Book excerpt: Having the capacity to benefit from emotions, rather than being paralyzed by them, offers people the opportunity to navigate difficulties, while being able to face life, relationships, and themselves with courage, grace, and strength. In The Skills System Instructor's Guide, author Julie F. Brown provides a curriculum for helping people improve emotion regulation capacities, which allows the person to actively participate in both joyful and challenging aspects of life. The guide presents nine simple, user-friendly adaptive coping skills effective for individuals of diverse learning abilities. Based on Dialectic Behavior Therapy principles, the Skills System helps people of all ages learn to effectively regulate emotions, thoughts, and actions to reach personal goals. PRAISE FOR The Skills System Instructor's Guide In this instructor's guide, Julie Brown provides a clear step-by-step introduction to the emotion regulation skills curriculum that she has developed over the course of two decades of work with individuals with learning challenges and emotional difficulties. Brown succeeds admirably where few others have even dared to set foot. Complex emotion regulation challenges are broken down into manageable problems using a series of steps that people of many different skill levels can apply for themselves. At once simple and sophisticated, this guide is a must for anyone who works with, or cares for, someone with emotion regulation difficulties. James J. Gross, PhD, professor of psychology, Stanford University; editor, Handbook of Emotion Regulation This practical Skills Training Handbook fills a critical need of providing Dialectical Behavior Therapy based techniques and related treatment procedures to individuals with emotional and intellectual challenges. KUDOS Julie Brown. Donald Meichenbaum, PhD, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada; Research Director of the Melissa Institute for Violence Prevention Miami, Florida Purchase this book and you will return to it again and again. The Skills System offers a concise, ultra-pragmatic skills training approach with comprehensive, step-by-step curriculum materials, great for teaching emotion regulation to learners of all abilities. Both experienced and novice skills trainers will love her tool kit of teaching strategies! Dr. Kelly Koerner, PhD, Evidence-Based Practice Institute, Seattle; editor, Dialectical Behavior Therapy in Clinical Practice: Applications across Disorders and Settings