How to Play 52 Essential Coping Skills

Click here to take the Online Coping Assessment.

 

Video Transcript: How to Use 52 Essential Coping Skills:

Hello friends, I’m Dr. Jenny Woo, founder of Mind Brain Emotion. And today, I’m going to show you how to use 52 Essential Coping Skills.

What is Coping? To cope means to deal effectively with the stressors and problems in our lives. So, anytime we try to overcome stress, we are coping.

 The ability to cope effectively is what makes someone resilient despite major life setbacks.

And in the extreme cases, the ability to cope is what differentiates posttraumatic growth from posttraumatic stress.

As we know, it is humanly impossible to eliminate all the stress from our lives, or to shield of life’s challenges from our loved ones’ lives.

But here’s the good news: we can become wiser, stronger, and calmer by expanding our coping skills and strategies.

52 Essential Coping Skills provides evidence-based exercises to help you build important coping skills and strategies, so that you can better

  • manage your emotions,
  • overcome the stressors in your life,
  • and reduce your level of anxiety and overwhelm.

This is a portable deck of cards in a sturdy tin can because it’s meant to be used and reused for a lifetime. This is not an activity that is done once and mastered. 

Each card includes actionable exercises that speak to the challenging situations that you’re facing and the goals that you may have on how you’d like to show up as a person. 

These coping skills and exercises are organized by Focus Area, which is in the top left-hand corner, and labeled by suit characters.

  • A heart stands for self-awareness
  • A diamond stands for self-management
  • A spade stands for social awareness
  • A club stands for relationship skills

 Use the red suits when you are having a hard time letting go of a thought or an emotion.

Use the black suits when you are dealing with external problems with other people or wounded confidence.

Each individual coping card is labeled by topic to help you quickly find what you need. Beneath each topic, you will find exercises and prompts to apply the specific coping strategy to meet your needs.

To get the most out of 52 Essential Coping Skills, take the free Online Coping Assessment to gain a sense of your current coping style.

  • For example, do you typically vent to others about your problems, or do you silently blame yourself for what happened?
  • Do you respond to an issue by taking action or you prefer taking a step back and give it time?
  • Are you responding to stress in unhealthy ways?

The Coping Assessment will take about 10 minutes. Once done, you’ll see suggestions on how you can personalize 52 Essential Coping Skills to address your areas of needs.

I encourage you to go slow and use 1 to 2 coping cards at a time. Each card is broken up into bitesize prompts, because our big emotions and lingering moods are a lot to process.

With practice, you’ll be able to call upon these useful skills and strategies in demanding situations.

Each coping exercise is meant to be repeated for new insights. So that you can revisit each exercise when you are dealing with other circumstances and challenges in the future.

Just think of coping skills as a muscle that needs to be practiced and strengthened over time, and under different training demands.

Take at least six months to work on the specific cards that are most useful for you. Apply these exercises in different situations that you encounter. Then, you can take the Coping Assessment again to see how you’ve improved in those areas.

For additional resources, you can also enroll in my Online Emotional Intelligence course to get an in-depth understanding of how to harness your emotions wisely to solve problems, succeed in goals, and thrive in life.

In the course, I help you to diagnose your coping barriers, and walk you through some specific card exercises in the 52 Essential Coping Skills, as well as the 52 Essential Relationships, Conversations, and Critical Thinking decks to become emotionally intelligent in life.

Thank you for watching and I’m honored to support you in your emotional intelligence journey!