It is especially needed at this time for students working there way through school college and apprenticeships under the influence of social media. Emotions evolved as an adaptive system to our world, our survival mechanism. Emotions sit in a very privileged position in the brain and help us create meaning and a sense of purpose. However when we are upset and unmanaged they have the power to overcome our thinking and drive our behaviour stopping us from thinking clearly and behaving in ways that are inappropriate, disrupting our task focus, distort how we perceive and understand situations/events and take our mind off what’s relevant to what we’re doing. This emotional and social management ability is fundamental to learning, building productive
relationships, and performing at our best with focus. Digital schizophrenia
We are listening to voices out side of our control and outside our-self. We give them more relevance than our own thoughts. We take guidance from them rather than being really present with our own thoughts. There is no pathway for emotions with social media. You don’t have to face the person so it is easy to be negative and not really see the hurt it causes. Its easy to believe that you have lots of ‘friends’ following you - unfortunately its not always for all the right reasons on social media. The scenarios we provide include, simulations of everyday teenage issues around using social media, and the challenges that brings, in maintaining healthy friendships, relationships in the larger community. The learners get the chance to observe life like events and start to develop a commitment values approach which manages impulsive behaviour to what is workable for them and others. The learning journey will allow reflection on the feelings of themselves and others and and what caused the feelings good and bad. Our Impact programme will bring awareness of the critical moments and help students pause and think about their behaviour and consequences. They especially benefit through understanding that emotions drive those thoughts and behaviours and to be mindful before they act. Self awareness is crucial in this progression and we encourage students to find out more about their Emotional Intelligence and behavioural style. This greater self awareness helps them reflect on differences between individuals and gives them the tools to show more understanding in a search for more effective communication on and offline. Integrating our minds
Face to face interaction is on the decline for young people and it is affecting their emotional and social skills. Our brains are designed by evolution to communicate face to face, now due to social media we have less opportunity for that growth and our emotional and social skills are on the decline. At Impact we believe in embedding this emotional and social development in the lessons and making young people aware of the pitfalls and of the emotional and social understanding needed in this virtual and digital world. The future is coming and we are striving to look at how we can embed technology into this virtual and digital world that will allow our young people to develop their emotional and social skills. Skills that will help them to regulate their emotions, stay focused, work through communication challenges with a variety of different personalities. Our future is to make sure that the digital world is full of opportunity to engage with it and in so doing have an opportunity to develop key skills. Imagine going into a game that you can only advance if you show learning in emotional regulation, controlling you hear rate to affective levels, and understanding good emotional communication to get the right team around you within the game to improve your score.
