How To Turn The Day Around In 3 Minutes, No Matter What Happened
About a month into sheltering at home during the pandemic, I was helping my 6 year old son hand-write a letter to his grandparents.
By “helping” I mean I was being extremely impatient and cranky, because any time we do school-y stuff it brings up my grief over not having access to his actual, wonderful, in-person school.
I was getting more hopeless by the minute, and really beating up on myself for how much fun I was sucking out of the whole process, and how badly I was failing as an impromptu teacher.
Then I started future-tripping, thinking ahead to “How the &%$#@ many more months of this will there be? Will my son end up hating learning? What if he never learns to write??" (note: he already can, that’s how far gone I was)
It was too early in the day to just send everyone to bed. But by then my son had stormed off, upset and defeated.
Cue more self-flagellation on my part, at the dinner table.
But even with that several seconds of quiet (after the storm), my nervous system finally had the space to let me know, “This isn’t working.”
I badly needed to reset, but I was clinging to the energy that my self-directed ranting was providing. Then I remembered something I learned from my Nurtured Heart Approach® training:
This is all energy: energy we can use. I can either use this as jet fuel to raise me out of this yuck, or I can let it blow me up into rage, despair, you name it.
I made a tired, incremental choice to try to repair, and took a big breath. As I breathed I tried to gather up every cellular bit of energy I could through my lungs, and then breathe it back out, a bit more renewed and aware.
This takes practice, of course. It’s not the easy choice. But it works.
By that time my son had returned to the table, more cheered. If I didn’t have my Nurtured Heart training I might have just grumbled, “finally” and moved on with our day.
But with this approach, one of my favorite features is that even if I “miss the moment,” I can always create a moment later, to share what I admired about something and express appreciation.
Here was our exchange, at this point:
Me: “Hey bud, can I tell you what I noticed about a little bit ago?”
Him: “Yeah?”
Me: “It looked like you were pretty upset before, when you went up to your room.”
Him: “Yeah, I was frustrated that I didn't get to play my [video game] yet.”
Me: “Ahhh. Well, I just wanted to say, I saw you take yourself to your room, your safe place, when you were upset. You didn't interrupt Daddy's work call, you didn't get crabby back at me, you didn't try to hurt me, you didn't even yell. You were super mature and wise in how you handled that feeling. You just went off to reset yourself.”
Him: “YEAH! And I went to reset myself, so you could reset YOURself!”
Me: “I really appreciate that! And you know what? It worked, bud. When you went to reset, that was my cue to reset myself too, and it really helped.”
Him: “Oh good! That's what I was going forward to!“
(And the thing is, even if I didn’t have a child, I could have a version of that conversation *with myself,* noticing any little successes to amplify, and acknowledging myself for any ways I didn’t make it worse.)
Even when it feels like our fate is set, the day is ruined, the damage is done, we always have some little bit of choice as to what we will “go forward to.”
It takes courage. It takes flexibility. It takes vulnerability sometimes. It takes a willingness to let go of “being right” in order to “make it right.”
But when “resetting” becomes a part of any given day, often many times a day, it stops feeling like a punishment or a time out or something to live down, or any kind of a defeat.
Instead, it’s a chance to come back to your best self with a fresh chance and a new lens for seeing any little thing that’s going right…or not going as wrong as it could have.
Unpublished Work © 2020 Leah Marcus
[Originally posted HERE]
