The abilities to manage one’s emotions, thoughts, and behaviors effectively in different situations and to achieve goals and aspirations. This includes the capacities to delay gratification, manage stress, and feel motivation & agency to accomplish personal/collective goals. Such as:

• Managing one’s emotions

• Identifying and using stress-management strategies

• Exhibiting self-discipline and self-motivation

• Setting personal and collective goals

• Using planning and organizational skills

• Showing the courage to take initiative

• Demonstrating personal and collective agency

The components of self-management are interrelated in many ways. Impulse control affects self-discipline. Goal setting requires self-motivations and organizational skills.

For students, the ability to regulate thoughts, emotions, and actions in various settings is the core of self-management. Emotions are co-regulated, we learn the regulate through relationships. Once students become aware of their emotions, we need to provide them with tools and strategies to help deal with those emotions and to help exercise self-management.

Negative emotions can hijack the amygdala, the emotional center, which then pushes aside thought processes based in the prefrontal cortex. 

The brain then releases the stress hormone, cortisol, which surges through the body and prevents logical thinking. Also, this impedes the hippocampus which is key in memory formation. 

If we know that we are angry. We need to name the emotion, which changes our thoughts from the irrational amygdala to the thoughtful prefrontal cortex. We can't name the emotion in the automatic areas of the brain, which is reflexive, When we name the emotion we use the speech center of the brain, which brings it to the frontal lobe. 

The ability to reach the frontal lobe when dealing with intense emotions and to name those emotions is at the heart of self-management.