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Welcome to come home to peace with Diane Passey, the show where we talk about how to become more emotionally intelligent and as a result, increase our emotional resilience. Diane will be your guide as you work towards your goal to help your children and teens become healthy adults, parenting is one of the hardest jobs we'll ever have. And one in which you get no formal training. Our young innocent children become adolescents who face challenges over which we have no control. We can't say them from fear, disappointment, anxiety and pain that life hands us. But we can equip them with the tools, skills and knowledge to enable them to get through it. Join us to hear insights, strategies, and relevant tips to help you come home to peace.
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Welcome to come home to peace, the podcast where I guide you along the path to create more peace in yourself and in your home, starting from the inside out. And we're going to do that today by naming our emotions. A couple episodes ago in Episode 24, I talked about the rain technique in being able to recognize what's going on in your body, why you're triggered with things and kind of how to get to the bottom of it. So we're gonna kind of unpack that a little bit more in this episode. Because naming your emotions is simple, but very, very powerful. It's probably in the top three of ways to increase your emotional intelligence, the rain technique, in case you missed that episode, or if you if you need a refresher, R stands for recognizing your emotions. A is for allowing the emotion to be AI is investigate, and is to nurture yourself. So that's the rain technique all have that, that visual handout available again for this for this podcast episode. So you can go there and review that. And his podcast episode number 24. If you want to go back and get a refresher on, on how to use the rain technique, but we're going to talk about the emotion part of it. Now when I go to a speaking event, or I work with my clients, and I asked them to see how many emotion words they can name, they can come up with usually around 11 emotion words, which is that's just kind of the average in the United States. That's about as many emotions as we can name. And our top three emotions are always happy, sad and angry. So, you know, that's so interesting when you look at it, because there are 10s of 1000s of emotion words, and we are certainly not limited to only experiencing 11 emotions. So why is it that we can only name 11 emotions, like we clump all of what we feel, and all of the beautiful things that our bodies can experience, we clump them into just these 11 emotions. And that kind of like robs us of some of the amazing experiences we have of living here on the earth. Now with emotional intelligence and resilience kind of becoming like a thing. In the past 20 years, we have not been raised to hear, understand and use these words that more accurately describe what we're feeling. We really didn't study emotional intelligence before then. So that's, you know, if we if we didn't hear those words and use those words, we don't know how to hear and use those words now. And we can change that which is exciting. Now Mark Brackett is the founder of the yell at the Yale University Department of emotional intelligence, and he does amazing work. He loves working with schools. And so he goes around to the schools mostly on the East Coast. And now it's starting to move more towards the west. But he teaches the administrators and the teachers how to use emotional intelligence in their classrooms and to manage like breakdowns and you know, bullying and all of the things using these emotional intelligence skills. And he created what's called a mood meter. I love using it all the time. You can you can look it up on Google and download it and see what the mood meter is. But it's this chart that labels all of these different moods and emotions and helps us be able to kind of segment them in according to how much energy they have and how pleasant or unpleasant they are. Now, another
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resource that I really loved using is my emotion dictionary. I have this emotion dictionary as 10,000 emotion words, we use it in Institute last semester, in my emotional and mental health institute class. We used it and it was so fun students just love looking up what these different emotion words were. And like seeing what the difference was the difference between angry and I rate between calm and serene, you know some of these words words that aren't used in society very much like what is the difference? How do we accurately describe what it is that we're feeling. So since the reality of adding like 10,000, new emotion words to our vocabulary, probably, you know, that's really not real realistic. Let's just see what we can do to add a few more to our vocabulary. And I have some easy ways to do this, I've got some, some good hacks, ways that you can increase the emotional intelligence in your home, and help your kids to be able to label exactly what they're feeling, and not just clump them into groups of what they think they're feeling. So let's start here. And this is how I would I would teach your kids it. This, this concept, and this is how I teach my my kids and groups of people that I work with. So emotions are vibrations in our body, that's all they are. They are the result of the thoughts we think. And the circumstances we we experience, we have thoughts about those circumstances, whatever it is that they are, and then that thought creates an emotion and we have a feeling about it. So that's like the basic, the basic definition of emotion emotions lasts about 15 to 20 minutes in our bodies, that's it, if we stuffed them, and we like, like, try and numb them and put them off and ignore them, they're gonna last a lot longer. But if you pay attention to an emotion, then it's just gonna last for about for about 15 to 20 minutes in your body. Now part of our earthly experience