Self-Awareness, Empathy, and Critical Thinking

• Unit focuses on developing an integrated learner.

Life Skills

• Any skill useful in life.
• The World Health Organization (WHO) defined it, in 1993, as abilities for adaptive and positive behavior, enabling individuals to deal effectively with life's demands.
• "Adaptive" means a person is flexible and can adjust to circumstances.
• "Positive behavior" implies a forward-looking person who finds hope and solutions even in difficult situations.
• UNICEF defines life skills as a behavior change or development approach balancing knowledge, attitude, and skills.

Importance of Life Skill Education

• Helps adolescents transition from childhood to adulthood with healthy social and emotional skills.
• Aids in developing social competence and problem-solving skills, helping adolescents form their identity.
• Assists adolescents in differentiating between hearing and listening, reducing misconceptions about issues like drugs and alcoholism.
• Delays the onset of tobacco and alcohol abuse.
• Promotes positive self-esteem and teaches self-control.

Ten Core Life Skills by WHO

• Self-awareness.
• Empathy.
• Critical thinking.
• Creative thinking.
• Decision making.
• Problem Solving.
• Effective communication.
• Interpersonal relationship.
• Coping with stress.
• Coping with emotion.

Self-awareness

• Includes recognition of self, character, strengths, weaknesses, desires, and dislikes.
• Helps recognize stress or pressure.
• A pre-requisite for effective communication and interpersonal relations.
• Conscious knowledge of one's character, feelings, motives, desires, and capacity for introspection.
• Clear perception of personality, including strengths, weaknesses, thoughts, beliefs, motivation, and emotions.
• Allows understanding of other people, how they perceive you, your attitude, and responses.

Developing Self-awareness

• Develop EQ.
• Know your Narrative Identity.
• Develop Self-reflection.
• Seek honest feedback.
• Plan and prioritize and track progress.
• Pay attention to frustrations.

Empathy

• Understand and care about others' needs, desires, and feelings.
• The ability to imagine what life is like for another person.
• Ability to accept and understand others who are different.
• Encourages positive behavior towards people in need.
• Helps resolve conflicts and enhance quality of life.

Critical Thinking

• Analyze information and experiences objectively.
• Helps recognize and assess factors influencing attitudes and behavior, such as values, peer pressure, and the media.
• Ability to analyze information, experiences, situations, and circumstances rationally.
• Recognizing and assessing factors that influence attitude and behavior.
• Core skills include Analysis, Interpretation, Self-Regulation, Inference, Explanation, and Evaluation

Developing Critical Thinking Skills

• Question your assumptions.
• Understand your biases.
• Think several moves ahead.
• Put yourself in other people's shoes.
• Understand all your options.

Creative Thinking

• Seeing or doing things in a novel way.
• Involves fluency (generating new ideas), flexibility (shifting perspective), originality (conceiving something new), and elaboration (building on other ideas).
• Can contribute to health by helping recognize and assess factors influencing attitudes and behavior.
• Think differently and out of the box.
• Look beyond our direct experience.
• Respond adaptively with flexibility.
• Helps find solutions and promotes improvement after self-reflection.

Approaches to Creative Thinking Skills

• Engaging in reflection.
• Looking for many possible answers.
• Allowing wild and crazy suggestions.
• Not judging ideas early.
• Treat all ideas as if they may contain seeds of something useful.
• Allows you to doodle, daydream, or play with a theory or suggestion.
• Utilize brainstorming Techniques.

Decision Making

• The process of making choices by setting goals, gathering information, and assessing alternatives.
• Helps deal constructively with decisions about our lives.
• Characteristics include selection among alternatives, being intellectual/rational, involving time, relating to the situation, and being a human/social process.

Problem Solving

• A mental process of discovering, analyzing, and solving problems.
• Overcoming obstacles and finding the best solution.
• Helps deal constructively with problems; unresolved problems cause mental stress.

Steps in Problem Solving

• Identifying the problem.
• Defining the problem.
• Formulation of hypotheses.
• Collection of data.
• Testing the hypotheses.
• Conclusion.
• Evaluation of results.

