What SEL growth can I celebrate?

Dear EQuipped Leaders,

Today I want to stop and take some time to celebrate what SEL skills I’ve grown. It’s easy for me to see what isn’t going well and only focus on my failings. So I want to do a little reframe for myself.

We teach these 5 components of SEL for both adults and kids:

Self-Awareness: What am I thinking and feeling?

Self-Regulation: How do I regulate what I’m thinking and feeling?

Empathy: What are you thinking and feeling?

Interpersonal Skills: How can we connect?

Effective Decision-Making: Who/What/Where/When/Why should I act based on the answers to the first four questions?

I’ve been focusing on growing my own SEL skills for two years now, and I’ve been pretty focused on the first two: self-awareness and self-regulation. Figuring out what I am feeling, letting myself feel it, and then regulating it so I don’t act outside my own values has felt like a lot all on its own. But I’m starting to trust myself more and recently I’ve noticed a difference in my effective decision making.

I feel a shift happening within me of letting go of what I cannot control and taking back power over what I can control.

I can’t control other people’s SEL. That might sound really obvious, but it is a genuinely new realization to me. I have felt so responsible for everyone and everything around me my whole life. I can only now realize how much time and energy I’ve wasted on trying to grow other people instead of growing myself.

I’ve always known this intellectually. “You can’t change anyone but yourself” is so cliche that my google doc just auto-filled it as I started typing. But there has been a part of me that still holds out hope/clings to denial about my ability to change others:

Of course most people can’t change other people, but maybe I can. I mean, I’m a writer. I’m like super good with words and stuff. So If I explain it just right or word things just so, I’ll be able to get them to see the light, to change for me.

I’ve made myself and those around me miserable with this kind of thinking. And instead of making decisions that honor myself and those around me. I’ve made decisions to try to force people to be who I thought they should be, which of course doesn’t work.

I think I felt such a need to control the people around me because I didn’t trust myself. I wasn’t self-aware enough to know how I would react, so I tried to over control my external environment out of fear of what I’d do. Now, instead, I can trust myself to move through these SEL steps:

Self-awareness: I just got a call of big news, and I can identify a few different emotions that are rising up in me. I can accept them and get curious about them instead of judging or suppressing them.

Self-regulation: I can take the space I need to let myself feel whatever I’m feeling before acting. I won’t let anyone rush me into making a reactive decision or get into an unproductive conversation/fight before I’ve regained my balance and gotten some calm around my feelings. Maybe I just need 2 minutes to walk outside and take some deep breaths. Maybe I need a week before I’m ready to respond.

Empathy: Once I’ve spent some time checking in with myself, then I can look outward and see what the other person needs and what’s going on with them.

Interpersonal Skills: I can ask them for what I need and share what I’m feeling and invite them to do the same so we can connect.

Effective Decision Making: Now that I understand what’s going on with me and those around me, then I can decide where I want to go from here. Who do I want to be? How do I move forward and make a decision that honors me and those around me?

I’m so much more proud of the decisions I’m making now, of the woman I am, of the life I’m building. It feels so good to not just react and survive all of the time. Living unconsciously was terrifying for me because I truly didn’t understand what was happening within me. It made me afraid of myself and everyone else. It made it impossible to be the person I wanted to be.

I’ve worked hard and come a long way. I’m really proud of myself and grateful for the people in my life who have been my EQ Intervention.

How about you? What’s going well in your EQ journey? What can you celebrate and be proud of yourself for today?

Can you think of someone (try to think of a particular student) who exhibits a noticeable amount of one of the SEL tenets? Can you think of someone who would benefit from more instruction/practice in one of the SEL skills?

Better EQuipped Together, Elizabeth elizabeth@appliedeqgroup.com