Courage is being afraid of something and doing it anyway. This can apply to all aspects of life from holding a snake to telling the truth to standing up for yourself.
To practise being brave:
Try new things, have adventures, and face your fears. This can be done in baby steps and at your own pace
Remember that it’s ok to do it wrong. It’s also ok to “fail” and at Barwon Heads PS we all know that mistakes are good because they help us to learn! Often we are too afraid to try out for a team or role in a play because we are afraid we will not get accepted. Failing and rejection are all part of the learning process. We have to take chances and learn from both the good and bad that results from them.
Kid President talks about ordinary people who are heroes and shown courage.
Who us your hero. Who do you know who has shown courage? When have you shown courage?
The character strength of hope has to do with positive expectations about the future. It involves optimistic thinking and focusing on good things to come. Hope is more than a feel-good emotion. It is an action-oriented strength involving agency, the motivation and confidence that goals can be reached, and also that many effective pathways can be devised in order to get to that desired future.
Students who are high in hope have greater academic success, stronger friendships, and demonstrate more creativity and better problem solving skills. The good news is that hope is very similar to the growth mindset in that it can be cultivated.
Hope doesn’t mean wishful thinking—as in “I hope I win the lottery.” Instead, a person who is high in hope is able to:
Set clear and attainable goals.
Develop multiple strategies to reach those goals.
Stay motivated to use the strategies to attain the goals, even when the going gets tough.
Visualising the paths to your goals will help you to achieve them and using a growth mindset will help overcome obstacles.
Another hint is to remember other successes that you and role models have achieved. There are many people who have overcome adversity to reach their goals.
It’s important that you enjoy the process of attaining your goals. If you use positive self-talk, you will be more likely to achieve your goals.
The North Star; a story of life which involves following the windy track on the journey to achieving your goals.
Hope can be about your wishes for yourself in the short term and long term future. It can also be about small steps of action for the good of the whole, for example, recycling things that you have used to contribute to a cleaner planet!
Think about your role models (such as scientisits, authors, environmental activists, sporting heroes) as they have managed, through small steps and persistence, to achieve their hopes!
This week at school we will be revisiting our PERMA model for wellbeing.
PERMA is an acronym for a model of well-being put forth by a pioneer in the field of positive psychology, Martin Seligman. According to Seligman, PERMA makes up five important building blocks of well-being and happiness:
Positive emotions – feeling good
Engagement – being completely absorbed in activities
Relationships – being authentically connected to others
Meaning – purposeful existence
Achievement – a sense of accomplishment and success
Positive Emotions
Positive emotions are among the many components that make up happiness and well-being, and one of the more obvious layers of happiness. It’s good to know the difference between pleasure and enjoyment. While pleasure relates to satisfying bodily needs like hunger, thirst, or taking a long sleep after a tough day, enjoyment comes from intellectual stimulation and creativity. Enjoyment can be as simple as playing a fun game with friends in the playground at lunch time. Enjoyment also involves being intellectually challenged and standing up to it. For example, puting a jigsaw puzzle together, which requires concentration and careful figuring out, can lead to smiles of contentment and enjoyment.
Positive emotions are good for us because they stretch the imagination. When we do something they enjoy or find interesting, we are more likely to persevere in the face of challenges, and spontaneously search for more creative solutions and opportunities. Positive emotions can also help undo negative ones; Generally, we are likely to do more of the activities we find stimulating and that bring enjoyment, and the effects last longer than those that generate short-lived pleasure.
Engagement
We’ve all had the experience of becoming so absorbed in work or in reading a book that we completely lose sense of time or forget an appointment. Achieving this state of flow or total engagement is natural, especially when people are involved in activities they love and are good at, such as dancing, playing sport, or pursuing creative activities and hobbies.
Although engagement in enjoyable activities comes relatively easy to most children, it is still important to have opportunities to take part in activities that offer experiences of engagement or flow. Such opportunities might involve putting together jigsaw puzzles, drawing and coloring, playing with toys, or practicing ballet or a musical instrument. The fact that such activities stretch the intellectual and emotional limits and endurance, as well as require concentration and effort, is important.
Relationships
Happiness and psychological health are inextricably linked with close, meaningful, and intimate relationships. Fleeting social relationships with strangers as well as longstanding ones with peers, siblings, parents, extended family, and friends are all sources of positive emotions and support. According to research, one important function of social networks is that they can spread happiness, cheer and laughter like wild fire.
Meaning
True happiness comes from creating and having meaning in life, rather than from the pursuit of pleasure and material wealth. Loving someone and being loved is a meaningful phenomenon, for example, because such acts inspire people to live for, and take care of, someone other than the self. Living a meaningful life is, in essence, related to attaching oneself to something larger than oneself. It instills the sense that there is a larger purpose to life, and being a part of it confers meaning. Doing chores, caring for the environment and helping others within the broader community are some examples of taking part in activities that go beyond merely living for oneself. These activities bring fulfillment and meaning that enhance well-being.
Accomplishment
Having explicit goals in life, even small ones like reading for an hour everyday, and making efforts to achieve them are important to well-being and happiness. Achievement helps to build self-esteem and provides a sense of accomplishment. It also strengthens self-belief.
The mere effort one puts into reaching a specific goal in itself harbors satisfaction. Importantly, setting goals and putting in the necessary efforts to achieve them are just as important as actually reaching them; it is OK not to succeed the first time.
The beginning of term is a great time to look at your previous Wellbeing Goal and, if you have achieved it, set a new one.
