Social-Emotional Learning Sessions
At ICCC our Social-Emotional Learning Workshops are designed to support students in feeling, identifying, and processing emotions in healthy ways. All sessions can be offered for the ESL student and that each session starts with 15 to 20 minutes of a mind/body experiential exercise to support students practice to techniques to empower emotional regulation and learning.
Distress Tolerance Skills
The training breaks down the ACCEPTS acronym and teaches practical ways to manage stress. Through utilizing a variety of skills such as engaging in activities, doing things for others, putting things in perspective, shifting our emotions, or taking a pause from the situation, individuals can find temporary relief from intense emotional states. Participants will engage in an interactive way to practice the skills.
Utilize the skills in this acronym to make life a little better when it gets hard. While it is impossible to stop distress, it is possible to improve that moment. Participants will learn how to utilize imagery, explore the meaning behind stress, identify ways to connect and relax, and learn how to not get ahead of the situation by spiraling or worrying.
Oftentimes there is no way to change a stressful situation. Participants will learn how to practice acceptance around upsetting situations and make choices on how they can effectively participate in their life, despite the struggles they may be experiencing.
Participants will learn how they can utilize themselves and the world around them as a resource to manage stress. Through activating the senses, individuals can shift their minds and their emotional states. Participants will identify and engage in practical exercises and techniques they can utilize when in distress.
Learn how to utilize the S.C.O.P.E. tool, which can help to stabilize the physiological stress response, build resilience and get a person through a crisis. The autonomic nervous system is activated under stress and causes a fight, flight or freeze response, it can feel like hypertension or helplessness. Symptoms that indicate someone is in this type of stress response include insomnia, numbness, rapid speech, heavy fatigue, muscle tension, erratic thoughts, social avoidance, shallow breathing and accelerated heartbeat.
Emotional Regulation Skills
Plan for the future by predicting the most positive outcome. Participants will walk through problem situations and look at them through alternative perspectives. By identifying the most desired goal, individuals can brainstorm realistic solutions to implement.
Learn how to recognize difficult and uncomfortable emotions. Discuss the purpose the emotions serve and the common ways individuals react to painful emotions. Identify healthier ways to cope and the differences in the outcome as a result.
Identify the emotions we have and the roles they play. Discuss self-care skills and identify why practicing self-care can be challenging. Discuss how to have a balanced lifestyle and take care of our mind, body, and soul.
Discuss why positive experiences sometimes are hard to accumulate. Identify the differences between short-term and long-term positive experiences and ways to start incorporating both into practice. Discuss ways to plan ahead for negative experiences to predict better outcomes.
Interpersonal Effectiveness Skills
Learn the building blocks for practicing assertive communication skills. Through understanding the role compassion plays in healthy relationships, individuals can identify the needs of themselves and others to effectively negotiate. Participants will differentiate between facts, emotions, and opinions and incorporate essential skills for assertive and confident communication.
Discuss the importance of self-respect to have a better relationship with yourself and others.
By assessing individual standards and treatment to self and others, individuals can make decisions about how to approach difficult situations. Participants will discuss the impact over- and under-apologizing can have. They’ll work to identify values and discern whether or not they’re living by those values. By being true to themselves and others, participants can learn the freedom that honesty and accountability can bring.
Identify healthy vs unhealthy relationships. Learn how to attract relationships that incorporate care and concern. Learn how to appreciate authentic engagements and differentiate between invalidation and validation. Practice effective non-verbal and verbal communication skills.
This workshop is an experiential workshop to cultivate conversations around identity. Through the educational and experiential practice of mindfulness, students will learn to create awareness of their experience. Students will engage in identifying expectations and influences, discussing the various aspects of identity, and creating awareness around negative thinking patterns and the connections between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Students will discuss self-care and self-compassion and address common barriers to problem-solving, decision making, and communication.
Realize individual interpretations and assumptions that inform interactions in relationships. Through viewing experiences through a different lens and offering empathy to others, individuals can discover compassion and kindness. Participants will practice approaching others in this manner and identify how it can reduce conflict and anger in their lives.
Mindfulness / Walking the Middle Path Skills
Learn the difference between effective and ineffective behaviors. Discuss how behaviors are aligned or not aligned with goals. Identify ways to increase healthy behaviors and decrease unhealthy behaviors.
This workshop is designed to educate students on the importance of mindfulness. Students will have the opportunity to experience the practice of mindfulness as a way of creating a more balanced way of being. Through interaction in an engaging activity, students will differentiate types of validation. Students will identify the relationship between thoughts, feelings, and actions to make active choices in their lives and will work to establish effective interventions such as self-care and self-compassion to manage stress and discomfort.