Interpersonal Relationship skills

• Helps relate positively with people.
• Making and keeping relationships.
• Important for mental and social well-being.
• Maintaining good relations with family.
• Skills used when interacting directly, using verbal and non-verbal communication.
• Enables positive interaction and effective work with others.

Developing Interpersonal Skills

• Relax and Deal with Stress.
• Seek Clarification in concepts.
• Be Positive and Cheerful.
• Empathize with others.
• Recognize, manage and control stress.
• Learn to be assertive.
• Reflect and Improve.
• Negotiate.

Effective Communication Skill

• Expressing ourselves verbally and non-verbally appropriately.
• Exchanging information by understanding the emotion behind it.
• A learned skill developed with effort and practice.

Developing Effective Communication Skills

• Listening.
• Bring your senses to rescue.
• Using effective Non-verbal communication.
• Managing Stress.
• Look for humor in the situation.
• Agree to disagree.
• Be willing to compromise.

Coping With Stress

• Recognizing sources of stress and how it affects us.
• Acting to control stress levels by changing our environment or lifestyle and learning to relax.

Coping With Emotions

• Recognizing emotions within ourselves and others.
• Being aware of how emotions influence behavior and being able to respond appropriately.
• Intense emotions can have negative effects on our health if we do not respond appropriately.

Dealing With Stress and Emotions

• Recognize when you are becoming stressed.
• Take a moment to calm down.
• Bring your senses to rescue.
• Look for humour in the situation.
• Be willing to compromise.
• Agree to disagree.

Guidance

• According to Skinner, it is a process of helping young people adjust to self, others, and circumstances.
• Helping individuals to help themselves and develop their potential using opportunities in the environment.
• Frank Parsons is the father.
• Assisting one person by another, promoting self-direction, organized, goal-oriented, lifelong, both art and science, life-related, and based on individual differences.

Need/Objectives for Guidance in School

• Help in the total development of the student.
• Help the child recognize and use inner resources.
• Help students make the best adjustments.
• Minimize mismatching between education and employment.
• Check wastage and stagnation.
• Minimize indiscipline.
• Tackle emotional problems.
• Develop a healthy and balanced personality.

Types of Guidance

• Personal Guidance.
• Vocational Guidance.
• Educational Guidance.
• Individual and Group Guidance.

Personal Guidance

• According to Wilson, assistance to an individual in physical, emotional, social, moral, and spiritual development and adjustment.
• Understand personal problems, enhance adjustability, develop socially desirable goals, recognize strengths/limitations, and be sensitive about environment.

Steps of Personal Guidance

• Collection of data.
• Diagnosis of the problem.
• Prognosis.
• Rendering Guidance.
• Follow-up.

Educational Guidance

• According to Jones, assistance to the pupil in choices and adjustments in school, curriculum, courses, and school life.
• Pursue the right education, cope with exam anxiety, develop effective study habits, check wastage and stagnation, help in educational adjustments, choose a suitable educational course, and make educational plans consistent with abilities and interests.

Vocational Guidance

• According to the National Vocational Guidance Association (USA), assisting in choosing an occupation, preparing for it, entering upon, and progressing in it.
• Help students make the vocational choice.
• Provide information about occupational opportunities, understand unemployment problems, help in vocational adjustment, and make educational plans based on abilities.

Individual & Group Guidance

• Individual guidance is a face-to-face relationship providing assistance.
• Group guidance (Crow and Crow) is a service made available by school personnel to large or small groups to discuss common problems, provide leadership training, give orientation, improve student's social attitude and behavior, etc.

Career Related

• Career talk imparts occupational information in group situations, with invited professionals.
• Career conference is a meeting where experts share knowledge about their fields in a group activity.

Organizing Guidance Services in School

• Requires leadership from a trained master and participation of teachers and parents.
• Provision for guidance programs in the timetable, school administration support, and frequent evaluation.
• Stages include constituting a guidance committee, having a separate guidance room, maintaining cumulative records, and liaising with relevant agencies.

Counselling

• A process of helping individuals or groups to gain self-understanding and to be themselves.
• It is scientific, preventive, focused on self-direction, varies with client needs, democratic, and respects individuality.

