The Social Confidence Collective

Who or What is The Social Confidence Collective?

Hello! We are Sonya, Rachel and Jo, and we’re the OTs and Directors behind The Social Confidence Collective. We’re also mums, good friends and colleagues from a long way back, and we’re passionate Kaiko customers and stockists!

The Social Confidence Collective is an Occupational Therapy practice based in Melbourne. As the name might suggest, we focus on working with young people who lack social confidence, things like feeling anxious or awkward when with others.

That’s an interesting focus – why do you zoom in on social goals in particular?

Well, most of our clinical experience has focused on working with teens and young adults experiencing difficulty with their mental health.

And what we noticed was that many of those young people lacked authentic, supportive social connection. Either their difficulties with mental health had derailed their social life, or their difficulties with social connection had impacted their mental health (or both – as it tends to operate in a vicious cycle).

There didn’t seem to be many services or supports to help young people to build their confidence around others or find that meaningful social connection – and we know this is such a critical ingredient of wellness! So, we launched The Social Confidence Collective a few years ago as a passion project that aimed to meet a gap we saw in services for young people – and it’s been steadily growing since then, which is exciting!

How do you support young people to work towards those goals?

So, each of us are trained in a range of ‘talking therapies’ and we do offer some 1:1 therapy, but the support we find the most impactful for young people who are struggling socially is group work.

Our groups are all about having a safe and inclusive space to socialise with other young people. They are activity-based, fun, and facilitated by OTs, who are supporting each individual in the group to work towards the goals that are meaningful to them.

Those goals might be about feeling less anxious, building confidence in conversations, learning new perspectives, or whatever is important to them. Our groups are different to social skills training – we don’t instruct participants in how to “perform” in social situations in ways that are not authentic to them. We strive to be an inclusive and neuroaffirming practice.

We also run some events for young people who may benefit from an Occupational Therapy “taster” – such as Find Your Focus Zone. This is an experiential workshop where participants learn more about their unique sensory needs, and explore strategies that can help them to focus on the things they want to, when they need to! (And yes – we have Kaiko products to try at these sessions!)

When you’re talking about “young people”....what age are we talking about?

That’s a good question! I can certainly say that none of us are “young people” any longer! But we generally work with young people who are aged 14–25ish. And actually, we do work with people of other ages, because we also support professionals in youth, health and education settings! And we’d like to work towards some further offerings for parents.

Can you tell us more about what you offer professionals?

Yes! We provide supervision, training and reflective practice for professionals who would like to reflect on their work. Our typical supervision work is with individuals and teams who are seeking a space to think about youth mental health, facilitating group work, supporting sensory regulation and neurodiversity-affirming care.

We also deliver training around these topics for settings including schools, youth programs and professional bodies.

And, following interest from some training we delivered recently, we are currently taking expressions of interest for an online reflective practice group for clinicians facilitating therapeutic groups (yes we are running a group about running a group – can you tell we love group work?!!)

Thanks so much! How can people find out more?

Thanks for the opportunity to share what we do! We offer a free 30-minute consult (phone or Zoom) to talk more about your situation and whether we might be a good fit for your needs before you sign or pay anything.

hello@socialconfidencecollective.com.au or head to our website www.socialconfidencecollective.com.au to find out more about our upcoming events and programs – and you can find us on the socials, too!