How many times have you been wrecked by emotions?
Maybe you weren't able to respond the way you wanted.
Maybe the tone of your home was not pleasant because your emotions, the emotions of your children, or all of the above, were taking control.
It's not always easy, but you can manage your emotions and cultivate a thriving home atmosphere. In this episode, you'll learn the three simple steps to manage your emotions instead of letting them control you.
Click here to download the free Thermostat Approach Toolkit.
Until next time,
Crystal
© Triumphant Learning, LLC
How many times have you been wrecked by emotions?
Maybe you weren't able to respond the way you wanted.
Maybe the tone of your home was not pleasant because your emotions, the emotions of your children, or all of the above, were taking control.
It's not always easy, but you can manage your emotions and cultivate a thriving home atmosphere. In this episode, you'll learn the three simple steps to manage your emotions instead of letting them control you.
Click here to download the free Thermostat Approach Toolkit.
Until next time,
Crystal
© Triumphant Learning, LLC
How many times have you been wrecked by emotions? Maybe you weren't able to respond the way you wanted or the tone of your home was not ideal because your emotions or the emotions of your children, or all of the above, were taking control. Welcome back to The All In A Homeschool Day. And today, we're going to talk about how to manage your emotions and the three simple steps that you can use. I want to start by telling you the backstory, I learned about being a thermostat instead of a thermometer when my daughters were about four and seven. A thermometer registers what is happening in the environment, and a thermostat seeks to influence the environment and work towards a desired outcome. Several years ago, I had a friend who asked me how I do that, how am I the thermostat? How do I set the tone of our home? And I was a little taken aback, I thought, I don't know. But the more that I thought about it, I realized I had been learning all of these years little things that I could do to change my mindset, to change my thoughts, to change the way that I reacted so that my emotions no longer controlled me, most of the time. And then I heard a podcast last year describing emotional intelligence, and I realized that that was exactly what I've been trying to learn how to do. I was so excited that I finally had words to describe what I've been doing for the past 10 years. So now I can finally answer my friend and tell her this is what you do to set the tone of your home. These are the three steps that you can use to manage your emotions so that you can be a thermostat instead of a thermometer. These three steps are simple, but they do take effort to implement. It will require a lot of practice and a lot of patience. We'll walk through each of these steps today. And to help you implement them. I've created a special toolkit. You can download this free Thermostat Approach Toolkit that includes additional resources, some of which we'll talk about in today's episode, and journaling prompts, as well as some completed sample pages. You can find that at triumphantlearning.com,/thermostatapproachtoolkit. So let's dive into that first step. The first step is to register what is going on, acknowledge your feelings, and evaluate your environment. You probably first need to ground yourself. When you feel strong emotions, the part of your brain called the amygdala controls your thoughts and your actions. A grounding technique can help you reengage your prefrontal cortex, which is your logical thinking brain, so that it can resume control and you can choose your response. I didn't realize that this is what I was doing. But a simple grounding technique is to pause and take several slow, deep breaths. And then there are multiple things you could do. The one that I did when I first learned about this concept was to say an anchoring phrase and my phrase was "Be the thermostat." I had to take a deep breath, calm down and remind myself of what I wanted to accomplish. My children laugh because whenever I tell the story, they remember me doing this. I would sometimes walk around the house just mumbling under my breath, "Be the thermostat. Be the thermostat. Be the thermostat." because it was so hard. If you're in the stages that your children are young, you know exactly what I'm talking about. And if your children are a little older, or grown up, you can probably you remember back to the days when it was all you could do to get through the day. There were times when I did not want to be the thermostat. I I just wanted to react. I wanted to get away. I didn't want to deal with it. But I knew that I needed to set the tone of my home, so I reminded myself to be the thermostat. It allowed me to reengage my prefrontal cortex. It allowed me to calm down and think about what was going on. Some other things you could do include rubbing the seam of your jeans or a bracelet, taking a sip of water, or taking a walk. I also love doing some breathing exercises and some mental grounding techniques that help me to reengage my thinking brain. You can find all of these in the Thermostat Approach Toolkit that you can download. There's also some bonus content for podcast supporters that walk you through a couple of these processes. If you're listening to this live, they will be released over the next couple of days. And if you're listening to this a little bit later, they're just going to be the next three episodes in your feed. They are available to to podcast supporters. And if you want to be a supporter to help me continue making this podcast and getting this message out to other homeschool families, you can subscribe as a supporter at triumphantlearning.com/podcastsupporter. You can click the link in the show notes. And then you'll be able to get access to an RSS feed that will include the bonus content