She looked at the member as he walked into the office, she greeted him with a sullen look on her face. “˜I have lots of filing today,’ she thought….

In an attempt to improve the interpersonal skills of officials, Numsa held an interpersonal skills workshop for all its administrators from KZN and Northern Cape/Free State regions.

The workshop taught us a lot about who we are as people, it taught us to delve within ourselves because we have been through a lot in life and we have experiences as workers and as human beings which define who we are. A lot of these experiences are negative and sometimes this is how we appear to other people.

The workshop helped us deal with these negative feelings and showed us how we can be positive towards people and workers. We were also taught that it is important to set goals in our workplaces. We had to think of at least one “˜smart goal in our working environment for 2005′.

No matter who we are and what we have been through in our lives, we can do anything we set our minds to. We tend to look at life with fences, we look at things in one way whereas there are many solutions to one problem.

The aim of the workshop was to equip us and make us better workers and better individuals. It helped us to help our members with more understanding and care.

The exercise that really stuck in the mind of Thekweni local administrator, Miriam Mochochoko, was when each of us had to wear one shoe from another person in the workshop. “Some of us had problems wearing the shoe because it was either too big or too small. This lesson taught us that we should put ourselves in other people’s shoes and see how difficult that person’s situation is.”

Although we did a lot of fun exercises, each one taught us a lesson. We went away from this workshop better equipped to help our members and improve our service. We learnt that we should never say “˜NO!’ – there is always a way to assist our members.