Social and Emotional Learning

Social and emotional learning:

We believe, that the knowledge that each and everyone of us possesses, as adults, is valuable and should be passed down to the younger generations to give them the head start that we never had. All those experiences that we have accumulated over the years, good and bad, have made us who we are today.

Just imagine how different our lives would have been if we knew what we know now.

Wot Wud U Do collaborates with adults, parents, peers, teachers, health and  youth working professionals to coproduce the foundations needed, for students to better themselves academically, socially and emotionally. Creating the resources and tools to enable this transfer of knowledge.

At the core of these resources and tools are the five core competences of Social and Emotional learning:

• Self-Awareness,
• Self-Management,
• Responsible Decision-Making,
• Social Awareness, and
• Relationship Skills.

Our goal is to educate young people to understand themselves better by helping them to recognise how their thoughts, feelings and emotions influence their behaviours and choices. Once a young person understand this, they can then learn and begin to understand how other things or people affect how they think and feel

Self Awareness

Through preventative education, we can equip young people with the knowledge to enable them to begin to choose positive thoughts, actions and choices. Helping and encouraging young people to develop a positive mindset, a mindset of resilience, seeing problems and stresses as a challenge to be overcome, a challenge to help them grow mentally and emotionally. Much like how training for sports helps a person grow and become more resilient  physically, training young people’s minds can help them become more mentally and emotionally resilient to the challenges of life. It is through self awareness that we can then begin to manage ourselves.

Self management

The first step in managing your self better, is to raise your awareness of your thoughts and how they make you feel. By becoming more aware of what you are thinking, you can begin to choose your thoughts and change negatives to positives. However, this takes much practice so don’t be to hard on yourself if you find it hard to stop thinking. Thinking is an addiction, the more you think, the more you want to think.

To break this cycle, you can begin by simply taking a minute to just breathe deeply. Pausing and focusing on your breathing for a couple of seconds helps you to interrupt you thought patterns. This is the basis of meditation and over time, you may want to take several minutes to yourself and just breathe.

Another key element of self management is being able to express what you feel or think. Keeping a journal can help identify your reactions and feelings to different events, and help you find clarity of mind as you unload your thoughts on to paper. Journaling is easy, start by aiming to write a short paragraph a day, reflecting on your day and how you felt in that particular moment. There are many forms of expression, from sports to arts and crafts to gaming, music and drama production.

Find what works for you. Check out our blog on mindfulness for more information

As we begin to manage ourselves better, whenever we are faced with challenging circumstances in the future we can implement a strategy to help us cope, relieve stress, or pressure. With this comes clarity. This enables us to make healthier, positive choices aligned with our desires, wants and needs.

Responsible Decision-Making

Social Awareness

Once we are able to manage ourselves effectively, no matter the event, (we will never be able to effectively manage all the events that happen, they happen to teach us, to help us learn to manage any similar events in the future) we can then begin to understand the influence and how we influence others either positively or negatively. Through compassion, empathy and using our own awareness, we are able to understand and feel what others maybe going through. This is social awareness.

By raising our awareness of how we feel and think, how we manage stressful and challenging circumstances, making positive and healthier choices we not only better ourselves, but others around us. We can positively impact and influence our world and the people within it, our friends, family, colleagues and even people who enter our lives for a short period of time.

Relationship Skills

It is through our relationship with others that we are able to see a reflection of ourselves. The hardest thing to do is to see our self for who we truly are and this is where your relationships come in. How we interact with our relationships and how they view us can help identify strengths and weaknesses that we may not be aware off. It is through these different perspectives and offer of support when we need it the most, that we as an individuals can learn from and thrive.

One of the main components of a healthy relationship is communicating in times of difficulty. Being able to negotiate and communicate effectively, and to really listen to the words being spoken, are skills that are hard to master. For some of us, the feelings, emotions and thoughts that happen behind the scenes when we are interacting with others, make it harder to communicate and to express ourselves. We need to be aware that this might be the case when we are forming new relationships or strengthening old ones.

Practicing self awareness and self management can help, but the glue that holds us together is the positive relationships we have with others. The support networks we create are constant throughout our lives and can either help or hinder us.

Through self awareness we can identify how our relationships make us feel, through self management we can learn to act with clarity and positivity and through our relationship skills, we can express our concerns and build healthier, positive relationships with others in the future.

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