Strategies to Cope with Challenges:

1. Learn to accept what you feel.

When you feel sad, angry, or envious, you need to embrace these feelings
because they are real emotions.
They are only reflective of who you are – a human being.
Accepting your feelings means allowing yourself to feel and express them.
Accepting your feelings means allowing yourself to feel and express them.
This means that you acknowledge what you feel.
 Strategies to Cope with Challenges:

This also helps in understanding the feelings, which is oftentimes rooted in

childhood experiences and triggered by similar situations that may or may not
be connected to each other.
You can choose ways not only how to express your feelings, but on how you
acknowledge them as well.
Trying to understand your feelings will give you a venue to study your
experience and express feelings in a more socially accepted manner.
 Strategies to Cope with Challenges:

2. Identify your vulnerabilities.

 Knowing when you feel intense emotions is important to acknowledge.
Ex. You know that you get irritated when your mother speaks to you as if you
were a young child. You have told her about your feeling when she does this,
but she still would not listen. Acknowledging that you feel negatively about
her manner of talking to you would help you think of ways to handle it.
 Strategies to Cope with Challenges:

 Also, it is beneficial when you know the warning signs or red flags of your
emotions because they tell you when to walk away or let go before you do or say
things that you will just regret later on.
Ex. You have noticed that before you flare up in anger, you first feel your face
getting hot, your knees trembling, and your heart pounding very fast. The
next time you feel anger and you see these signs, you excuse yourself from
the discussion and walk away.
 Strategies to Cope with Challenges:

3. Develop your talents and interests.

Attaining positive self-esteem helps boost your psychological well- being.
You can do this when you exert efforts to develop your talents and interests.
Doing so needs patience and perseverance, because mastering skills and
honing talents do not happen overnight.
Further, confidence is not simply gained by just believing you have it; rather,
you see yourself growing with confidence when you have enhanced your
competencies, seen the things that you can do, and figured out how far you can
go.
 Strategies to Cope with Challenges:
Know your interests or things that you enjoy doing.
Engaging in sports may divert your attention from the challenges of life and
will prevent you from feeding your negative thoughts.
Negative thoughts when nourished become monstrously unhealthy.
4. Become more involved with others.
Happy people do not just live for themselves and do not think of themselves
alone.
They attain happiness through helping others and sharing what they have with
others.
 Strategies to Cope with Challenges:
They express fulfillment when they have shared with and helped others.
Involvement with others allows you to appreciate what you have and gives you
lesser time to think of what you do not have.
 Strategies to Cope with Challenges:

5. Seek help when needed.

 Asking for help is as beneficial as helping others.
 Many adolescents are shy and hesitant to ask for help because they feel that
they only add weight to the problems of others when they do.
 Also, they think that they would look silly when they ask for help.
 However, you should know that a teenager still has to learn a lot of ways of
being effective and psychologically healthy.
 Strategies to Cope with Challenges:

 As adolescence is a transition from childhood to adulthood, you are still not

used to solve problems alone. Thus, asking for help or assistance is a measure
to prevent things from being complicated or getting worse.
 You may ask help from any trusted adult such as a parent, a teacher, and a
guidance counselor.
 Activity 2: “Dear Significant Others”
• This activity aims to facilitate communication between you and your significant
others about the challenges that you are facing as adolescents and your feelings
towards the expectations of your significant others.
• On a sheet of paper, make a letter addressed to your parents/guardians or other
significant people around you (siblings, friends, teachers, and community
leaders).
• In the letter, courteously express how you feel about the stage you are going
through (adolescence) and what you think and feel about your significant others
expectations of you.
 Activity 2: “Dear Significant Others”

• Send or give it to the significant person/s to which it is addressed.

• Ask your significant others make a short reply letter and submit.