The Sailboat
Overview
- This unit includes a group activity designed to help you and your peers collectively establish guidelines for this program.
- This unit also includes a mindfulness activity that helps you pause and consider things without judgment.
Unit 1 introduces the sailboat metaphor, a framework used throughout the program to explore your thoughts, feelings, stressors, and abilities as you encounter transitions and generally throughout your life.
Bridge Exercises
Why This Matters: Major life transitions can be both exciting and challenging for anyone. As you get started in college or any change in your life, it can be useful to learn how people close to you navigated similar changes in their lives.
Ask a family member or peer to chat with you about their transition to college or a similar major life transition. Ask the following questions and write your responses in a notebook or type in a document:
- What events, both positive and negative, do you recall happening around this transition?
- What were your strengths and weaknesses? How did they help or hinder you in taking this big step?
- What were your goals as you set off on this journey? Did those goals change over time? If so, how?
Why This Matters: During transitions, you’ll face a lot of new decisions. This activity prompts you to think about how you make those decisions and how different parts of you might influence your choices.
We all have different states of mind that we can be in, which affect how we respond in the moment to situations in our lives. For example, sometimes we respond with our emotion mind. This happens when we’re focused on our emotions and feelings and make decisions based on impulse or intuition. On the other hand, sometimes we respond with our reasonable mind. This happens when we use logic and reason and make decisions based only on the facts.
Read the following scenarios. Then write down how you might react to each scenario, using the perspectives of both your emotion mind and your reasonable mind, in a notebook or in a digital document.
- Scenario 1: You’re looking forward to going to a newly released movie with your best friend. About an hour before the movie, your friend, who is usually very reliable, texts to say they’re sorry but something has come up and they can’t make it to the movie after all.
- Scenario 2: You need a new phone charger. You’re at the store looking for one when a clerk walks by and asks if you need help. You say you’re looking for a charger for your phone. The clerk adopts an attitude, saying that there are a lot of different phones and chargers and that you need to be more specific if they’re going to be able to help you.
- Scenario 3: You’re driving to your piano lesson and are running late. You think you can make up time by taking a shortcut. Once you turn onto the “shortcut” road, you find yourself behind a very slow-moving truck. You’re on a two-lane road with a lot of oncoming traffic and no turnoffs for about a mile.
Why This Matters: Building resilience is a goal of the My Compass program. It can be challenging to be resilient or even know what kind of resilience is required when entering a new environment such as college or a new job. This activity asks you to listen to other young people’s views on resilience before considering your own.
Watch the video “What Does Resilience Mean?” Then post your thoughtful response to the discussion board.
Session 1 Survey
Answer the following questions about your experience with Session 1.
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