Staying Positive Step 1

Staying Positive: The ability to use tactics and strategies to overcome setbacks and achieve goals.

Step 1: I can tell when others feel positive or negative

Outcomes

To achieve Step 1, learners will be able to recognise positive and negative emotions in others.

Previously, learners have been able to identify positive and negative feelings in themselves. For this step, the extension is to recognise them in others too.

Learners need to be able to:

Know how to spot positive emotions
Know how to spot negative emotions
Understand what events might lead others to have positive or negative emotions

Introduction

Recap the two different types of emotions:
- Positive emotions: These emotions make us feel good, and that we want to continue to feel like this, e.g. being happy, excited or calm.
- Negative emotions: These emotions make us feel bad, and we want to stop feeling like this, e.g. feeling sad, angry or scared.
It is not always easy to tell what emotion someone is feeling, and some people might choose to try to hide how they are feeling.

Skill Starter

Express Yourself

Pairs discuss what positive emotions look like and show a partner what that might look like as a facial expression.

Then they can try recreating expressions for negative emotions.

10 mins

Paired activity

Discussion

Teach & Apply

We can pick up some clues which might tell us how someone is feeling:
- People who are happy tend to be smiley, look at you directly and also laugh.
- People who are excited tend to be very active and look like they have lots of energy.
- People who are feeling sad might have downturned mouths. They might cry or look like they could.

We can also use our understanding of a situation to help us to guess how someone might be feeling.
It is important to remember that not everyone will react in the same way to different events. Thinking about what is going on for someone can help to give a better idea of what they might be feeling.

Optional Activity

Game Face

Encourage learners to practise behaving in a positive manner in games/matches and sharing how they feel:

Communicating with teammates in a positive manner
Celebrating teams wins and successes
Encouraging team mates if they make a mistake

10 mins

Group activity

Active

Reflection & Assessment

Embed these strategies across your teaching and coaching to help learners apply what they’ve learnt.

When events are described, ask learners for their reflections on how the individuals involved might have felt at those times and why.

Use these ideas for ways of assessing this skill step to help you check learners’ understanding and confidence.

Ask learners to think about what situations or scenarios might lead to the different emotions and write down some ideas.
Ask these reflective questions:
- What is an emotion?
- How can you tell what emotions other people are feeling?
- How can you use your understanding of the situation to help work out how someone is feeling?