we have is to experience this wide range of these emotions. Each of these emotions, whether you like them or not, they really are gift to us. They refine us. They teach us empathy, They guide us, they help us to avoid avoid painful situations. Our emotions provide us growth. And the only thing it means when we feel emotions is that we're human. It doesn't mean anything else doesn't mean we're good. Humans are bad humans. We're just human. Jesus Christ as part of his atonement for mankind, experienced emotions, that is the deal. Like he had to know what it felt like to feel anger, jealousy, resentment, depression, sadness, calm, happy, serene, surprise, elation. Like he, he had to know what it was like to have all of the emotions. And whether he experienced those while he was on the earth, or during the process of the Atonement, like that, to me is like, that's a little detail. That doesn't matter to me. But it's a way that I view emotions, to help to neutralize them, to not help myself. Remember that just because I'm feeling any emotion, that's not pleasant, doesn't mean anything's wrong with me. And the Savior knows what it's like to experience that emotion, and he can help me. And when some of these emotions mean that my heart needs to be healed, my Savior will be there with me, because he understands what it was like to be human. And he understands what it's like to feel emotions, and he knows how to succor me, in my time of need. It's a common belief within members of religious organizations to believe that if we are feeling emotions that are not pleasant, or that don't feel good, then we're doing something wrong. And this is 100%. Wrong. That's just not, that's just not correct. We feel unpleasant and uncomfortable emotions, when we do something wrong like that, that does happen. If I go and I like going, you know, go and punch somebody at the grocery store, I'm going to feel bad about it. Because that's, that's a consequence of, of going in and punching someone at the grocery store. However, if I'm feeling discouraged, disheartened, depressed, sad, jealous, doesn't mean that I'm doing something wrong. So it doesn't go both ways. I can create that emotion by by choosing an action, that's not great. But I just because I feel an emotion doesn't mean I did something that's not great. So I've had many teenagers tell me they feel like their parents try to fix their sad or negative emotions. And so they feel like if they let their parents know how they're really feeling, then their parents are going to try and tell them that they should be happy. They should be grateful. They need to look at the bright side of things need to count their many blessings. And we do this as parents because we don't like seeing our kids struggling. We're like our intentions are good. But that's not the way that we need to handle it as parents we need to validate and allow space for all the emotions because here's how its interpreted with your kids.
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Is they think, well I can't tell my mom that I'm sad. I can't tell my dad that I'm jealous. I can't tell my teacher that I'm angry because these like it's not right. It's not okay for me to feel the things and if they know, then they're going to try and tell me that it's not okay and that I need to change it. Instead, when you have a child that says, Yeah, you know what, I'm just feeling really jealous I wanted to, I wanted to be class president and my best friend got it instead. And I'm just feeling really jealous. Instead of saying, oh, you know what, it's okay, you'll get another chance. And we, you know, you should be happy for your friend. And, you know, tell them all these things, we sit with them, and we say, Man, I'm so sorry, that sounds like that would have been really hard. I know, I felt jealous sometimes too.
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And just sit with them for a minute, don't fix it. Don't try and make it better. But allow them to feel the emotion without shame. And without discouragement. And without thinking that something is wrong with them, nothing is wrong with them. They're just human. And that's it. And that's hard to do. As parents, I'm, at least for me, I'm a fixer, I want to make it better. I want to provide solutions. So it's really hard for me to sit and sit with my kids and their emotions, especially the older they get. But the more I've done it, the easier it's become. And I'm getting a lot better at it before I used to always have to like, clench my teeth to gum, like you'll hear me talk about that a lot. Like, oh, keep my mouth closed. And now I can sit with them. And just say, Yeah, I'm really sorry, I have one of my kids that will call me out on it pretty good. And, and I appreciate that he does that. He'll say, Mom, I don't want you to fix it, I just need you to listen, say thank you for reminding me. And I'll sit and I'll listen and just hold that space for him. And he really, really appreciates that. So that's how we want to do like, that's how it needs to be managed. And what we can practice doing as parents just saying, Yeah, you know what, I felt really anxious before too, I can totally understand why you would be feeling anxious. We don't want up them. We don't, you know, tell them that they need to do anything different. They're just human. And it's okay to be human. Helping our kids name and understanding emotions will take you as their parent understanding and naming your emotions. So I have two favorite ways that I like to do this. And that will involve you as a parent, and also your kids and your spouse or whoever your significant other whoever you're living with. And these are pretty easy to implement. Because we want to keep things easy to easy to do. So the first one is to find that mood meter by Mark bracket, there are going to be four quadrants and of emotions. There's a red, yellow, a green and a blue. And they're organized by high energy, low energy, pleasant and unpleasant. And when you kind of go through, you can kind of look at the different emotions