How are you teaching emotional control and the power of thought?
It can be tricky to teach children emotional control. Trickier still to teach them how their thoughts can create fear, sadness, or anger. How do you help them understand that they don’t have to believe all their thoughts?
Our brains are making thoughts all the time, right? It’s like we have this roomate inside our head who keeps talking all the time. Much of this inner talk is unnecessary or downright unhelpful. Do you ever find yourself wishing your inner talk would just shut-up?
Metacognition is the ability to think about what we are thinking about. We are not our thoughts. We are the observer of our thoughts. You don’t have to believe all your thoughts, you can catch the thoughts that aren’t true or are hurtful, and replace them with thoughts that are more true; making ourselves smarter, and getting to feel the way we want more often.
Sometimes I will ask kids if they would be okay with getting smarter and feeling happy more often. Even the tough cases will usually agree this would be worth working for. I’d like to share some tools I use with you.
You can go to http://intensivecareforyou.com/resources-for-free/
and find pdf lists of stress triggers, stress signs, and stress management tools. Kids, and adults too, can highlight those that apply to them. Transfer these to a 1-5 scale. You will also find a list of “Rational vs. Irrational Thoughts” you can use for practice, teaching the skill of noticing thoughts that are true, and thoughts that are not true, and can cause unwanted distress.
You can also go to
https://app.convertkit.com/landing_pages/32645
and sign up to get a longer video showing one way I teach this to kids, and get more explanation of how to put this process into action and teach the skills.