‘Let’s embrace emotional resilience’
The Founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Addison International Centre for Emotional Intelligence, Mr James Kwesi Addison, has called on Ghanaians to embrace emotional resilience to deal with stressful situations in their lives.
Advertisement
His call comes in the wake of recent reported cases of suicides among the youth in various parts of the country.
Mr Addison was speaking at the second edition of the Agape Children’s Ministry Conference 2017, which was organised by the Agape New Testament Church in Accra.
He is Ghana’s acclaimed first certified emotional intelligence coach, as well as the driving force behind the Social Emotional Skills Academy (SESA) Initiative in Ghana.
Participants at sessions
Participants at the event were taken through various sessions including emotional self-awareness and management and other emotional intelligence competencies.
They were also given a lot of insight into how the SESA Initiative Ghana operates as well as how young people could develop interests in how to build emotional resilience.
According to Mr Addison, young people could build emotional resilience through four major ways, namely ability to manage difficult emotions with greater discretion to respond to stressful circumstances and to take control, increased creativity, innovation and problem solving abilities to enhance learning or work activities.
Other ways are improved health and wellbeing through the quality of social connections and relationships, with an enhanced capacity to make emotional connections with others and attract other people, and solid optimistic approach and positive mood with a sense of self-confidence that in many ways inoculates against depression and anxiety.
Youth-related anxieties
The emotional intelliegence expect added that there was a rise in youth related anxieties; self-harm, self-medication and crime, “with research indicating that it stems from the lack of preparedness for life and the distressing emotions encountered by young people.”
He, therefore, called on stakeholders to join the SESA Initiative Ghana to help the youth come out of the emotional stress they usually encountered to reduce spate of suicide in the country.