and where they are in the chart, and have conversations about it. It's also a really good way to look and see, okay, you know, I think I'm feeling anxiety, but actually, I'm feeling jealous and exhausted. Like, maybe that's what I'm really feeling instead. Or maybe I'm feeling anger, and sadness. So that helps us to be able to come up with the words that feel right, that feel like okay, I think that's the emotion I really am feeling. You can download and print a mood meter, I always recommend having in your kitchen or over by your kitchen table or on the fridge or somewhere where you start seeing those words, there are mood meters available for younger kids that have emojis instead of words on them, so that they can kind of see what the different, like the different emojis are. And they'll there's, there's more than 10 more than 10 Emojis on there that will show different feeling words and where in the quadrant they are. So even using that will introduce more emotions into their brain as their brains are developing. There is also a mood meter app, which I love. It's a fantastic app, it's 99 cents one time 99 cent fee, and it's make sure you get the one by Mark bracket. It is so good at helping you narrow down name your emotion, track your emotions. Are you always feeling angry at work? Or does being at home, make you feel depressed? You know, and where are you? And how much time are you spending in each quadrant? I tell my clients I want to see that they're spending time in all the quadrants, I want to see that they're experiencing the entire rainbow of emotions, and not just emotions. And in a couple of the quadrants, like that takes a lot of the fun out of life and a lot of the the richness of our life if you're only feeling a couple quadrants. So that's the goal is to say, oh look, here's one over in the yellow. I didn't notice I had any emotions over here in the yellow. Whether you use the app or you use the printed out version of the mood meter, it's okay like either way it's going to work. And that's going to be a really good way to have conversations with your kids and your family about what happened. 14 different emotions mean, the other thing I have, and I'll include a printout for this in the show notes of the podcast, the other thing I have is you can create an emotions jar. And in that emotions jar, you're going to have a bunch of emotion words in there. Some of them are going to be the unpleasant emotions. And it's okay to take those out to start with, because let's just, you know, if you want to just start easy, let's start with just the pleasant emotions. And you pull out one of those emotions, and it will say, excited, it will say heard, it will say serene, it will say, you know, different words like that surprise. And you say, Okay, so here's the emotion word. Once the last time you felt surprised, and then let everyone kind of think back and see if they can connect to a time that they felt surprised, this is a great time to look up words that you're not sure what they are Google, um, use your dictionary, whatever that looks like. But that way, you're not only naming the emotion, and describing the emotion, but you're going back and explaining a time that you felt that emotion. If your kids don't have enough of that history, that they can find a time that they felt that emotion, that's okay. When they hear how you felt the emotion, their brains will understand the context that that emotion is felt. And the more that that they can hear the context, the more that they'll be able to use those emotion words in the right context, and they won't be so unfamiliar with it, they'll really understand what they are. So that's a really fun thing to do. And you can do it at dinner time. You can do it in the morning. We have in one of my classes, we have a Marco Polo chat, and we we have an emotion word in our Marco Marco Polo chat that we can comment on every day. And so and so that's really fun, too. So until you can correctly name an emotion, emotions are going to feel like this huge, big thing. This big giant cloud that just sits over your head is like the unknown, like what is in this cloud, I don't know what's in the cloud. And it's so scary and big. When you name your emotion, it's takes the power out of that cloud, and just transforms it into this little thing that you can hold in the cup. Like if you have your hands cupped little thing that's that you can be able to hold in your cupped hands. It just makes it so much smaller, and more manageable and less scary, and less ambiguous. Like it's just there. And so you'll be able to then examine it and investigate why am I feeling you today. And what's you know, what's the last time I felt this emotion, that's maybe triggering me a little bit. And then to be able to nurture and to love yourself through feeling that emotion, if you are able to name your emotion, which makes it small, so that it feels like you can have power and control over it. When your name when you name it. And you will allow it to be and just sit there and your cup tans for about 15 to 20 minutes that goes and just just what happens if I totally need to experiment with it, try it out. If it doesn't work for you, I need you to let me know. Because it's always worked for me. And it's worked for all my clients and it's worked for lots and lots of people who have tried this technique before. So this is something I I challenge you to experiment with. You can create more peace in your home by correctly naming emotions, allowing them to be honoring each other's emotions, and sitting in that space with them. And emotionally intelligent home is a peaceful home. We'll see you next week.
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Thank you for joining us on this episode of come home to peace. If you haven't done so already. Subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform. Leave us a five star rating and share it with friends family and anyone else who is searching for more peace from the inside out. Thank you
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