Emotional Coaching - Staff Only Day

A Clinical Psychologist lead a refresher session with us on Emotion Coaching at one of our Staff Only Days. Whilst the material was based on Emotion Coaching for parents - it's for all adults showing them the way. 

The work is based on the work of Dr John Gottman- you may have across his extensive work on emotions and we won't get into adult relatonships and the '6 lasting marriage predictions'- we will stick with the ' safer' area of parent/ children!

' Emotion Coaching works alongside positive forms of discipline that rely on providing children with clearly understood consequences for misbehaviour"

 

(Gottman, 1997) 

A taste of the four parenting styles identified by Gottman and his colleagues. Most of us use a mix but one is usually more dominant. The styles:

1. Permissive
2. Dismissive
3. Disapproving
4. Emotion Coaching

For more detail about each style:

https://www.gottman.com/blog/an-introduction-to-emotion-coaching/

To give you a link for further exploration if you are interested in more of the specifics we looked at : https://tuningintokids.org.au/. 

TO Day 2: Stephanie Sinclaire Lightsmith, Artist

Stephanie Sinclaire Lightsmith

came in and talked to us about using art to express emotions. We did some exercises together that she has done with children and adults around the world, and she did with our seniors last year.

Painting emotion:
First close your eyes and feel into your body.
Write down the first emotion that comes to you. No judgment, be authentic (sometimes people need help clarifying their emotion).
Then paint what that feels like.

We were encouraged to use our hands to paint with, to deepen the experience and embody it.

Sometimes the emotion changed as we were painting, and we painted again to express the new emotion.

The science behind this is all about expressing emotions in a positive, creative way so that we don’t hold onto negative emotions, and enjoy our positive emotions.

We shared what our paintings meant to us, giving us all some understanding of what was alive for each other.

This is a great exercise for children to teach them a positive way to handle emotions that they are struggling to manage constructively.

Tapping into your body’s wisdom:

Close your eyes and focus on any body part that you choose for a couple of minutes. Feel into it deeply.

Now write from that body part to you - what is it’s wisdom that it is trying to tell you? Write for 5-10 minutes then read it over. What have you learned?

A third exercise Stephanie shared with us (but we didn’t complete) is to write to an authority figure in your childhood (parent or caregiver, etc) fully expressing whatever you want to and then also have them write their response to you.

We ended the session with a lead meditation to the stars and beyond...

Blog post written by Gabrielle