Disability Coordination Office ACT - Negotiating the Maze

This section of the resource includes life-domain worksheets: functional skill checklists and associated information and advice to help you inventory the skills you already possess and identify skills and goals you want to achieve.

The checklists are divided into the following 8 life-domains:

• Personal Presentation & Personal Hygiene
• Physical Health & Wellbeing
• Independent Travel
• Financial Independence / Money Management
• Work Skills & Career Competencies
• Home Life Skills
• Social Networks & Life in the Community
• Self-Determination Skills

The worksheets are in a table format and can be downloaded from the site for use.  The checklist layout was designed to help individuals to prioritise skills and goals important to them and includes space to identify when a skill might be focused on. 

The Scary Questions

At the top of each life-domain worksheet are the "big scary questions" associated with each life domain - the overarching goals and issues commonly associated with each domain. For example, the scary questions in the Financial Independence / Money Management life domain are:

When we started to work on putting together these checklists we used the phrase "scary questions" as a working title as we couldn't think of a more appropriate or "politically correct" term to give them at the time.  In the end we couldn't come up with something more appropriate and decided to stick with "scary questions" - it is blunt, but honest, and captures that spine tingling sensation many of us experience when confronted with larger multifaceted life-goals.  

Functional Skill Checklists

The big scary questions, when listed on their own can seem daunting. They do focus us on the bigger picture, but how do we work toward achieveing them?

We have included the functional skill checklists to breakdown these larger goals into smaller steps. The functional skills checklists were not intended to be comprehensive, but we have tried to include the more common skills and activities that young people may undertake.  Some skill have been divided into small subsets, to provide examples of how a skill may be acquired over time, by breaking a larger skill or long-term goal into smaller parts. Not all skills will be applicable and there are many more skills that we haven't listed.  We have provided space at the end of each checklist to include other skills sets as well as a blank template page at the end of the section.

Putting the functional skill checklists into perspective: Low expectations & Learned Helplessness

As you look through the skill checklists, you may feel that we have listed skills that your teenager may not have the capacity to achieve. You may also find that there are skills listed that you, as a parent, may not possess.  Indeed, when we carried out own our skills inventory using the checklists, there were definitely some areas that remained unchecked. Deciding what skills to include was always going to be problematic. We felt that it was important not to make assumptions about what an individual can and cannot achieve especially as young people with an intellectual often fail to have their potential recognised and fall prey to "learned helplessness."

Work Talk: Effective workplace communication with employees with an intellectual disability provides a concise explanation about the effects of learned helplessness:

The biggest barrier faced by anyone with any form of intellectual impairment is having their potential recognised and realised. The social and psychological impacts of an intellectual disability will be determined by the responses made to the individual's needs. Two common social and psychological impacts on the person with an intellectual disability are:

• Low expectations of the person with an intellectual disability held by families, teachers and trainers, and support workers (the ‘they couldn't learn that' syndrome). This will generally have negative consequences for his or her self-esteem and can set up a ‘self-fulfilling prophesy'.
• Learned helplessness. If people doubt their competence and worth as a person, they will come to believe they have no influence over the things that happen to them and around them. When this happens, they feel helpless. Helpless to take on the challenge of learning. Our perception of our ability to influence or change things keeps us motivated and energised. Someone who feels powerless in the face of events often seems to others to be unwilling, uncooperative or unmotivated (‘She doesn't want to learn').^[1]

When using the checklists, it is as important to identify skills or activities that you do not intend to develop, so that this information can also be taken into account when setting goals and making plans to achieve these goals. For example, if you have no intention of learning how to use public transport, you may want to consider what consequences this could have to other goals.  It may mean including plans to develop other travel skills to enable you to get out and about.  It may affect how you decide to manage your personal budget, sacrificing other item expenses so that you can allocate sufficient funds to cover alternative travel costs.  I may also affect the things you can do, perhaps limiting workplace learning opportunities if you are unable to travel independently to the work location.  These "knock-on" effects need to be taken into consideration when making decisions. That way, you are better able to make informed decisions about what you want to achieve and how you go about achieveing it.

[1] Wodonga TAFE & Aware Industries 2006, Work Talk: Effective workplace communication with employees with an intellectual disability, funded by the Australian Government Department of Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs.