Teaching Fellowship Project

Oxford Brookes University

A GUIDE TO YOURSELF:

Understanding and developing personal competences

(Images removed in this version)

Dr Tatiana Bachkirova and Dr Ilona Boniwell

2007

Content

Introduction to the Guide 3

Section 1. Personal competences Self-wise: 7

Understanding yourself

1.1. Self-awareness 8

1.2. Self-evaluation 13

1.3. Self-development 18

1.4. Your emotions 23

1.5. Your thinking 28

1.6. Your values 33

1.7. Self-discipline 38

1.8. Feeling good 43

Section 2. Personal competences People-wise: 48

Relationships with others

2.1. Getting on with others 49

2.2. Communication 54

2.3. Appearance 59

2.4. Being yourself among others 64

2.5. Influencing others 69

2.6. Assertiveness 74

2.7. Dealing with conflicts 79

2.8. Making friends 84

Section 3. Personal competences Task-wise: 89

Achieving results

3.1. Making choices 90

3.2. Motivation 95

3.3. Learning 100

3.4. Setting goals 105

3.5. Being organised 110

3.6. Creativity 115

3.7. Solving problems 120

3.8. Dealing with stress 125

Introduction to the Guide

Dear First Year Student

Congratulations on the start of your academic study! You are now part of a big army of busy, excited, constantly learning, worrying about deadlines, interested in too many things outside of the university, questioning their future young and mature people who have chosen to commit to this kind of life for the next three years. There must be so much information for you to take on board right now that it may feel overwhelming. This booklet is not part of this load. If you do not want to look at it right now you can safely put it aside until it feels OK to explore what it is about.

There will be, however, one particular activity in this big workload that might remind you about this booklet again. You will soon discover that all students are strongly encouraged to become acquainted with and involve themselves with something that is called PDP: personal development planning. The purpose of PDP is to help you to start thinking about your future career and to purposefully develop the skills that could increase your employability. It is now a vital role of universities to support students on this path. Therefore you will be given an opportunity to use a computerised system that is designed for you to plan, monitor and evaluate your process of personal and professional development.

This system is not new. It was introduced two years ago. Some of the students, who were in their first year before you, are well into the process of their professional development and on the whole found this system and the idea of PDP useful. Some students only partly engage with it, being too busy or thinking that they can catch up with it later when it becomes more pressing. Some students, however, find the idea of PDP too dry and struggle with the formal element of it. Regardless of which group, if any you might belong to you could find this booklet useful. Here are some possible scenarios that this booklet may help you with:

· It may help you to understand yourself better as a learner, friend, group member, decision maker, etc. or just a human being in general.

· You may find some practical activities and reflective exercises that could be helpful if you want to improve some of your personal competences. All of these competences are useful for your future employability in one way or another.

· You may find that using your Guide to Yourself you can make your PDP more personally meaningful and lively at the same time.

· You may use the Guide for learning about yourself together with your friends and classmates which could be even more fun.

This booklet consists of three main sections:

1. Personal competences Self-wise (understanding yourself)

2. Personal competences People-wise (relationships with others)

3. Personal competences Task-wise (achieving results)

Each section includes eight subsections that are devoted to one personal competence. In the section of personal Self-wise competences you can learn, for example, about self-awareness, your thinking, your values, self-discipline and how to feel good. The examples of People-wise competences are: getting on with others, appearance, influencing others, assertiveness, dealing with conflicts and making friends. Task-wise competences include making choices, setting goals, being organised, solving problems and dealing with stress.

Each subsection includes a short and clear introduction that helps you to see what this competence is about. Then some activities are suggested that could help you to get engaged with it and to try to understand and develop it further. We are also offering reflection questions that may prompt you to think more about this competence. This will include a cartoon which may through a humorous approach reinforce and stretch your thinking. A list of other sources of information on this topic is also included. At the end of each subsection you will find a blank space for your personal reflection or whatever you feel like writing in relation to this competence.

At this stage we think it would be useful to let you know a little about us, why we created this booklet and who helped us. We are both psychologists who are experienced in teaching university students. We are very passionate about individual development and the ways of facilitating development of others. What was always clear to us was that students on the whole want to learn more about themselves and about ways of making changes in their lives. This booklet is a short guide to exploring the questions that students were curious about and discussions they enjoyed.

We are very grateful to all students with whom we have been working, for their inquisitive minds and great questions that led to very interesting conversations. We are also grateful to those authors whose books have inspired us in our own process of self-exploration. Some of the books are suggested for you in further readings. We would like to mention one particular book and give our personal gratitude to its author, Dr Nash Popovic, for his helpful ideas and support. This is Personal Synthesis: A complete guide to personal knowledge (2005, London: PWBC). We believe that this book could serve as main background reading for this booklet. Finally we would like to thank Bob Pomfret for the great pictures that make A Guide to Yourself more alive and colourful.

Welcome to A Guide to Yourself!

We wish you an enjoyable learning experience!

Tatiana and Ilona

Section 1

Personal competences Self-wise: understanding yourself

1.1 Self-awareness 8

1.2 Self-evaluation 13

1.3 Self-development 18

1.4 Your emotions 23

1.5 Your thinking 28

1.6 Your values 33

1.7 Self-discipline 38

1.8 Feeling good 43

1.1. Self-awareness

Introduction

Self-awareness is awareness of our inner world: our thoughts, feelings, desires, fantasies, dreams, worries and so on.

So, why is self-awareness important? It enables us to learn about ourselves. And the more you know yourself, the more you can make of your life. If you want to drive or use computer, you need to know something about cars and computers. If you want to engage fully with your life, you need to know yourself.

Self-knowledge could also be useful in forming realistic expectations, which minimises disappointments. It can enable you to judge situations more accurately too. And finally, self-awareness makes life rich and interesting.

It may sound very simple: to be self-aware. We don’t need to keep our eyes open to become aware of what is going inside us, and yet we often miss a lot or get things wrong in this respect. There are three main reasons why it happens:

Ignoring ourselves and the processes that are going on inside us: we do this to avoid possible unpleasant feelings or postpone facing difficult issues. However, what is ignored does not disappear - in fact, in the long run its influence may increase.

Deceiving ourselves means creating a false or unrealistic self-image. It is usually used to avoid unacceptable or undesirable aspects of ourselves and to preserve self-esteem. Deceiving can make us feel temporarily better, but discrepancies between reality and what we imagine will accumulate in time, which may create many problems. To avoid this, it is necessary to be honest with yourself even when it is uncomfortable.

Not understanding ourselves may happen because we suppress or cannot clearly formulate certain processes in our minds. Such processes are usually manifested in dreams, daydreams and fantasies, so dream analysis can be an example of how to shed more light on them.

Dreams are manifestations of our emotions, desires, thoughts and other drives. While in reality experiences affect our state of mind, in dreams the state of mind creates experiences. Dreams can be meaningful, but their meaning is not universal. A similar dream can have a very different meaning for you and for somebody else. Dreams do not follow logic but a chain of associations, which is why they may be confusing and difficult to interpret. Several techniques to analyse dreams are suggested below in addition to other ways of becoming more self-aware.

Activities

1. Talking about yourself to an accepting listener (e.g. a trustworthy friend, relative or counsellor) is one of the oldest and best methods of getting to know yourself.

2. Keeping a diary can help us recognise certain patterns that would otherwise not be noticed. For this purpose, the diary should be a candid description of events and your reactions, thoughts and feelings. It is better to leave interpretations and analyses for later, because they can take you away from the experience or distort its accurate recollection.

3. Using images. Visualise or draw a picture of an image that symbolises your personality. It may be a house, for example. Is it big or small, detached or attached, dark or bright? What is in the cellar or in the loft? What does this image tell you about yourself?

4. You at your best. This exercise can teach you a lot about yourself. Think about a time when you were at your best. You don’t need to come up with a grand or life-changing event. Perhaps what comes to mind is a small event that brought about the best in you. Write about this time when you were at your best. Make it in the form of a story with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Then reflect on what personal strengths you displayed when you were at your best. Did you show a lot of creativity? Did you show good judgment? Were you good with other people? Were you kind? Loyal? Loving? Brave? Passionate? Forgiving? Honest? You are the judge. Ask yourself: “In what other areas of my life might I use these strengths to my advantage?”

5. Dream analysis. There are several ways to analyse your dreams.

a) One method to analyse dreams is to write down everything you can remember from the dream and then extract several elements (e.g. an object, person or event from the dream). On the basis of what comes to mind first, make a short story about each of them (this will eliminate the form of the dream that may be an obstacle to understanding). The themes that are common, that repeat, should reveal the meaning of the dream.

b) You can also engage in a dialogue with whoever or whatever appears in your dream. For example, you may ask a person who appeared in your dream ‘Why are you here?’ Then imagine that you are that person and try to answer. Or you can ask a monster from your dream ‘Why are you chasing me, what do you want from me? Can we be friends? What do you want me to understand?’

c) Another option is to focus directly on the feelings and sensations rather than dream images, and consider how they relate to your present situation, aspirations or concerns.

Questions for reflection

· Focus for a moment on what is going on inside you right now. A little or a lot? How do you feel about it?

· What do you think, how well do you know yourself? For example, why do you have certain preferences or react in a certain way? What are your trigger points? If you would like to know more about yourself, how will you go about it?

· How well do you know your strengths and weaknesses?

· Could self-deception be good for you? Why?