Staying Positive Step 10

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

Step 10: I look for opportunities in difficult situations, and create new plans to use these opportunities

Outcomes

To achieve Step 10, learners will show that they can explore a situation and use their analysis to create new plans to use the opportunities they identify.

In the previous step, the focus was on how to look for opportunities in difficult situations, and then adapt their plans accordingly. This step expands on this, but by looking at the creation of new plans as a result.

Learners need to be able to:

Review a challenging situation and identify viable opportunities
Develop plans to make the most of those opportunities

Introduction

Use questioning to help learners reflect on how to come up with multiple ideas for changing difficult situations into positive ones, e.g. What challenging situations were you in? What positive ideas have you come up with to change that situation? What did you use to help you come up with these ideas?”

Recap what a SWOT analysis is and how we can use it to adapt our plans and ideas.

Skill Starter

My Goals

Ask learners to think about a goal in relation to the activity they are learning about in that session. Ask them to complete a SWOT analysis thinking about their existing strengths and weaknesses as well as the opportunities and threats they might encounter.

At the end of the session give them time to review their analysis and see how accurate it was and whether they were able to build on the opportunities.

10 mins

Individual activity

Written

Teach & Apply

When we are creating new plans it is essential to start by identifying what the goals are of what you are trying to achieve: the primary goal (main one) and secondary goals (additional ones).
We can then work backwards from here. Typical stages of a plan are:
- Scoping and research – understanding the problem more fully.
- Idea creation – developing different ideas for how the problem could be addressed, or the opportunities used.
- Testing ideas – putting ideas into practice and seeing how they work.
- Reviewing and improvements – seeing whether the ideas worked in practice, and how they might be improved.
- Putting into practice or production – putting the idea into production, completing the experiments and solving the problems.

Optional Activity

Floor of Lava

In groups of 4 or 6, teams must make it from one side of the field/hall to the other without one of the learners in the group touching the floor.

Add in different constraints along the way to make it more challenging. Ask the groups to share some of the positive plans they came up with.

15 mins

Group activity

Active

Reflection & Assessment

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

When you see a learner choose a positive way to move forward in a difficult situation, rather than giving up, ask them to reflect with you on the process they used to choose this approach. Ask them to share this process with the group and support others to create new plans to respond to challenges, e.g. personal targets.

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

Get the groups to give feedback to one another on their thoughts on the way they came through the difficult situations to check their understanding.
Ask these reflective questions:
- How can we find opportunities in difficult situations?
- How can we turn analysis into new plans?
- What do we need to keep thinking about?