Social-Emotional Learning: Self-Management

Sometimes taking initiative is just about collaborating with others. Other times it needs courage to take the risk. Explaining our insight is sometimes the hardest part of initiating something, especially for multilingual thinkers. (At times I can easily articulate or describe things in Finnish but trying to do the same in English becomes a struggle just because of the differences between the two languages.)  Still, initiating a discussion that might be harder than expected is a wonderful way to engage in collaborative problem-solving!

We can coach ourselves to prepare for harder discussions - like the ones where we likely need to disagree with someone. In disagreements it is very important to use Positive Regard to reframe our perception and detach the behavior from the person so that we can respond, not react. I think this is the basic rule for polite disagreements in general.

I was  excited to be in the forest and see this amazing mushroom. While others might think is is useless and proably poisonous (not really, but I still wouldn't eat it). I think it is very pretty and it just made me happy to see it as I had not seen one before. I am glad that a person in our mushroom hunting group showed it to me!  

Social-Emotional Learning: Responsible Decision-Making

I was reading about Solarpunk as a genre for hopeful stories and realized how important is it for me to think about the future in a positive way. It's way too easy to fall into the doom and gloom with the current state of the world, however, it IS possible to engage in hopeful Futuring, too. But choosing to think hopeful thoughts is not always easy. The good news is that we can practice it.

On the beach, I know fore sure that the tide is coming up and I need to be prepared (and also not to be too close to the surf, because it often throws big logs on the beach). Yet, I am optimistic there because I know how to stay safe, so that I can enjoy salty water spray in the air and the feeling of the ground shaking when big waves break. It's amazing!

Applying the same thinking in life and future is much harder! It looks and sounds so scary with the climate catastrophy and everything going on. I am learning to resist the negativity bias, but also have to keep on reminding myself of changing my thinking because imagining hopeful futures will help my wellbeing. It is easy to forget that we can choose what we think.

Initially, I considered using this content to explore self-management, but then realized the it really is about our own agency (our capacity to choose our responses to problematic situations), and choosing to think possible resilient and hopeful futures.