It was a hot summary day in 2015 when with a friend of mine we realized that we sucks in flirting. Since our drive for learning is always high, we decided to watch some youtube videos. Please don´t do it! What we have seen was mainly gender incorrent, sexist, very much stereotypical and and most of all didn´t help us at all.
Later on that thay we were in the car going to festival, and since we have a lot of passion fro youth work, we started discussing if it is somehow possible to connect flirting with our work with young people, and surprisingly it make sense.
We have realized that flirning (as we started calling our concept which is flirting + learning) could be very usefull in developing the competences of young people. We have defined that the aim of flirting is a creation of a social capital; the process is very similar to networking, since the objective is to get to know new people and create a connection, that there is a willingness to follow up on both sides. That means that if we will work with young people developing their flirting competences we would acctually work on the development of their social skills – networking, social competence, communication competence, sustaining relationships and many more. Moreover one of the biggest challanges of youth work is to get the interest of young people, and our hipotesis is that if we will make activities and advertise them as flirting workshop many more young people will show up, then as advertizing them as development of social skills.
Other important element of flirting is self-awareness. You can flirt in many ways, but not all of them will work for you probably. You need to be authentic and base your flirting stratrgy on your strenghts. For example if the person is not good in the small talks, trying to flirt using this technique might be having the oposite results, not talking about lowering the self-esteem due to lack of success. Therefore we assume (still not confirmed) that the self awareness is a clue issue, to find out our strengths, to get to know each other better, and know what are our limits. Maybe the person who is not good in small talks, is acctually good dancer, or very inteligent person and can mantain intereting conversation (now how you doing, and your eyes are beutifull as the youtube videos recommand).
This leads us as well to the conclusion that in order to flirt better, we should work in general on the self-esteem – such a important life competence for young people not only for flirting, but as well for employment, well-being and any type of social relations.
This was enought to motivate us to start further developing this concept. Since then we did one workshop in Bulgaria, and for this we have developed 2 tools, and we found out the way how to connect flirting with racism and different forms of intolerances, but I will write about it later on:)
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