Basic Principles of Counseling

• Scientific.
• Primarily preventive and remedial.
• Dedicated to self-direction and self-realization.
• Methods vary.
• Democratic and problem-oriented.
• Private between counselor and counselee.
• Respect for the individual.
• Based on mutually acceptable values, structured learning.

Types of Counseling

• Individual (one-to-one).
• Group (professionally trained counselor and a group).
• Classifications include educational, marital, personal and social, rehabilitation, and vocational. Schools mainly practice Educational, Vocational, and Personal-social counselling

Approaches to Counseling

• Indirect/Non-Directive/Permissive (Carl Rogers): client-centered
• Direct/Directive/Prescriptive (E.G. Williamson): counselor centered.
• Eclectic: combination of both with the preferred approach

Non-directive Counselling

• The counselor listens, offers minimal input, and accepts what the counsellee says
• Defining the Problem Situation.
• Free expression of feelings by client.
• Development of insight by client.
• Classification of positive and negative feelings.
• Termination of counselling situation.
• Helpful to attain emotional integrity.
• Becomes independent.
• More time-consuming.
• Not suitable for less matured and less intelligent.

Directive Conselling

• Counsellor does the talking and question based.
• The counselor dictates the pace and directs the counsellee based on information gathered from the client.
• Acknowledges intellectual data that the client has no grasp on.
• Analysis.
• Synthesis.
• Diagnosis.
• Prognosis.
• Counselling.
• Follow-Up.
• Less time consuming
• Even less matured and less intelligent.
• Best method at lower levels.
• Never becomes independent.
• No altitude developed.

Eclectic

• This does not rely totally on a directed approuch
• Can be a suitible form of approach for resolving a client issue.
• It is a combination of both approaches.

Counseling Skills

• Acquaintance skills.
• Observation skills.
• Diagnosing skills

Acquanting Skills

• Make onself familar with someone on the outside.
• Chit chat skills.
• Inviting new ideas.

Personalizing Skills

• Making the client ready for the situation that needs done.
• Giving the client the ability to fix a deficiency.

Reframing Skills

• Approuching the problem in different angles and aspects.

Initiating Skills

• Counselors abilities to start communication with clients.

Avaliating Skills

• Skills used to assess the preformance of the counsellee.

Qualities of a Good Counsellor

• Possess.
• Magnetic personality.
• Personal adjustment.
• Professionalism.
• Dedication.

Steps in counselling

• Having contact with clients to help assess the correct steps in a safeway.
• Establishing goals in order to move on from abstacles.
• Avaliating to review to assess the change.

Guidance vs Counselling

• Guidance is generalized, broad, given to normals, preventive, and continuous.
• Counselling is specialized, precise, given for abnormal, curative, and not lifelong.

Adolescent Issues

• Disturbances can arise during the change from total dependence to independence.
• Sexual abuse have huge impacts on a personal way of life.
• Because of social views adolescents have a risk of high experimentation.
• Substance abuse the hazardous or harmful use of psychoactive substances.
• Can come from behavioral, cognitive, and physiological views.
• Media influences can greatly affect kids through TV, internet and radio.
• Sexula abuse are becoming more common because if the use if media.

Tackle Adolescence issues

• Giving training to the adolescents to become helpful and constructive.
• Provide more and more awareness of different media apps.

Depression

• Can destroy ones personality.
• Sadeness from different struggles and depression.
• Unhealthy relationships with pears.
• Lack of parental control.
• Some medications like treating skin will result in depression.

Remedies to depression

• Creating safe enviorments.
• Good stress management.
• Creating trusting values.

Geriatrics

• The focus and focus on older groups of people.
• Have different physical aspects to view.
• Bone density become weak.
• Dementia's increase.

Emotional aspects

• Neglicge and loss of feeling as they age.

Finical

• Loss of insome because of retirement and medical condition.

Homecare

• Create safety homes for the elderly.
• Install safety features.
• Make sure to keep them active.
• Encouage socializing.
• Practice self care for the elderyies.
• Make sure that the elderly is always calm and happy.
• Always respect the listen and adhere to help.
• Keep the elderylies safe.