The practitioner can encourage and support the young person to identify attitudes and behaviours that have been, or might be, either helpful or unhelpful in achieving goals and meeting needs.
Practitioners ask the young person to draw from their own experiences to discuss times when they have and haven’t got their needs met, and identify what helped and didn’t help in these situations.
Helpful attitudes and behaviours can include punctuality, patience, politeness, assertiveness, kindness, honesty, etc. Practitioners can help young people to elicit attitudes and behaviours that have meaning for them. Practitioners can make suggestions but are advised not to impose their own values and preferences on to young people who are likely to resist efforts to ‘make them conform’.
The most important thing is that the young person sees that these attitudes and behaviours work for them and that they can benefit from them.
In ACRA much of the focus is on how prosocial attitudes and behaviours can be employed to improve relationships, particularly within the family.
