setting but some of them can be adapted for one-to-one work.