5 Character Trait Types — What Traits Do I Want To Strengthen? Uses "The BIG 5" OCEAN Model

Character is the consistent pattern of qualities and attributes that define how an individual tends to think, feel, and behave. These traits shape an individual's personality and influence how one interacts with others. Character traits exist on a spectrum or continuum…

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Tom Karl
5 Communication Skills — How Do I Communicate Effectively with Others?

Communication is a vital life skill that enables individuals to express thoughts clearly, build strong relationships, and navigate both personal and professional environments. The ability to effectively communicate one's needs, desires, expectations, and insights empowers individuals to thrive in diverse life situations.

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Tom Karl
14 Life Skill Types — How Do I Build My Skills & Reach My Full Potential?

Life skills development enables individuals to build and maintain the skills that lead to greater autonomy and independence. The ability to manage daily responsibilities, such as time management and organizational skills, equips individuals to take control of their

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Tom Karl
7 States of Change — How Do I Experience Grief and Be Resilient?

Grief is a natural human response to coping with acute pain from a loss or traumatic event. Although grief typically focuses on an emotional dis-regulation, it affects thoughts, emotions, and behavior. While everyone experiences grief differently, there are common grief states, emotions, and coping responses.

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Tom Karl
7 Resilience Practices — How Do I Adapt To Adversity and Change?

Life experiences and events shape our beliefs about who we are. This is true for both joyful experiences as well as adverse ones. How one deals with stressors that originate from adversity, change, adverse childhood experiences, grief & loss, and traumatic events impacts one’s life and long-term health outcomes.

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Tom Karl
Trauma-Informed Care — How Do I Instill the 6 Principles in Practice?

Trauma researchers, practitioners, and survivors recognize that understanding trauma and trauma-specific interventions is not sufficient to optimize outcomes. The context and environment where trauma is treated

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Tom Karl
5 Card Structures — How Do I Activate Individuals Toward Self-Efficacy?

Engaging logical learners with real-life situations and circumstances, not only makes the learning experience relevant and practical, it sparks one’s journey toward self-efficacy through a reflective self-discovery process. It also encodes the information one is learning into long-term memory.

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Tom Karl
4 Levels of Defense Mechanisms — How Do I Protect My Self?

How human beings distort reality to protect themselves is amazing. Given adverse childhood experiences or other traumatic events that can occur along life’s journey, defense mechanism serve an important protective role psychologically.

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Tom Karl
SMART Goals — What Makes SMART Goals Smart?

They make you think! That’s the simple answer to the question. Thinking and reflecting on goals make them real and concrete. This internalized goal drafting and crafting process sparks and motivates individuals onto the path of behavioral change. Self-efficacy is a belief in one’s competence to successfully accomplish a task and produce a favorable outcome.

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Tom Karl
The R1 Discover Vision — Imagine What We See

R1’s purpose is to build an interactive curriculum service that will impact individuals, their families, equip deeply caring and compassionate practitioners in the workforce, and change lives. We also set off to build tools to learn from more quickly and easily. We asserted at the start in July of 2017 that it was impossible.

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Tom Karl
10 Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) — How Does My Childhood Affect Me Now?

"What happened?" "How do my childhood experiences effect me now?" are questions for individuals to explore in order to identify traumatic experiences and get help. The experiences one has during childhood (within the first 18 years of life) impacts

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Tom Karl
Curriculum Accessibility — How Does Your Program Stack Up?

For individuals and communities to benefit from a curriculum it needs to be both impactful and accessible. Even with the world's best curriculum, its efficacy diminishes if not accessible to everyone. Discover how we're prioritizing accessibility to maximize impact for every individual in the community.

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Frank Bomher
9 Substance Classes — What Are The Symptoms of Harmful Use?

Substances are all around us in society. Some are marketed and distributed by some of the most profitable companies in the world (Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Roche for prescribed pharmaceuticals, Starbucks and other coffee franchises for caffeine, Phillip Morris and Altria…

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Tom Karl
5 Dimensions of Recovery Capital — Do I Know the Basics?

Recovery Capital refers to the internal and external resources necessary to achieve and sustain recovery. The Recovery Capital Model recognizes that a variety of dimensions — personal capital, social capital, community capital, emotional support, commitment to sobriety, and well-being — can support or jeopardize recovery depending on how individuals use their capital.

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Tom Karl
10 Emotional Regulation Practices — Which Coping Skills Work Best For Me?

Emotional coping skills are the topic of today’s post and important tools individuals learn on the path of health and wellness. Emotional wellness is central to most evidence-based practices and psychological models including Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT),

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Tom Karl
Emotional Triggers — What Activates My Physiology and Moves Me to Behavior?

Helping individuals think about their past experiences to identify environmental triggers is central to preventing other mental health conditions such as anxiety or depression. Our model highlights four types of environmental triggers — people, places, things, and situations.

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Tom Karl
Substance Use — 11 Symptoms for Observing the Biological, Psychological, and Social Patterns of the Disorder

Substance use is on the rise and impacting individuals, families, and communities world-wide. Hundreds of millions of individuals use substances in some fashion with over three million people dying from substance related use globally. The use of physical or mind-altering substances

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Tom Karl
Affirmations — 5 Practices for Building Internal Strength

Building new positive stories and beliefs about oneself takes practice. Frequent and consistent re-connection with core values, new healthy choices and behaviors, and a shift in one’s core beliefs takes time..The more we practice and incorporate these new beliefs into our daily routines and mindset, the more we will achieve their benefits.

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Tom Karl
9 Classroom Structures — Which Engage Your Learners Most?

How does structure impact one’s learning experience? is one of the major questions we’ve been shining a light on since R1 Learning’s inception. There is little for me to tell you in this post. The main point is your observation of the 9 structures below and your own experiences either being in one (being one of the green dots) or facilitating one (being one of the blue dots). Each has a primary purpose. Each has pros and cons. Structure has a way of placing emphasis on the blue dot in relation to the green dots. As you observe the 9 configurations, which ones

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Tom Karl