Responsibility Redefined: The 5 Essential Skills for Your Response Toolkit

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So which skills are needed to be able to respond? 

Our ability to respond depends a lot on learning a good repertoire of skills. We actually ultimately respond to any kind of situation with an action that requires a skill. Based on DeYoung’s study of human behavior, skills can be perceived as evolutionary adaptations. This means that over long periods of time, our ancestors have developed certain behavioral tendencies that work better than others, and the most efficient ones have been passed down through genes and culture. 
Following this understanding and the classification of these broad and encompassing categories of skills, The Bridge supports students to develop 5 Core Skills (the PROPS) that serve as the foundation of their ability to respond to all life situations and goals: 

PROACTIVITY
​Proactivity is about directing one’s energy toward a goal. When we are proactive, we have a clear purpose (big or small) and are willing to drive our actions toward it, even if it’s outside of our comfort zone.  

• When we lack proactivity, we may feel aimless or lacking the drive to respond to a situation.

RESILIENCE
​This skill helps us modulate fear. How do I respond to this situation? Do I confront it? Do I retreat? Resilience is not just about persevering when we are challenged, but also about maintaining emotional balance. 
 

• When we lack resilience we may not know how to discern when to approach or avoid a situation; we may overreact or underreact, we may overthink it or underthink it. ​

OPENNESS
We are not isolated beings; we depend on other people and our environment for our wellbeing. It is essential to be in an open and reciprocal relationship with our surroundings.

This means that we are able to contribute to the wellbeing of others and our surroundings as well as stay open to the feedback we get from them. 

• When we lack openness, we cut ourselves off from learning, we make lots of assumptions and we don’t nourish crucial relationships. 

PROBLEM-SOLVING 
​Problem-solving relies heavily on other skills like curiosity and creativity. Problem-solving requires an attentive and open mind to possibilities, connections between parts, and finding a match between external and internal resources.

How do I get from point A to point B? How do we strengthen our team? How do I get over my anxiety? Those are questions that problem-solving helps with. 

• When we lack problem-solving, we get stuck with what we know and in our typical way of doing things, and like people say, we can’t expect different results if we always do the same thing.

SELF-GOVERNANCE
This skill helps us prioritize what’s important. Whenever we want to accomplish a goal, it is crucial that we organize our mind, our space, and our tasks. We need to stay focused and stay aware of our current actions and their future consequences. 

• When we lack self-governance we get distracted, we can be impulsive, and get overwhelmed with tasks that require consistency and long-term planning.

Guided Exploration of Skill Development

Our students are constantly invited to get “in the driver’s seat” of their experience by choosing the kinds of activities as well as the pace and schedule arrangement that best works for them.​

They are given lots of opportunities for healthy risk taking, exploration and trial-and-error. However, they are not left to their own devices; we are guiding them by sitting “in the passenger’s seat”. By doing so, we carefully guide students to activate their response-ability in a scaffolded way through every attempt to push slightly past their current ability, recognize the skills implemented, and discover their unique formula to respond to their goals and life’s challenges. 

Now that you've learned about PROPS skills, could you identify each core skill when you see it in action or hear someone talking?
 
Here's a reflection from one of our graduates on his experience at The Bridge 11 years ago. See if you can identify when he's referring to the different PROPS!