You don't always choose the emotions you feel, but you do get to choose which ones you express.— Adam Grant (@AdamMGrant) February 3, 2019
Emotional intelligence depends on the will to recognize harmful emotions and the skill to avoid inflicting them on others.#SundayThoughts
One of the early mistakes I made when working with students who were upset (often understandably so) about a situation is that I either 1) minimized their emotions or, when that didn't work, 2) indulged a way of dealing with emotions that was unproductive for both the child and myself.
The way to find the balance between the two lies in communicating the concept Wharton Professor Adam Grant describes above. That is, one always has a choice about what comes out of your mouth.
This is incredibly hard for children to actually do because their frontal lobe — the part of the brain that, among other processes, regulates impulse control and emotion — isn't fully developed and won't be until their early twenties. (Side note: This is why RAs often have the most interesting stories from college.)
That said, a big thing about teaching for a living is convincing/instructing/cajoling people into developing worthwhile skills that they otherwise would resist. I can attest that students can make real progress in expressing their emotions in healthy and productive ways. It's hard because there's nothing fun or fast about this kind of teaching.
Once I knew the words to say to a student, the next challenge was repeating them again and again. The proverb "fall down seven times, stand up eight" became a mantra. I remember directly saying this to one student after he asked me how many times I was going to tell him to count to ten and speak without shouting when confronted with a situation. (He, uh, wasn't great at holding his tongue or controlling his volume.) He came back a day later and made a connection between the phrase and the manga he favored. Didn't entirely fix the issue, but he got a lot better.
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| I don't understand manga but the kids really dig it. |
Happy coincidences involving pop culture references you're too old to understand are one of the myriad ways working with teenagers is a strange and beautiful job.
