Emotions signal needs, not character defects.

When a kid is raging or crying or acting out, it’s really easy to see that kid as bad. The behavior is disruptive/inconvenient/bad, so the kid must be bad. But then if I slow down and start observing what a kid is feeling, that changes everything. This kid isn’t bad, this kid is struggling and is not EQuipped to ask for help. This kid needs something, and it’s my job as the adult to help this kid figure out what she’s feeling and what need that feeling signals. And then ask for it appropriately.

This is way easier said than done.

What do you do when you’re avoiding your feelings?

“Some harbor the misconception that a healthy relationship is characterized by the absence of conflict–not true…

-The EQ Intervention

Are you unconsciously pushing people away when you really mean to help them?

It takes a really strong and self-aware adult to instead get curious in the heat of the moment, to calm their own body down enough to get quiet, and crouch down at the kid’s level, and genuinely ask a kid what they’re feeling, and then be strong enough to handle the honest answer. 

I want to become that kind of adult. I want that kind of strength.

I posted my teaching manifesto behind my desk at the beginning of each school year, and my favorite reminder to my teacher self was:

“Get curious, not furious.”

I can’t remember where I got this line from, but I’m a sucker for anything that rhymes.

Curiosity is my best friend right now because it is so good at helping me step out of old thought patterns and into new perspectives.

Because I get stuck sometimes.

In short, stress is like fuel. You can put it in your car and drive across the country, or you can pour it on top of your car and light it on fire. Your ability to harness the power of stress determines whether you use it productively or destructively.

One thing that can help is taking some time beforehand to anticipate, redirect, and assert yourself in the face of stressful situations before you face them. For example, the start of the school year when everyone is still fresh and not driving each other crazy yet, is a great time to anticipate more stressful months like October when school-year tensions start to ramp up.

“Time is now. If you haven’t already established why you are choosing to invest your life force in any given venture, you owe it to yourself to do so now.”

As we enter into September with this new school year in full swing, I wanted to use our time together today to celebrate what happens with kids when adults are taking good care of their own EQ. What does it actually look like in practice?

I had an awesome teacher reach out to me recently and share some of her students’ responses to this prompt: “Tell me five things that you’ve learned in our class that aren’t in your spiral.”

Here’s what they said:

Where is an area you want to grow your self awareness this year?

O (Openness to New Experience)

C (Conscientiousness)

E (Extroversion)

A (Agreeableness)

N (Neuroticism)

When you know yourself and your personality well, you can set yourself up for success by sharing that awareness with your students and colleagues.

I want to offer you something today that was offered to me late in my teaching career: a permission slip to say “no” to something and set a healthy boundary at work. Your homework for me this week is to do just that: to say “no” to something, to let someone else down, to disappoint someone.

Today we’ve arrived at the final and best (and hardest) way to respond to emotion:

Instruct Emotion!!!

We made it, the pinnacle of Emotional Intelligence mountain! Once you read this blog post, you’ll never have any difficulty responding effectively to your own or someone else’s emotions ever again.

Just kidding! :) Wouldn’t that be great though?

We might not ever fully arrive, but we can be a lot better EQuipped to deal when big emotions arise in us, our children, and our students.

The last three weeks, we’ve explored three ineffective ways to respond to kids’ emotions: ignore, inhibit, and invalidate.

Today we’re getting into the effective ways to respond to kids’ emotions, starting with the simpler of the two: Invite Emotion.

The easiest way to start inviting emotion in your classroom or home is to stick up an emotions chart for yourself and your kiddos. If you haven’t already printed and posted ours, here ya go!

Today I want to discuss the third way to respond to kids’ emotions: invalidating emotions.

Like ignoring and inhibiting emotion, invalidating emotions falls in the destructive column of ways to respond. To me, it’s the most dangerous of the three not-great ways to respond to emotions.

This week, I want to talk about the second option: inhibiting emotion. Like ignoring emotion, it’s not a healthy or helpful option, but it is an option. It’s also a way that we as adults often hurt kids unintentionally.

Ignoring emotion is always an option. Not a healthy one, but it is an option!

In my experience teaching, this is what ignoring a student’s emotion went like:

I’d be excited about the activity or discussion I spent hours prepping the night before. The kids would be filing through the door getting settled, as I was setting everything up. As I walk by Sophie’s desk, I notice she’s off. She’s rocking back and forth in her chair. I know the name for this is “psychomotor agitation” now, but I didn’t need to know that word to know that when Sophie did this, something bad was about to happen. She was going to explode.

-What did you learn about your body from your parents or caregivers growing up?

-What do you think your own children or students are learning about physical wellness from you?

-What does the way we set up our schools and classrooms teach students about physical wellness?

-What if every administrator, teacher, and student came to school well nourished, rested, and getting adequate movement? How would learning be affected?

-What is your core purpose in life?

-What is your teaching WHY and how does it integrate with (not replace) your core life purpose?

-Who do you admire spiritually? What is their core purpose? What if you asked them?

-How do you get your spiritual needs met?

What are your conscious or unconscious beliefs about money?

How do you feel when I ask?

Do you think of money in binary terms as good or evil or do you think of it as just a tool?

How were finances handled and talked about (or not) in your family of origin?

Who do you feel comfortable talking to about money? Who is your support person to help hold you financially accountable?

Today’s question makes me giggle. Have you ever gotten giggly in the “wrong” place such as a yoga class or funeral?

I have. :)

Nervous laughter is a good tell for me that I’m too uncomfortable to let myself feel something. At the yoga class, the laughter exposes my discomfort with my body. At the funeral, my discomfort with grief.

So today when writing about my own emotional wellness, I know my gigglyness points to my discomfort writing publicly about my own emotional wellness.

To give you a taste of what I’m talking about, here are the first four questions on the emotional wellness section of the assessment: