Blame, the hot potato game of emotional avoidance. One of my all time favorite moves for escaping myself and my own feelings. Let’s talk about it!!!

Sometimes I get stressed. Can you relate?

I normally think about you during my weekly writing ritual time–work time that I protect and savor each week. However, this week after learning of the school shooting in Nashville, I couldn’t stop thinking about you.

What’s happening within you this week?

Within your students?

Within your classrooms, schools, homes?

When a kid is acting out destructively, what if instead of even going down the unproductive “good or bad” road, we went to:

What is going on with this kid? What does he need? What is she feeling? What’s happening here?

“What I’m talking about is a district full of Life Givers...The Life Giver School District is not life giving because there are no acts of aggression or because there are no acts of noncompliance, or because there is no illogical standardized testing. It is life giving because the adults in the district have committed to living emotionally intelligent lives, thereby making it a safe place of learning with the richest of soils.”

-The EQ Intervention

Are you placing any unfair “should” judgements on your emotions? On your students’ emotions?

What emotion do you most often feel compelled to “fix” in yourself in others? How was this emotion treated by the adults who raised you?

What if everything you feel is okay? What if who you are right now is okay? No fixing necessary. What if instead of fixing ourselves, we worked with ourselves?

The ways to respond to emotion that leave a scar: ignore, inhibit, invalidate.

The ways to respond to emotion that leave a mark: invite and instruct.

“The best intervention for every student in every classroom is a healthy adult living a balanced life.”

“Stress is the energy you produce as you wonder whether you can deal effectively with a threatening situation. Symptoms include increase heart rate, muscle tension, preoccupation,

We usually use the energy to attack the source of our stress (fight) or run from it (flight), and either option can be helpful or not helpful.”

The metaphor we often use in trainings is thinking of stress as fuel.

Fuel that you can put in your car and drive across the country.

Fuel you can pour on top of your car and set on fire.

The breath is unique because you can do it both unconsciously and consciously.

You breathe whether you think about it or not.

You can also decide to think about it, pay attention to it, and affect it.

One way I’m exploring my unconscious is trying on different breathing mantras from mindfulness teachers.

How my life looks to other people affects me very little.

How my life feels to me affects me A LOT.

Are you getting these needs met? Do you have a Dream Team of your own, a legitimate support network to fall back on? I’m talking about people who you can show your most shadowy shadow self to. People who are strong enough to handle your vulnerability.

“We all have a shadow. No one has it all together, and everyone has things they don’t like about themselves.” -From The EQ Intervention

Are you familiar with your shadow?

Your shadow are those parts of you that you hide because you think if others see them, you will be rejected. And they’re the parts of you that you aren’t even aware of. Perhaps parts that got wounded so young, that you had to push them outside your own conscious in order to carry on.

Today I want to talk about you and your unique life force.

The one ingredient I most underestimated while teaching was my own presence.

Have you ever seen a person get overcome with anger and start acting out reactively and destructively?

Have you ever seen a person get overcome with anger, pause, reflect and honor their anger, and then decide how to act in a way that honors both themselves and others?

Just like math has addition and multiplication, SEL has a lot of parts.

Self-awareness and self-regulation are about knowing yourself and managing your emotions.

Interpersonal skills and empathy are about getting along with others.

Effective decision-making is using all these skills to help you be your own hero.

“I want you to know that you are doing incredibly noble work on your campus, and you don’t have to leave it just because of the way people make you feel. We can find ways to help you direct the emotions rather than repress them or carry them around inside you.”

I’m feeling a lot of feelings, and it makes me uncomfortable. Because I want to be sturdy, together, dependable.

When I can’t be those things and instead need to cry and be quiet and be still, I don’t know how to interact with other people.

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.

How do you react when you get sick?

How do you react when those closest to you get sick?

I’m really good at ignoring my body and pushing through in order to meet expectations.