Empowering Today’s Youth with Emotional Intelligence (EQ) Skills
Emotional intelligence (EQ), the ability to recognize, understand, and deal skillfully with one’s own emotions and the emotions of others, is a durable skill that is essential for personal and professional success. Based on a search of today’s job postings, employers agree. Over 14,000 positions on LinkedIn and 11,000 on Indeed include EQ as a requirement. And the numbers increase exponentially when the search is expanded to include associated durable skills like communication and collaboration.
So how can we teach today’s teens this critical skill which is not included in most schools’ core academic curriculum? To meet and engage students where they are, online and within community-driven gatherings, American Student Assistance® (ASA) partnered with Emotional Theater. to provide EQ training on EvolveMe®. EvolveMe, ASA’s award-winning, skill building and career experimentation digital platform, features more than 100 career readiness tasks and powered by more than 30 innovative partners. Designed specifically for GenZ, the platform is free and awards users incentives for each task completed, resulting in an impressive 81% task completion.
Emotional Theater nurtures emotional resilience and provides vital emotional intelligence skills to today’s youth through immersive experiences. Their unique approach gamifies emotional skill-building and provides multiple disciplines of creative expression. For example, students can learn EQ skills in a dance or drawing challenge, all while using Emotional Theater’s playful Augmented Reality (AR) costumes.
Since launching the partnership, 71,000 students aged 13-19 have participated in an Emotional Theater task through EvolveMe. Teens are extremely engaged in the tasks with a 89-92% completion rate.
Not only are they completing tasks, but teens are acquiring essential EQ skills. A survey of the 71K new students found that:
- 84% said they believe it would be healthy to surround themselves with friends and social settings that resonate with a positive emotional state.
- 86% rated the importance of understanding the relationship between thoughts and emotions to enhance communication and relationships with others high or somewhat high.
- 95% said they used the four-step process of recognizing the emotion, identifying the thought, changing the thought, and changing the emotion to a more positive one a few times or a lot of times.
These findings confirm the partnership is achieving its intended impact, promoting resilience and cultivating the durable skills employers value in young people across the country.
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