“I am able to let go of frustrating or challenging situations over which I know I have no control, and such situations do not steal from the enjoyment of my life apart from school.”

True or False?

Dear EQuipped Leaders,

I’m extra excited to write to you this week because we’ve been preparing a summer gift for you, and I finally get to share it with you today!

We want to give you a free, one hour course on How to Nurture Wholistic Well-being. :)

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.” -Carl Jung

When we train education leaders on personality, we use the awesome visual of the johari window to emphasize the why of studying one’s personality:

“To be healthy emotionally, we must move beyond simply expressing our emotions, keeping in mind how we choose to express them.”

Contingent communication = Let’s get stuff done!

Non-contingent communication = Let’s acknowledge our shared humanity and connect. :)

I’m realizing that my feelings aren’t the problem. It’s my judgmental thoughts about my feelings that cause issues.

I want to spend our time together this week loving on teachers and reflecting on the impact teachers have in all of our lives.

The Neuroticism scale measures the tendency to be prone to psychological stress and to experience unpleasant emotions easily. The closer to 5 you score on this scale, the more likely you are to be described as a worrier who is prone to emotional vacillation. The closer to 1 you score on this scale, the more likely you are to be described as able to manage stressful situations without emotional arousal and as being emotionally resilient.

How did you get here?

What drew you to your current career?

What is the story of your WHY?

When you go back to the root and tap into your deepest intentions, what do you find?

We have two Emotion Charts that we use in our EQuipped Classroom, and I’m sharing both in today’s post.

I hope they help you better EQuip your classrooms, offices, homes, and empower you to feel all your feelings!

Life Givers have something to offer and leave you feeling empowered and energized. These people are emotionally intelligent and have a Dream Team of their own. They know how to get their emotional needs met, so they have something to offer others.

Life Suckers have something to take and leave you feeling drained and unmotivated. These people are often lacking in emotional intelligence and likely don’t have a Dream Team of their own. Their emotional needs are NOT being met, so they walk around (unconsciously) sucking the life out of everyone around them.

I’m only beginning to develop enough self-awareness and self-regulation to peek over all my own stuff enough to start seeing and empathizing with other people. Previously, I was too unaware of myself. I was living in the unconscious, so I had no idea how I was projecting my own unmet needs onto other people. I couldn’t see myself.

To be fair, I still can’t see myself. Not fully. No one can. So how do I grow self-awareness?

Self-disclosure/exposure: being honest with myself about what I’m really thinking and feeling even if I think those thoughts or feelings are “bad” and will cause me to be rejected if exposed.

Asking for feedback from others: being open to feedback, so I learn how other people experience me.

My agreeableness helped me relate to students quickly and build the rapport I needed to create a trusting learning environment.

My agreeableness also made me too quick to say yes to every committee, event, task that was asked of me in faculty meetings.

Picture a school where teachers and students are EQuipped to feel their feelings and to self-regulate.

Now imagine the students at this school are so self-aware and self-regulated that they're actually able to empathize with each other: with their seat mate in math class, with their teammate on the soccer field, with their co-star in the school play.

What if empathy was the norm at school?

“We often hear of emotion as being categorized as either good (e.g., happiness, joy, excitement) or bad (e.g., anger, frustration, confusion). I think we arrived at those descriptors because of the behaviors we often see when people do bad, harmful things, those behaviors are often fueled by anger, frustration, and confusion. The reality, though, is that emotions are neither good nor bad.”

I want to invite you to try something with me today. :)

Round 1: Please cross your arms in whatever way feels most natural to you.

Which arm is on top? How are your hands positioned? How do you feel with your arms crossed this way?

Once you’ve tried that and gotten a sense of how it feels, I want you to try something different.

Where do you land in these 5 core areas of wellness right now?

Occupational Wellness

Emotional Wellness

Financial Wellness

Spiritual Wellness

Physical Wellness

Just looking at these words and thinking about your life, what areas are you like: “Yeah, I’m crushing it!” And what areas are more like: “Oof, I don’t even want to think about that right now.”?

Is there a person at work who gets under your skin, pushes your buttons, rattles your chain?

Have you complained about this person to your spouse? Have you been tempted, and sometimes succumbed, to talking trash about this person in the faculty lounge?

Being human is hard. Working with other humans is especially hard. Don’t worry. You’re not alone, and we have resources to help. :)

I used to believe having needs meant I was “needy.” I desperately wanted to be fully independent and to be a helper (not a helpee), so I tried to fool myself into thinking I didn’t have legitimate needs.

I came by this belief honestly. I think back to what I was praised for growing up, and I was often rewarded at school for suppressing my needs to over-achieve. My perfectionism was lauded, so I assumed it was only a good thing. I didn’t know its cost and the way my hypervigilance would eventually wear on my body and health.

I love talking about extroversion with teachers because differences in this personality trait can cause conflict in relationships, which always makes for interesting conversation.

For example, let’s say you have one colleague on your team who won’t participate in your team’s group lunches. Is she a stick-in-the-mud, or does she just need a quiet lunch to refuel before another class of students comes bustling into her classroom? Maybe she likes her team but just needs the solitude to replenish her energy for students. If she doesn’t know how to communicate this need to her team, they might make assumptions and see her choice as a rejection.