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:

“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.