This activity seeks to enhance the participants’ levels of consciousness concerning the way they spend their time on a day-to-day basis, and also to promote the development of new strategies to manage their time more efficiently. Linking this exercise to the ‘wheel of life’ in Handout 3A. and the important values and projects in the participants’ lives will help select the important tasks and projects.

To increase the participants’ perception and awareness of themselves and others perceptions and to enhance tolerance to differences in other people.

Communication skills and the ability to create good relations improve when one is highly aware and accept different perceptions to a given situation, a task and an event and accept that every person’s perception can differ from ones own.

This section builds on part 1 and 2 of the cognitive activities and methods. To complete the circle of activities serves as the 3rd and final part. This activity aims to increase emotional self-regulation, flexible thinking, build resilience and optimism. Before doing this activity, it is important that you have worked with ‘The Diamond’.

To help the participants identify which thoughts support or prevent them from reaching their goals develop their life projects and learn how to question the thoughts and feelings.

This is activity or tool is for training alternative thoughts and core beliefs for further reflection: Thoughts that the persons can imagine are more positive and appropriate. This is done by helping the participants register, nuance and evaluate their thoughts, and teach them strategies of disputation by using different questions to change the unnecessary and unrealistic consequences that might occur from these in different situations.

To help the participants increase personal insights by becoming aware of how their thoughts, emotions and sensations related to a certain behaviour or action.

This will help them take responsibility for their own lives and increase their personal agency and to be able to complete tasks and projects.

The activity will also help participants become aware of the resources available to them when facing positive events and appropriate thoughts and the link between the two concepts. Understanding this connection enables the participants to re-structure their thoughts and behaviour towards a more constructive and positive behaviour, to create more flexibility in choices, enhance self-confidence and autonomy and create an enhanced sense of self-efficacy.

Furthermore, the activity increases the participants’ awareness of their values and core beliefs that either help or hinder them. This new awareness can help the participants become more open to different opportunities in life, new life roles, and enterprising action. The activity also aims to increase emotional self-regulation, flexible thinking, build resilience and optimism.

To motivate and have the participants focus on and explore their positive emotions. This activity aims to cultivate positive emotions. Focusing on and experiencing positive emotions can open and broaden one’s mind as well as enforce one’s sense of resilience, hope and strength. Focusing on positive events and positive emotions can help one deal with negative events in a more constructive way.