Foundations and Self-Awareness of Emotional Development

Preparing to support emotion management and empathy skills.

In this section, we lay the foundations and self-awareness of our own emotional development and knowledge, in order to enhance our practices as staff who support young people to develop their own emotion management and empathy. 

Emotion Management refers to the ability to be aware of and constructively handle both positive and challenging emotions, and empathy is about relating to others with acceptance, understanding, and sensitivity to their diverse experiences. 

This module will support you to: 

  • Deepen your understanding of the framework for SEL generally, and the emotional domain specifically; 

  • List common emotions and how they are frequently experienced in the body ; 

  • Practice skills for identifying hot buttons and self-regulation when experiencing emotional activation;  ​ 

  • Understand the role that past experiences and social identities play in how people experience and interpret the emotions of others; 

  • Identify techniques for modeling empathy and emotion management in your organisation;  ​ 

  • Plan next steps for incorporating concepts learned about emotional self-awareness into your work with young people; and 

  • Assess your readiness to implement empathy and emotion management skills with young people. 

For this section, we’d also recommend spending some time getting to know our neuro-person model for socio-emotional skills development which describes how when young people’s schemas are triggered it can be more difficult to manage emotions. 

Resources

A series of resources to help you to support emotion management and empathy skills.

Foundations and Self-Awareness of Emotional Development: participant notebook

In this workbook, you will find the following activities: 

  • The Art & Skill of Managing Emotional Activation Guided Meditation 

NB. Please practice self-care during this exercise and go only as deep as you are comfortable with. This is an activity to be used during training, so that if you need support at any time, you can let a facilitator know. In our work, we get emotionally activated and the young people that we work with may do or say things that are ‘hot buttons’ for deep emotional responses in us. In order to be more effective at delivering and supporting socio-emotional skills development, we need to understand our own emotional landscape, as well as how to manage it. This exercise is an opportunity to reflect on a time when things did or did not go well. 

  • The Art & Skill of Managing Emotional Activation 

This worksheet will support you to reflect on another emotional experience with a partner – use the prompt questions to guide your discussion. 

  • Reflection Questions 

Two reflection questions to support you to reflect on what you’ve learnt and taken away from this section on Emotional Development. 

  • Implementation: You First 

Use this worksheet to think about what you need or want to do to support yourself, in order to support young people to manage their emotional experiences. What commitment do you want to make around your own emotional self-awareness? 

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Further Reading

A selection of articles, books and websites offering additional resources designed to deepen your understanding. 

Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle

From the University of Cumbria, and adapted from Salford University, the Gibbs’ Cycle is a step-by-step process which takes us through a series of questions designed to facilitate learning from experience. It is a helpful tool for practitioners, but also for working with young people as a way of encouraging them to reflect on their SESD experiences. 

Read here

Reflection and Reflexivity: What and Why?

A helpful introduction to the idea of ‘reflexivity’ as a way of finding strategies to ‘question our own attitudes, thought process values, assumptions, prejudices and complex roles in relation to others.

You can also find the full text here.

Read here