Support For Parents
In this somewhat surreal life situation, many of you are finding yourself in challenging situations. As if in day to day life normally you aren’t already juggling enough… now you might be finding yourself working from home, home schooling your kids and having your kids with you 24/7.
And not to mention that there is so much to keep up with on the Coronavirus (COVID-19). What we should do and shouldn’t do and what the future will bring for our jobs, the economy, our lifestyles and the world.
So to say you have your hands full is probably an understatement. Your hands, your minds, your homes… everything is full. And you are probably feeling even more emotions that you usually do.
So here are some tools to help you make sense of your emotions so that all this can be much easier to manage.
The Emotion Course
A free course all about emotions that is…
... online (delivered by email)
... start-able anytime
... bite size (each lesson takes < 5min)
... spread over 10 weeks (3 lessons/week)
... practical and applicable to life immediately
Emotion Q&A
a living forum about all things emotions
Do you have burning questions about the emotions your are feeling or that are bubbling up at home (with your spouse, kids, neighbours, etc.)?
We’ll aim to answer all your questions within 24 hours and to offer you practical and simple advice to help you through these times.
Emotion Activities for Kids
If you want to help your kids deal with emotions in a healthy way, we have some activities and resources for you. Doing these activities on their own or with you will help them to:
understand their emotions better
to build their emotion vocabulary
be able to express themselves better
enable you to have better conversations with each other
improve their emotional intelligence
Tangible tools for at home
If you want a tangible tool to help you and your family navigate emotions, here are some that might help.
Feeling Magnets are a magnetic game that make feelings tangible, easier to understand and communicate with others.
How do Feeling Magnets work?
It’s simple. You look at the magnets and pick out how you are feeling right now (in this moment). Then you might want to pick how you want to feel, or how you think you might feel or how someone else might feel…
Just finding the words to describe our feelings decreases the power of your unpleasant emotions and anchors the pleasant ones. The thing is, the unknown is more uncomfortable than the known. Once you know what you are feeling, then you can use this information and take action.
Sometimes, just finding the words is all you need. Sometimes, you’ll want to go deeper. But the first step is to know what you are feeling.
Who uses Feeling Magnets?
Everyone. Really, there are young children as of the age of two up to my grandmother. They are used by families on their kitchen fridge, on the whiteboard in classrooms, in councillors offices, next to the couch in a coaches practice, on the desk of managers, in leadership workshops and emotional intelligence trainings… Shall I keep going?
What these people all have in common is they realise feelings are really important. They want to understand their own feelings better. They want to understand other people better. They want better relationships, better quality of life and a smooth ride through life.
Is that you?
The power of putting feelings into words
You know the moment where you just feel a bit off and you can’t put it into words? Or when someone you love obviously has something going on and you wish you could see inside them? Yup, there are probably lots of feelings going on there. The thing is, you never really learned how to express what you are feeling. In most cultures and homes, that just wasn’t done. Or perhaps you shared the basic ones like happy, sad, mad…
Naming your feelings tames them
It’s hard to talk about emotions. They’re almost a bit taboo. And at the same time studies have shown that naming your feelings tames them. The unknown is more uncomfortable than knowing what you’re dealing with. Once you know what you’re dealing with, you can act and respond to it. That’s at the core of Emotional Intelligence. Knowing what you feel, being able to lead yourself consciously, recognising feelings in others and using this information to navigate your relationships.
What about Pandora’s box?
Being willing to pay attention to your emotions doesn’t mean opening pandora’s box. It means getting to know yourself, what’s important to you, what your limits are, what you value and then being able to use this precious information to navigate your life.
Tools like Feeling Magnets help to make the abstract feelings inside you more tangible and easy to express. And the more you use them, the more you won’t even need them. Because each time you use them, you develop your emotion vocabulary and become more emotionally literate. Emotions don’t need to be feared and ignored, they can become good friends that support you through life and complex times like these.
Not to mention that Emotional Intelligence is one of the top 10 skills in demand today and also for the future (Future of Jobs Survey 2018, World Economic Forum). And it’s a learnable skill.