Sharanya Vairam

Life Skills Training Session I Report Life Skills are essential to deal effectively with everyday life challenges at school, college, work and personal lives. These skills would, in turn, improve one’s life and career prospects. Keeping this in mind, a series of life skills training sessions are being conducted for the students of class XII of Thiruvadhoor Higher Secondary School from July 2015 onwards. The various aspects of life-skills and career guidance are being introduced to the students. The main aim of these sessions is to help students plan their next steps and guiding them to choose a college course that would satisfy their career goals. The First Life Skills Training Session was conducted on July 31, 2015 for the 280 students of class XII, divided into 3 batches. The theme for this session was self-awareness. Self-awareness is one’s ability to access one’s own personality, behaviour and skills accurately by observing one’s thoughts, behaviour, skills, etc. It therefore, helps develop one’s response to stress and hardships, and shape one’s personality. Developing self-awareness helps to plan one’s career path too. Therefore, it was a good starting point to help these class XII students to start thinking about themselves and how they want to shape their lives. Topics covered • • • • • Who am I? How do you I see myself? This question was asked and some of the students were asked to answer it. from there the ideas of selfimage, ascribed vs achieved identity and how we often fail to understand ourselves were discussed. What is self-awareness? Why is it important? The students were explained about how self-awareness helps us to understand our personality better, provides emotional stability, improves performance, plan one’s personal, professional and social life, improves ability to adapt to change, and helps develop self-control. Real-life scenarios and examples were provided for the students to understand how having self-awareness is important and how it benefits them. Topics of discipline, academic performance, depression, etc. were touched upon here and linked to self-awareness. Components of self-awareness This aspect was handled with the help of an activity that required students to write down certain things and share it with the rest of the group. o Emotional self-awareness: Recognising one’s emotions and the impact that they have one’s life. The students were asked to write down an emotional problem that they have and how it affects their life. Some of them were asked to share what they had written down. o Accurate self-assessment: Identifying one’s strengths and weaknesses which in turn, would help build one’s strengths further and work upon one’s weaknesses. The students were asked to think and list their strengths and weaknesses. o Self-confidence: Knowing one’s self-worth and capabilities helps in building one’s self-confidence and thereby, self-awareness. The students were asked to list down their capabilities. How can you develop self-awareness? The students were provided the following suggestions to help develop their self-awareness: o Consciously spending time in self-introspection. Creating a space and time for that. o Maintaining a diary or just noting on a piece of paper, one’s strengths, weakness, emotional problems, goals, capabilities, etc. Taking feedback from others like friends, teachers, parents, etc. o Intentionally making an effort to build one’s strengths. o Knowing one’s values, beliefs and assumptions. The students were given a self-introspection task of thinking about a challenging task they have performed. What were their first thoughts? Were these thoughts positive or negative? If they o were positive, then how did they influence their ability to complete the task and vice-versa? We had provided relatable examples from our lives to help them understand this task. Experimenting with new hobbies as it would help in discovering one’s hidden skills and potential. Observations It was observed that the students were mostly well-behaved and listened to what was being discussed with much interest. The session was planned as an interactive one with the need for the students to open up and help take the discussion further. But the students seemed very quiet and reserved since this was the first time they were meeting us. Despite the ice-breaking games and in-session activities, and constant motivation to contribute to the session, only a handful of students opened up. It was felt that the students would maybe warm up to us from the following month’s session onwards. It was observed that out of those who actively participated in the session, greater proportion were girls. Among the rest of the girls, many of them wanted to speak but were too shy and also feared being ridiculed by the others. It was therefore, felt that from the following sessions, some steps had to be planned to help the students participate in the sessions. It was also observed that some students generally shut down upon hearing English words. So, we had to make a conscious effort to translate all the words to Tamil and write it on the board, and explain the meaning in detail. It was felt that from the next session onwards, we should make a list of all the technical terms in Tamil and keep it handy.