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What to do when you get tired?

In a long distance race, everyone gets tired. The winner is the runner who figures out where to put the tired, figures out how to store it away until after the race is over. Sure, he’s tired. Everyone is. That’s not the point. The point is to run.

— Seth Godin

We all have our own races.  Today we tested students for some advanced belts and each of them had to learn how to put the “tired” away for later.  How we run the race and our determination to finish strong can be learned and practiced.  Our students are learning and practicing.



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Focus: this is our moment

All of us has had someone tell us that we need to focus.  It may have even been ourselves that we had a little self talk “Focus, Focus, Focus”.  So what is focus other than looking and listening with intensity.  This is what we teach our young children and for all of us it is really blocking out all of the distractions that keep us from focusing.

How do we direct our mind so that we can focus on our work, assignment or other things?  We must remember that the only thing that we have is this moment.  If we are washing the dishes then we need to be washing the dishes.  If we are talking to our child, then we need to be totally there with them.  This is the only moment that we have.  

All of the moments we had – are in the past and we cannot get them back.  There are no future moments that we are guaranteed – so NOW is all we have.  Still all of us have things that will be a distraction to us, so practicing being in this moment will take time.  

This week in our classes we will be talking about what distracts us and how we can keep ourselves focused.

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Anger management: #5 we need empathy

Depending on the age of the child, understanding the feelings of others may be difficult, if only due to developmental reasons.  A five year old has one emotional ability and a 12 year old another.  One thing though that does happen is that when they are angry no matter there age or training – they will be blinded to someone else’s feelings. 

Developing this empathy will help them to understand that all of us have feelings and just as we react to how others treat us, we too can react to how others feel.  Some children though who have had painful lives, may defend themselves by shutting down their sensitivity to others.  Or they may use intimidation and fear as a part of their defense.

Teaching empathy is a two fold.  First every child needs to understand feelings and they need adults around them whom they can trust.  With our younger children, increasing their “feelings vocabulary”, is very important to them identifying both their own and others feelings.

If we find older children are having difficulty with understanding the feelings of others, encourage them to write down stories in a journal.  If they have a problem get them to write or or talk about what happened – from the other persons point a view.

Finally as a parent or teacher, describing our own experiences and the emotions that we feel can be very helpful.  They can identify that you have faced difficult situations or may still be dealing with them, and they will learn to empathize.  

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Focus discussion: changing our results

The concept that we are focusing on this month is “Focus”.  Interesting is the fact that many of us focus on the things that we fear or the things that we do not want to happen.  I will give you an example that is very easy to relate to.  Have you ever driven down the road and had something on the side of the road grab your attention.  As you looked at it you were so intrigued that when you did look up you found that the car had moved toward that side of the road.   In fact many professional driving instructors will tell you that if you lose control of your car on the road – DO NOT look at the tree you want to avoid – you will surely hit it if you do.

Now there is an interesting place to begin.  If you focus on the things that you do want and the goals we want to reach it is just that much easier to reach them.  I know that is very hard to do.  One reason it is so hard is because of the amount of information we are bombarded with on a daily basis.  I recently read that we receive over 3000 marketing messages a day that we need to process. Did you know that is as many as our grandparents received in a whole year.  No wonder it is hard to do.  So how will we do this and just as important how will we teach our children to focus.  

Over the next month we will work on that here at Balanced Life Skills.  If you want to learn about this you will want to follow this blog.  In addition FOCUS is one of the concepts that we work on in our school every class.  Reinforce what you see us do in class at home and you will see improvement in your child’s focus.

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Focus: Definition

Each month we define and discuss a word of character development with all of our students.  This month the word is Focus.  It will be defined this way.

Young students: Focus means “I look and listen to one thing at a time.”

Older students: Focus means:  Using laser-like concentration even when there are distractions.

If you would like to see how we will deal with this subject with our students please follow our discussions here during the month of June.

 



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Anger management: #4 One word answers

As I speak to children about different scenarios that they could see themselves in I continually hear the same one word answers, good, bad, mad.  These are the labels that many children know and understand.  So when asked about different situations they will use these as their answers many times.  Yet we know that anger does not exist in a vacuum.  There is always another emotion at work when there is an outburst.  We recognize that in ourselves too.

With children though they may not have the words to identify the other emotions and so they are only, mad!  When the child feels only the anger, they act on the anger and the impulses of the anger.  So what can we do as parents?  If we can put a label on the feelings for them by saying, “You must be feeling…..”  this would be a good start.  Some would say that we could say, ” You must be feeling angry.”, but we must be careful not to reinforce the feelings of being mad – and careful to watch to see if recognition of feelings of anger is used to redirect the energy to solving the problem.  Our children may protest that they are not frustrated, jealous, or whatever the feeling might be that we name, but what we are trying to do is to build their vocabulary so they can start using the correct feelings words and finding ways of dealing with them.

As we make these attempts we will make mistakes and mis-characterize the emotion.  Do not give up and just keep working at building everyone’s awareness of feelings.

This is an activity that has worked for me also.  If I am feeling angry I try to stop and think, what am I really feeling?  Am I scared, intimidated, frustrated, hungry or a whole list of other emotions and feelings.  If those can be identified we many times can draw the attention to an emotion of feeling that we can control.  That is very powerful.