Emotional Intelligence – Self-Mastery
It is essential for students to develop a deep mastery of self, which involves learning and integrating their own learning processes, social skills, and strategies for resilience and well-being. We encourage our students to cultivate tools of emotional self-regulation and create cognitive strategies that cultivate healthy empowering habits of mind. As we attain more self-mastery we understand and have better awareness of our bodies and thought processes and how they connect to a personal sense of balance and resilience. Our overarching long term goal is to create a new paradigm of self mastery in our students that builds and sustains wellness and wisdom that lasts a lifetime.
A lot of research shows that cultivating compassion promotes health and positive relationships. We endeavor to help our students understand what it means to leave a compassionate life, where compassion is seen as the ability to care for oneself and others, being a source of empowerment and strength, not a sign of weakness or an inability to stand up for oneself or others.
Our blended SEL curriculum teaches students about the role that our bodies and our nervous systems, play in our happiness and wellbeing. Students learn to calm their bodies and minds and regulate their nervous systems, as they are introduced to resilience skills that enhance this type of self-care.
The SEL curriculum addresses systems thinking as well, as students are slowly but steadily introduced to the idea of interdependence between people, objects and events, within complex networks of causality.
Watch a longer talk about Social Emotional Learning and its development within Verita from our school founder, Richard Joannides.
