What is mindfulness? Mindfulness is the practice of bringing our awareness to the present moment, without judgment. We are usually taken up with our thoughts and feelings and reacting to them as we think and feel them. Mindfulness is a way of being in the present and simply observing ourselves. …
Personal Space
In a previous post about boundaries, we mentioned how we use expressions about physical boundaries to apply to emotional boundaries: “He gets under my skin” or “Keeping someone at arm’s length.” The term Personal Space usually refers to physical space, but it can also mean an appropriate emotional …
Self-reflective Questions
In a previous post we wrote about Self-Awareness. One way to get personal with coping skills is to get to know yourself better! If you are interested in life skills, and are reading these words, chances are you are interested in improving yourself or your life. Do you have a vague sense that things …
Getting Personal with Coping Skills
Introducing some personal, close-to-home coping skills into our lives has serious advantages. With ourselves, we are operating in our sphere of influence. We can waste a lot of time trying to control others and be none the better for it. Even if we hope to contribute to world peace, the only …
More Coping Skills
Several weeks ago, we took a jump up to the 30,000-ft level for an overview of coping skills. We discussed how thinking, emotions, and behavior all affect each other. Then we examined some specific thinking skills, emotion regulation skills, and behaviors, and how we can use them. Now it’s time to …
E.I. Concepts
Awareness of emotions and emotion regulation brings us back to the subject of Emotional Intelligence, which we wrote about in an earlier post. Daniel Goleman, psychologist and author of the 1995 New York Times bestseller Emotional Intelligence, views Emotional Intelligence as “a profile of specific …
More Emotion Management
Emotional self-regulation is defined on the Crisis Prevention Institute Blog as “the ability to monitor and manage our own behavior. With self-regulation, we can calm ourselves down when we’re distressed, and pick ourselves up when we’re low.” Successful management of our emotions does not …
Emotion ID
Emotions come in many flavors and sizes. Sometimes we begin teaching children four basic emotions: mad, sad, glad, and hurt. On the other end of the spectrum, Live Bold & Bloom undertakes to list 400 “emotion words” – names of emotions, or adjectives describing the emotions. Some emotions are …
Feelings Primer
Feelings are considered the conscious experience of emotional reactions. Many people when expressing themselves will use the word “feeling” interchangeably with the word “emotion.” Feelings are, in their most basic definition, senses—like the sense of smell or taste. A cool breeze might give us a …
Next Up: Feelings
We are complex beings. Many parts of us interact to produce “who we are” or “what we do” or “how we feel”. There are also many areas where we can intervene in these interactions to bring more satisfying outcomes. The more we observe ourselves and the greater awareness we have of our own inner …
More Thinking Aids
One of the strategies for countering rigid or harmful ways of thinking is to ask ourselves questions about our thoughts and assumptions. Likewise, we can treat our thoughts as “best guesses” rather than as facts. We can also use the PACE model in our own inner dialog: Playful, Accepting, Curiosity …
Better Ways of Thinking
We’ve talked about several ways of thinking that are not helpful—and even harmful, along with suggestions about how to counter each one. Let’s do a round-up of these: Black-and-white thinkingAsk questions to arrive at a more balanced viewpoint: “Really?” “What do you mean by…?”Use more nuanced …
Overgeneralization
Overgeneralization is another way of thinking that can add to negative feelings and sabotage constructive effort. The motto of overgeneralization is not “if you don’t succeed the first time, try, try again.” It is rather “Because you didn’t succeed the first time, you are doomed to failure” or …
Negative Filters
Have you been wearing dark glasses lately? Negative filtering is one way to get ourselves into a negative-feedback loop that can be challenging to get out of. This type of thinking keeps us aware of and dwelling on negative aspects of ourselves or our situation, and either discounting or entirely …
The Inner Prosecutor
Self-blaming often goes along with mind-reading, but it also has a life of its own, separate from mind-reading. In self-blaming, we attach too much power and responsibility to ourselves. We hold ourselves accountable for things that are outside our sphere of control, and take responsibility for …
Black and White Thinking
Black and white thinking, also called polarized thinking, is a way of viewing situations that fails to acknowledge the nuances that exist between two extremes. With black and white thinking, situations, problems, outcomes, and even people are seen in extremes. Accompanied by our tendency to …
Thinking Skills
Our thinking patterns have a big impact on our emotions and our ability to act in positive ways. Becoming aware of how our thoughts affect us and developing helpful thinking patterns is a skill that can help us realize more positive outcomes in our career, our relationships, our health, and in our …
Coping Skills Overview
As you’ve seen in the past weeks’ posts, there are a great many coping skills available to us to deal with the demands and challenges of life. Let’s jump up to the 30,000-foot view to categorize some of these. We are complex beings, with thoughts, emotions and behaviors all working together. Our …