Search results for "emotions"

In principle four of his book, The Happiness Advantage, Shawn Achor teaches us all about “falling up” -- finding our way out and up from the negative events of our everyday lives and using the experience to become stronger in character. This is a handy lesson for adults that also carries great value when thinking about the children in our lives. In today’s post, we explore how kids can capitalize on a troubling situation to move their happiness needle forward. Our brains are naturally wired to “map out” the many paths available to us depending on our choices. When faced with hardship or a difficult situation, nearly everyone’s mental map contains three paths. One path is a continual loop circling us in the negative event (creating no change). Another path has us traveling further down the road of negative consequences (leading us to believe we will be/things will be much worse on the other side). The third and final path we can choose is one that takes us from the place of our mishap and points us in a direction where we land much stronger and more capable than ever before. While this third path is the most productive and positive path we could ever take, during hard times, it is often the hardest path to clearly envision ourselves traveling. We oftentimes don’t even believe it exists. The trick in helping our kids “fall up” from their mistakes (instead of falling down) is to get them to truly see the third path of positive opportunity and believe that they are brave enough to begin their journey down that road. So...how do we empower our youth to fall up? Here are 5 ideas to try: Positively reinterpret the negative experience. Be open, accepting, and optimistic about whatever situation they are facing. Flip the switch on the negative outcome to find areas of positive growth. Did your child miss a majority of the words on a spelling pre-test? That’s ok! Now you have a realistic view of what to study for the final test at the end of the week. Was your teenager late for school because they couldn’t find their homework? Lesson learned! Now they have real-life experience to support the idea of packing their bag the night before. Treat setbacks as an opportunity to excel. To quote Robert F. Kennedy, “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” If you want your child to fast track their learning and self-growth, encourage them to embrace their mistakes and failures for what they truly are: teachable moments that provide the opportunity to learn about their personal character and strengthen their resilience and perseverance to rise above and surpass all expectations. Find the fortunate in the unfortunate. So often, life is all about the stories we tell ourselves. Unfortunate events are no different. The key here is to not get hung up on how devastating the event might be, but how fortunate or lucky you are that things played out the way they did. Suppose your child auditioned for the main role in their school musical. When the cast list was announced, your child did not get the main role but instead, was cast as a supporting character. How do they react? Are they disappointed? Sure. But can they still feel good about the role they do get to play? Absolutely. While it might not be their name headlining the production, think of all of the kids who tried out and didn’t even get a part. In the nature of falling up, your child can feel proud about their performance in that they simply get the opportunity to perform, even though it’s not in the way they originally desired. Explain the situation using positive talk. How we choose to explain events has a significant impact on our happiness and success. People with a more positive explanatory style interpret tough times as being very temporary, (“Things will get better.”) while those with a more negative style see events as being more permanent (“Things will never change.”). As we’ve come to learn, what we believe is often how we behave or act. To fall up out of a hardship, model a positive explanatory style with your child when talking about their situation and ways to cope. Acknowledge what happened and honor whatever feelings might be there, but at the same time, reinforce that the moment truly is temporary and will not last forever. By modeling this type of talk and belief system, you encourage them to do the same. Avoid “immune neglect”. In his book, when faced with a troubling situation, Achor claims we have a tendency to become “immune neglect”, meaning we “consistently forget how good our psychological immune system is at helping us get over adversity”. We tend to overestimate our feelings. We tend to get stuck in our heads and fear what we “think” might happen. By default, we neglect to see the reality of what’s really happening. Simply being more aware of this default setting can help our kids succeed and fall up with more grace. The next time your child is faced with a trying situation, take a breath...and have them take a breath, too. Success is not about being perfect. It’s not even about falling down and getting back up. It’s about recognizing a setback and using it as momentum to spring forward in the opposite direction. Doing so will lead to an experience that is happy, positive, and rich in self-fulfillment. What are ways you or your child have fallen up when faced with adversity? How has that experience shaped you as a person? Share your wonderful ideas and thoughts on this topic in the comments section below or in our book club.

At the secondary level, each class begins with an emotional and physical feelings check-in.

Morning meetings and closing circles provide teachers a daily well-being routine to help regulate emotions is designed to help teachers and students: - cultivate kindness and authentic connections - practice emotional

portal can be a powerful tool to help feel confident in your ability to notice where your students are emotionally mudra cards, another resource on the portal, can be used to help students regulate and navigate their emotions this moment, giving students the space to practice what it feels like to be aware of and manage their emotions

means to be either hyper-aroused, or hypo-aroused, the consequences, and why we experience strong emotions

for students to manage their emotions. Emotional regulation involves managing emotions in a healthy and constructive manner. An emotions chart or an emotions card deck can be a helpful way to introduce emotional intelligence skills Free Download Includes: 1 Feelings Discovery worksheet + 5 Emotion exploration pages + Emotions Chart Our Emotions Card Deck can help foster emotional intelligence but is also fun to use with a partner!

education and empowerment to use their mind and body. 5 Mindfulness Tools to Support Caregivers #1 - Emotions and Physical Feeling Check-In The first tool was an emotional check-in using Challenge to Change’s emotion I invited each participant to read over the chart, notice if any of the emotion words resonated in the When they opened their eyes, I asked them to identify and mark on their chart which emotion(s) they were Attendees referred back to their Challenge to Change emotions chart, and I invited them to notice how

