Ready or Not!

“Ready or not” is a phrase I can remember we used as children when playing a game we called run outs and hide and seek. I remember feeling excitement and sometimes fear too as I hid alone and felt some anticipation and restlessness at the prospect of being found and maybe a tinge of anxiety at the prospect of not being found. Then of course the extreme excitement when I was found!

Emotions are like fuel that spark us into action and let us know what we do like and what we don’t, what fires us up and what calms us down, what causes us anxiety and what makes us happy and yet often for all different reasons, it is sometimes difficult to “see the wood for the trees”. I have worked with thousands of people who find it difficult to know what makes them happy and to take action towards this.

It seems our thinking takes over – for example we have a disagreement at work or at home and spend so much time talking about what happened and often what the other person did wrong or what we did and how guilty we feel and this keeps us stuck!

When we learn to intervene in our own process and connect to what it is we feel and want, we begin to gain some clarity about what action we might take and we know if we are “ready or not!”.

Ready to act, ready to rest, ready to express ourselves etc…Emotions are the key to our wellbeing.

Strong emotions that are not regulated cause stress and this has an immense impact on our actions and in the longer term, on our health and wellbeing and its not only adults that experience stress. Children who are in deep distress when their parents leave them in the nursery, or when another child takes their favourite toy often feel overwhelmed with emotion, this happens when they are hungry, disinterested and tired too.  Young children are completely unable to regulate themselves and completely unable to think. Under the age of two they don’t even have the necessary architecture in the brain to do this!

Being responsive to children's needs, from a place of warm heartedness, and understanding is not always as easy as it sounds…so remember to look after YOU, so that you are “ready”,  instead of “not” able.  It is our responsiveness that helps  children to develop warm heartedness themselves and emotional maturity.

Tracy x