The Reflective and Empowering Corner
v Planning for a Difficult Personal or Professional Situation
When you face a difficult situation or meeting, planning both a successful outcome and your emotional state pays dividends.
These four tips can help you achieve this:
- Identify what emotion can help you manage the situation well.
- Bring back a remembered sense of this feeling mentally and physically.
- Visualise yourself maintaining this feeling through the situation.
- Repeat an empowering word or phrase that keeps you on track.
v Five-Step Emotional Healing Process
Become familiar with the situations that disturb you, take action to enable yourself to balance your emotional response to them and make this emotional healing process an integral part of your life. Notice the situation that upsets you. Observe your :
- Physical signals from body-mind
- Emotions
- Thoughts
- Behaviours
- Stop, step back, take a breathing space to calm yourself and reflect on what’s happening. Ask what you need to do now.
- Act to resolve the situation by applying physical strategies, emotional self-care, and thinking methods, and integrating these into new behaviours.
- Embrace change with emotional needs as your guide.
Six Tips to Calm Your Body through Breath
Should you find yourself feeling stressed or emotionally disturbed you can quickly re-establish your inner sense of calm and control by following these six tips:
- Bring your attention into your body-mind.
- Notice tension and release it by breathing out, softening your body.
- Open your shoulders and notice how you’re breathing.
- Expand your belly as you breathe in.
- Count each breath: four for the in-breath and six for the out-breath.
- Bring in calm and breathe out stress.
Focusing on Positives for Emotional Healing
Developing the habit of focusing on the positives in your life and reminding yourself several times a day of those aspects that are working and going well enables you to regain perspective.
- Start the day with gratitude and loving kindness.
- Switch out of negative and distorted thoughts.
- Choose thoughts that are empowering.
- Open your eyes to smiles, your ears to birdsong, your heart to joy.
