An Introduction to Life Skills

At first I was going to title this post, "An Introduction to Growing Cohones."

Part of the work I do for my psych lab entails running a Life-Skills Program [based off the Penn Resiliency Program]. Specifically, I partner up with another research assistant to visit a middle school and teach two small groups of 7^th graders life skills, allowing the children to - as it says on my résumé - better regulate and understand their attitudes, behaviors, and emotions.

According to the World Health Organization life skills are defined as,

"Abilities for adaptive and positive behavior that enable individuals to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of everyday life."¹

Since this series is titled Iron Resiliency, we can't proceed further if we're not familiar with resiliency. In my own words, I would succinctly define it as the ability to handle challenges and being strong-minded. I'll be adapting my lab's program to the weight trainee's experience, which includes behaviors, thoughts, their social network, and prioritization to name a few points of the upcoming discussion.

The program is composed of eight sessions, but I'll be writing six sessions and a conclusion. I've decided to cut out a small portion of the material because it's not completely necessary to include in the series.

Like last time, I'll do one post every Tuesday with it following this schedule:

Session 1 - 1/11/11
Session 2 - 1/18/11
Session 3 - 1/25/11
Session 4 - 2/1/11
Session 5 - 2/9/11
Session 6 - 2/16/11

The session titles will be revealed when the posts themselves are published each Tuesday. Additionally I'll still do one post towards the end of each week, albeit shorter and less intensive.

With that being said, drop by Tuesday to see session 1 for yourself.

¹ UNESCO, http://portal.unesco.org/education/en//ev.php-URL_ID=36637&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
Source: Wikipedia