for podcast supporters. And there are three grounding techniques that are releasing this week, one being the square breathing, I'll guide you through that and give you an opportunity to just pause and relax. The 54321 grounding technique which my daughter enjoys using a lot. And then one that is really helpful to my daughters and I, the Be still know meditation. So there'll be other bonus content coming out later, but that's what you can get related to this episode right now. After you've grounded yourself, and you are able to think again, And just like all emotions are valid. In that same vein, we the next step is naming your emotions. Our feelings are not good or bad, all emotions are valid. Let me say that again. need to practice naming all of our emotions, not just the ones All emotions are valid. They provide information and that we typically associate as negative emotions. We had been talking a lot about emotions a couple of years ago, in our family. And a lot of times that comes up when someone is upset awareness of what is happening. There are times we are going to or frustrated. So one night my daughter decided we needed to talk about all of our emotions. And my husband and I had gone to pick up some dinner for us. Unfortunately, we didn't time it very well, and we ended up having to wait a lot longer than we were anticipating. So when we texted my daughter that we were be angry, we are going to be sad or scared or estatic. But our on the way home, and that we had the food, she texted back to us a picture of the feelings chart with the estatic feeling circled multiple times and said, "We need to practice all of our emotions. I'm so excited that you're coming home with food." emotions do not need to control us. Your emotions have more So practice recognizing your emotions when you're not in that state that you need to get control. You also can pay attention to where you feel the emotion in your body. This can give you clues about what you're feeling. There is a feelings power when you do not acknowledge them. So by naming chart in the toolkit and questions to help you process your emotions. Now step two is to interpret. You want to assess and reframe the situation. Consider what's happening and how your response your emotions, you remove some of their control over you. I is affecting you and others. Sometimes we need to reframe the situation and see it from another person's point of view. I remember one time that we were on a long trip. We had been gone for a couple of weeks already. As we came to a rest stop to love the phrase, you can name it to tame it. take a break and to fill up with gas, I asked my husband if he could fill up my water. And he snapped at me and I thought what is going on? Why did he do that? And I started to get really frustrated and upset. I took a deep breath. I calmed my amygdala and reengaged my prefrontal cortex. I said what's going on in the situation? And I realized we were pulling in to the big truck lanes, the big rigs, and there was a lot of traffic. There was a lot going on. He was really stressed. I chose the wrong time to ask for him to fill my water. Of course he was going to fill up my water. He always asked us when we stop if we need more water. I mean, that was not like him. So by reframing the situation, I was able to let go of the hurt that I felt and move on so I could be a thermostat and be back to encouraging and providing the support he needed in that situation. The toolkit has some additional questions that can help you assess and reframe the situation. The last step is to choose your response and to implement your action plan. It can be challenging to choose your response to a situation and carry it out, but your response is often the only thing that you can control. When an event occurs, it triggers thoughts that trigger feelings that prompt you to take action. Your feelings are valid. We talked about this already that all emotions are valid, they provide information about what is happening. And it's okay to allow yourself to experience the emotion. But the chemical that causes a feeling only lasts about six seconds. The feeling is real, but staying in that emotion longer than six seconds is a choice at some level. Your feelings are the result of what you think about and on what you focus your thoughts. So you have a choice. You can choose to stay in your current mood and emotional state, or you can choose to change it. It will be challenging, but you do have a choice. You can choose to be a thermostat instead of a thermometer. To make a change and be a thermostat, you need to change one of those three things, your thoughts, feelings, or actions. Changing just one will change the other two, it's often easier to change our actions. But you can change any one of those. So which one will you change? Again, the toolkit has questions to help you think through this and create your plan and to think about what change you want to make so that you can move forward so that you can be a thermostat. So let's recap the three steps to managing your emotions. Your first step is to register what's happening by doing a grounding technique and naming your emotions. The second step is to assess and reframe the situation. And the third step is to choose your response and implement your plan. Taking the first step is often the most difficult, but each step gets a little easier. When my friend asked me how I set the tone of our home, and I thought I don't know, that was after 10 years of me trying to live this out, of me trying to be the thermostat and thinking through different situations and how I would respond and how I wanted the situation to go. So I didn't have to think about it as much anymore because it becomes second nature as you do this. Again, you can get your own copy of the toolkit at triumphantlearning.com/thermostatapproachtoolkit. I hope that you'll download that so that you can start being the thermostat of your home