Interpersonal Effectiveness, the final skill of DBT, builds on the foundation of mindfulness, distress tolerance, and emotion regulation. These 10 exercises teach you how to navigate relationships, assert your needs, and manage conflict while maintaining respect for yourself and others.
Imagine you’re at work and a colleague has unintentionally taken credit for your idea in a team meeting. Instead of reacting impulsively or harboring resentment, you decide to use interpersonal effectiveness skills.
You request a private conversation with your colleague, where you calmly and assertively express how you feel about the situation. You listen to their perspective, empathize with their oversight, and collaboratively find a solution to ensure proper recognition and prevent future misunderstandings.
This approach not only resolves the immediate issue but also strengthens your professional relationship and mutual respect.
Interpersonal Effectiveness refers to the skills and strategies you use to interact effectively with others. These skills can help you build and maintain positive relationships, communicate needs and desires effectively, and manage conflicts in a constructive way.
The key aspects of Interpersonal Effectiveness include:
Interpersonal Effectiveness in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) equips you with a set of skills designed to help you interact with others in a way that is assertive, maintains self-respect, and strengthens relationships.
In DBT, this module is usually taught last, as the first three (Mindfulness, Distress Tolerance, Emotional Regulation) lay down the foundation for Interpersonal Effectiveness skills.
This page helps you practice and master 10 Interpersonal Effectiveness skills:
Focus on identifying personal communication styles for mindful interaction.
Teach how to express opinions, emotions, and needs clearly, honestly, and respectfully.
Provide templates for clear communication.
Emphasize attentive and mindful listening skills.
Address common obstacles in effective communication.
Explore building trust and honesty in relationships.
Discuss awareness of boundaries for productive outcomes.
Navigate making requests assertively.
Master effective communication in challenging situations.
We offer 10 free videos and worksheets you can take advantage of in this module. Our worksheets work with you in different ways:
Aside from the obvious benefit of improving your communication skills, reducing conflicts in personal and work life, and being able to immediately solve problems, there are a lot of additional long-term benefits.
In the long term, healthy interpersonal skills lead to stronger, more fulfilling relationships, enhanced self-confidence, better emotional regulation, and overall improved mental well-being. These skills foster a healthier social environment and personal growth over time.
Like good interpersonal skills, poor interpersonal skills can lead to immediate and long-term consequences.
In the short term, they often result in misunderstandings, conflicts, and stress in your relationships. If these happen repeatedly, this can lead to long-term problems like chronic relationship problems, social isolation, and depression. These can negatively affect both professional and personal life.
Interpersonal Effectiveness is like muscle – you can exercise and build it. What was hard before becomes easier as long as you keep up with your workouts.
The exercises we have here on this site are a good place to start – we have ten exercises, all have a video and a worksheet you can take advantage of for free.
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Lessons emailed to you twice a week.
Here are some ideas. Practice interpersonal effectiveness daily and you will gradually get better!
Interpersonal Effectiveness skills, as taught in DBT, can be highly beneficial in your romantic relationships. These skills help you communicate more effectively, understand and empathize with your partner’s perspective, and manage conflicts in a healthier way.
Interpersonal Effectiveness works wonders at the workplace. Here are some of the benefits:
One of the challenges of learning DBT Interpersonal skills is that many people assume they already have good communication skills – when in reality, they may lack the fundamentals. Unless they accept that, they will have a hard time learning new skills.
Another challenge lies in the complexity of these skills. An example would be the difficulty of maintaining active listening and other targeted behaviors during interactions. This makes learning Interpersonal Effectiveness skills harder to learn. This is one of the reasons it is usually the last module to be taught in DBT.
Developing interpersonal skills involves more than just being pleasant; it requires learning specific behaviors and competencies for effective collaboration and communication. With the multitude of skills taught in Interpersonal Effectiveness, it’s often challenging to identify and focus on the skills most relevant to one’s role and career objectives.
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Lessons emailed to you twice a week.
I was wondering if you have any worksheets or tools for teenagers. My son is ADHD ODD ruling out Bi Polar & PTSD I need some real help.
ADMIN – Hi Gena,
Teenagers are old enough to use the adult DBT worksheets that are on the site. Sounds like you might need more help than the self-help resources on the site. Are there any local resources available through your son’s school or your local healthcare system?
Do you recommend a parturition order of doing these modules, and how many per day so you recommend? Is it better to work all the way through one module or is it helpful to do one or some exercise from each module daily?
These are so helpful!
ADMIN – Hi Viv,
I focus on just one exercise per day, and I keep working on it until I feel comfortable with it. Some exercises are going to be really useful to you, and you should keep revisiting them as needed. Other exercises won’t be useful to you and after giving them a try you should move on. You are going to master some of the skills after just a few sessions, some of those skills will be long-term things you keep revisiting.
One thing worth noting, focus more on whether you think the skill is useful, and less on whether it is difficult or something you like doing. Sometimes initial discomfort leads to a lot of progress.
Hi Viv,
I focus on just one exercise per day, and I keep working on it until I feel comfortable with it. Some exercises are going to be really useful to you, and you should keep revisiting them as needed. Other exercises won’t be useful to you and after giving them a try you should move on. You are going to master some of the skills after just a few sessions, some of those skills will be long-term things you keep revisiting.
One thing worth noting, focus more on whether you think the skill is useful, and less on whether it is difficult or something you like doing. Sometimes initial discomfort leads to a lot of progress.
Good website I am starting the exercises today!
I am looking for the most official website for learning about DBT as a professional who wants to be trained in DBT. There are clearly many outlets to be trained as a DBT practitioner, but I would like to pursue this through the most official means possible to ensure the best training.