This is our last week discussing Self-Compassion and Resilience! We hope you and your family were able to use the anxiety relief and ways to build resilience tools as well as the self-compassion journal, like we did in our classrooms and at home.
Along with Self-Compassion and Resilience, we are also talking about feelings, emotions and thoughts! Every day in the classrooms, we ask the children how they are feeling? Along with feelings, we would walk the children through any problems, thoughts or reactions they were having by asking them how big their problem is with visuals. We included these visuals with the staff as well and hung them on our Staff Boards. We encouraged everyone to use the visuals to help when they had a hard time expressing how they were feeling, what they were thinking and eliminate BIG reactions.
We usually don’t have BIG reactions because of the challenge itself..we have BIG reactions because the way we THINK about the challenge. Many times, our thoughts are exaggerated or missing information. We encourage you at home to write about a challenge you’re facing. Write some thoughts you think when you’re in the middle of that situation. Then question each thought by asking yourself: is this thought really true?
Changing your reactions doesn’t mean you should stop feeling your feelings. Feelings are important to have. The goal is to try to FEEL your feelings BEFORE reacting. This takes practice.
Before you react to a challenge, you need space to choose the right-sized reaction. What you do to create space is in your power. Here are some ideas.
- Drink some water
- Remember: I can do hard things
- Push against a wall
- Write down my feelings
- Try my favorite yoga pose
- Be kind to myself
- Squeeze and relax muscles
- Take a deep breath
- Take a walk in nature
- Ask for help
From our Family to yours, we wish you all a very Happy, Healthy and Safe New Year! Come back next week as we focus on the topics of Goals and Movement!