Do you have a bad habit you’d like to break? Yeah...me too. And we all know our kids have more than just a few! Knowing how to turn our bad habits into ones that are more desirable is yet another path on our road towards happiness. In fact, it just so happens to be the focus of principle 6 in Achor’s book, The Happiness Advantage. We’ve all heard of the “5-second rule”. But do you know about the 20-second rule? No, it doesn’t allow us more time to declare a fallen snack on the floor as still being edible! The 20-second rule is all about minimizing the barriers that make change so difficult. Simply relying on the pure force of will isn’t going to cut it. Instead, to build better habits and create long-lasting behavioral change, the “20-second rule” calls on us to make small energy adjustments to reroute to the path of least resistance. How do we redirect the path? How do we help our kids redirect their paths? Let us be your guide. Lower the amount of effort needed for habits we want to adopt. Create a “path of least resistance”. For my two kids at home, this means keeping a basket of books in our living room, strategically placed near the TV, to promote at-home reading. Before screens get turned on, reading time needs to be logged. Having the books already in the living room eliminates the extra “20 seconds” it takes for them to run to their room and grab something to read. Raise the effort needed for habits we want to avoid. Find ways to create obstacles that make the bad habit not worth the effort. With kids, this increase in effort might look like leaving phones or i-Pads on the kitchen counter after supper to avoid use right before bed as well as promote more restful sleep. If after-school snacking is an issue, keep the potato chips in a cupboard that is awkward and inconvenient to get to. The more barriers we add, the more time we have to decide if the habit is worth the effort. Limit choices. Simply put, having too many choices depletes our energy supply! Making choices in advance, when stress is low and our tanks are full, can pay off in spades when it comes to developing habits you can feel good about. We all know mornings are a barrage of decisions and choices. However, if we can make some of those executive morning decisions the night before, or at the very least, limit the options available for those decisions, you just might find a little more peace before 8 AM. This might look like choosing outfits the night before, offering only two types of cereal for breakfast, and setting bags, pre-packed for the day ahead, right beside the door. Set expectations...and stick to them. Setting expectations in advance allows us to put our power of choice on auto-pilot. This is a good thing! By not having to expend energy in making small decisions and choices, we have more energy to devote to the establishment of good habits and positive change. When setting expectations with your kids, be sure to have a conversation about exactly what you want from them and, most importantly, why you want that desired behavior. When both sides are clear on what needs to happen and why; there will be a greater probability of success. How can you use the “20-second rule” to create more happiness in your life? How about your kids? Share your comments below, on our Facebook page or join our discussion in the book club!

it their “journey”, but my “journey” felt a little bit more like a roller coaster in all the ways: emotionally

Ohhh….this is SUCH a good principle! Welcome to the 5th Principle - The Zorro Circle. Achor, the author of The Happiness Advantage , explains this principle as limiting your focus to small, manageable goals that can then expand your sphere of power. “One of the biggest drivers of success is the belief that our behavior matters; that we have control over our future. Yet when our stresses and workload seem to mount faster than our ability to keep up, feelings of control are often the first things to go, especially when we try to tackle too much at once. If, however, we first concentrate our efforts on small manageable goals, we regain the feeling of control so crucial to performance.” This past year has been SO hard with feeling like we do not have control and the ripple effects of that have hit our children. Children already struggle with not having a sense of control, because, well, they are kids! As much as we want to let them have control over the majority of their lives, we know that is not possible. The interesting thing about control is it does not necessarily have to mean we actually have control over something, it’s how much control we think we have. As we have been talking about throughout each of these blog posts, our mindset is what really matters here. Psychologists have two terms for the types of control. We either have an ‘internal locus of control’ or an ‘external locus of control’ . As you can imagine, those with an internal locus of control believe that their actions affect the outcomes in their lives while those with an external locus of control believe that factors outside of their control are what creates the outcomes in their daily lives. I am sure you can see which mindset creates more success and happiness in life. By cultivating a mindset of internal locus of control and believing that you have the power to create and control your success propels us to work harder and then when we work harder, the belief in our abilities grows. According to Achor, when we embody the mindset of internal locus of control, we have higher academic achievement, greater career achievement, and are happier at work (which we could extend to school as well.). This mindset can really affect every facet of our lives. We can strengthen our disposition to an internal locus of control with a couple of actionable ideas: Circle of Control - Using this *FREE* worksheet , your own paper, or through a discussion with your child, note what types of things are in their control and what types of things are not in their control. For example, they can control their own actions and reactions towards others, but they cannot control how someone reacts or acts towards them. One thing to keep in mind regarding control and our mindset is that it takes practice. To help strengthen your child’s ability to handle what they can control (and what they can’t), find simple ways throughout the day to allow your child to practice having control. For example, instead of packing their snacks for them each day, give them a few options to consider and let the power of choice rest with them. You might be surprised! Giving them more control of things that may seem innocuous to us will help to empower them to feel more in control of their choices. Incremental Change - goals are a wonderful thing and I am sure that our children are aware that they have goals in school (i.e. - reading levels) and outside of school (i.e - scoring a goal at soccer). Unfortunately, that goal can seem pretty daunting for them, because they do not necessarily see all the smaller steps that help them reach that goal. So, to help our kids thrive in this, we can map out those smaller goals with them. Breaking a goal into smaller, actionable items can help relieve the pressure of the larger goal and build success along the way. Each successful step completed helps create a stronger internal locus of control and fuels the fire to keep going. For a fun guide, you can use this printable . Just as the Masked Hero, Zorro, was once unable to take out ten men with one swipe of his sword, we too, cannot take on everything at once. Nor can our children. We can take the time to determine our circle of control and continuously modify it as our lives and our children’s lives grow and evolve. Then, as we approach goals and guide our children with theirs, we can build success through smaller incremental steps. Learning about control also involves a lot of letting go . Take some time to honor that part as well. Let go of what does not serve you or your children and be intentional about the goals you create together and what you allow to be in your circle of control. What are some things that you have found to be in your circle of control and what are some things that you have had to let go of? How did your discussions with your children go about the circle of control and incremental change? Share below, on our Facebook page or join our discussion in the book club .