Identify the ways that we view the world and ourselves in rigid, black-and-white terms. Participate in activities to start to see alternative perspectives and find the grey areas. Participants will learn how to use self-compassion and flexibility to identify personal strengths, achievements, and times when things go well to soften thinking patterns.
Available in English and Spanish
This presentation will educate and allow students to experience the practice of mindfulness in order to be fully aware of their experience. Students will create awareness around their feelings. Students will create understanding around stress, the impact it has on their lives, and identify ways to effectively cope in times of distress. Students will discuss the Pros and Cons Dialectical Behavior Therapy skill to create awareness around the connections between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in order to proceed in mindful decision making.
How We Understand Ourselves and Others
This presentation will educate and engage students in the practice of mindfulness as a way of creating space to be more aware. Additionally, the concepts behind social psychology will be utilized as a framework for understanding ourselves and others. Students will analyze the judgments they make towards themselves and others and learn techniques to notice, create awareness of, and avoid making judgments in the future.
Available in English and Spanish
This presentation will educate and allow students to experience the practice of mindfulness to be fully aware of their experience. Students will create awareness around their feelings. Students will discuss the STOP distress tolerance skill to create awareness around the connections between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in order to proceed in effectively intervening in times of distress.
Learn the roles your mind plays and how to mindfully observe when you are in each state of mind. Determine the differences in the feelings, thoughts, and behaviors that arrive in each state. Practice identifying real-life situations where each state of mind shows up and what purpose that serves. Determine what actions you can take as a result of your observations.
Learn how to mindfully observe and describe experiences in a way that allows for feelings and thoughts to arise without added judgment. Participants will be able to identify the difference between mindfully allowing what is arising versus judging and becoming overwhelmed by thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Through this practice, participants will then be able to choose how to effectively move forward through decision-making and problem-solving.
Skills for Athletes
To be a man, to be male, to be masculine; are nouns, adjectives, objectives, identities, all labels for a condition that though seemingly a birthright is often confusing to understand or to feel one has achieved well. Here in the 21st century where the script for almost all other groups has evolved, the narrative for men remains predominantly fixed. Fathers are the primary pathfinders for their son’s journey from childhood through adolescence into adulthood. Their transmission of knowledge around what healthy masculinity means, what it means to be a “real” man, is based on what the earlier generations found “functional” in their specific context. A mindful revisiting on what is healthy masculinity in the current social/political context will be explored.
“Winning reveals some of a man’s character, losing reveals all of it.”, Vince Lombardi. Character development is another gift sports has to offer participants. How to respond to adversity, to face and deal directly with losing, with injustice, when things just don’t break the way you want it to. How to win with dignity and humility. This course is to help participants realize both winning and losing are moments with their own unique lessons that provide opportunities for personal growth.
Frustration tolerance is keeping your cool when everyone else is either losing theirs, or more directly your opponent is trying to get you to lose focus. Outside of the purposeful taking and giving fouls like in basketball, personal fouls can cost you the game, a starting role on the team, or get red carded and ejected from game. Personal fouls are often the result of caring so much, being so focused, investing so much and playing so hard that adversity becomes catastrophic and one just losing composure. In this way personal fouls are the mis informed attempts at trying to be successful. This is the exact same process off the court as well.
Ice hockey, as with many sports, teaches the importance of maintaining “good vision”, the quality of awareness that allows one to notice not just the puck in front of them but their surroundings and position related to threats and opportunities. The true value of sports is not in college scholarships, but the skills lessons that are directly transferable to life off the field.
Performing our best is a unique balance between intensity and focus, aggression and patience, pushing ones self towards success while still being able to pick ones self up after adversity. The drive to win and be perfect can be overwhelming and cause intense anxiety and fear that inhibits performance.
“Leave it on the field, on the court, on the mat”... the aggression that gets the ball across the goal line, the aggression that all sports attempt to tap and channel, is often not as easy to turn off once the game is over. This training attempts to have an open and honest conversation about the effective uses of aggression. Unpacking directly what is assumed too often in athletics that the time and place to participate with anger toward success is easily discerned by the athlete. So many life lessons are taught in sports; how to win, how to lose, how to pick yourself up in the face of adversity, yet the appropriate use of aggression requires more nuance and description.
Team development and cohesion is the foundation of a success program and has direct implications for a successful season, regardless of record. How to support the individuals seeing the benefits of belongingness and move to sacrifice individual needs for the benefit of all has always been a challenge. This challenge presents even more difficult in the current cultural of sports where kids see professional athletes more and more often acting in their own self interest at the cost teams and programs. Fans are now more likely to follow individual athletes than teams, eroding the teaching moments of team sports- the meaningfulness and life skills benefits of learning belongingness.
