Understanding Emotions (One and a Half Hour)

Youth workshop outlines

Rough timings are given, but these can be adapted to suit the service. A minimum of eight participants are required to deliver these workshops. The workshops can be delivered as a one off session or as a course.

Understanding emotions (one and a half hour)

This session introduces young people to the importance of understanding and identifying emotions such as anger, anxiety and grief in themselves and others. When exposed to extreme emotions over a prolonged period, young people may ‘switch off’ to avoid intense feelings, and find it harder to recognise their feelings. This session will explore how to identify, respond and deal appropriately with emotions internally (e.g. body scanning, breathing techniques and self-regulation) and with others (e.g. through discussion and negotiation). This session can lead into future focused sessions on specific emotions.

Confidence and self-esteem (one and a half – two hours)

This workshop is designed to help young people leave feeling better about themselves, using a range of techniques. These will enable them to find out more about self-confidence and self-esteem and how they differ. It will use assertiveness techniques to allow young people to define and express their values and views with peers. Ranked statement cards, ‘Who is confident?’ and ‘Advertising me’ activities will be used. It can also be designed to identify those in need of more support, where these individuals can be given more targeted attention in future sessions.

Relationships (one and a half hours)

This workshop will help young people gain more insight into what personal relationships mean to them, exploring their expectations and those of others. It looks at the reasons why people have close relationships and helps young people to think about the nature and complexities of such relationships. It will do this using a variety of short activities including group led discussion, outcome based scenarios, engaging games and activities and quizzes and checklists.

Identity (one hour fifteen minutes)

A person’s identity is who a person is and what makes them who they are. This workshop is all about exploring individual and group identity. Firstly we explore what identity is, using statement cards to explore attitudes of the young people. This is then extended to form groups based upon these attitudes, with the activity used to explore how people join groups in society, and how social and personal identities differ. The session helps young people discover that identity can help social bonding by allowing people to form commonalities with others in society.

Goal setting (one hour)

This short session will help young people identify a goal for themselves - either something they would like to improve in their life, something they enjoy doing and would like to do more of or something new they would like to try. The session will then demonstrate how goals can be broken down into smaller steps and will encourage the young people to go for their goals! A follow up review session can be provided to see how well goals are being met and to give encouragement.

How to be more assertive (one hour)

This short session aims to help young people and adults identify the difference between being assertive, passive and aggressive. It looks at short video clips of different scenarios followed by group discussions. The workshop also gets participants engaging in role play and playing the parts of being assertive, passive and aggressive in a safe environment.