As leadership coaches who use the power of emotional intelligence (EI) to help support organizational leaders and teams thrive during challenging times, we are applying our expertise to the most important teams in all of our lives—our families.
Although our primary work at the Noble Story Group focuses adult leadership development, there is a direct connection to the social emotional learning (SEL) efforts for children at schools around the globe. As parents and teachers, we are important models in helping children develop their abilities to acknowledge their own feelings, build awareness about why they feel that way, and understand ways to manage themselves to make decisions that are best for themselves and those around them.
In our last piece, we focused on the importance of raising our own self-awareness around resilience and how to nurture it in ourselves through exploring our core motivational drivers, a concept developed by Michele Nevarez, CEO of Goleman EI. Today we will explore one way to bring these drivers to life in your family by brainstorming strategies, both for yourself, as well as for your family as a team.
Self-Management Application:
Building resilience is an important part of self-management. Self-management is the way in which we build strategies to effectively manage our emotions, particularly in challenging situations. Self-management is essential during crises especially, and nurturing resilience is an important part of this strategy building as we navigate our new reality.
Family Meeting Idea: How can we nurture and build our resilience as a family?
Helping ourselves and our children build resilience is an essential life skill—especially today. One way to put this into action is by having a family meeting to start the conversation.
- Name that you as a family—a team—will be most successful if you think ahead about what you all need individually and as a team during this time.
- One way we can be successful is by proactively building our resilience by identifying ways in which we can recharge our batteries. See our last post for additional information.
- Start by introducing the four core motivational drivers, and share what you have learned about yourself as you reflected on your own resilience and on your motivational drivers.
- Brainstorm ideas for ways you can recharge and build your resilience as family. Feel free to use this template if it is helpful.
This can be done individually and then shared, or done together, depending on the ages/attention spans in your family. The big idea is to take a moment to acknowledge the ways in which we all need to recharge, as well as the ways in which we, as a family, can recharge together. As you continue on in your week, notice which of these motivational drivers you are using and how they are helping you to recharge and self-manage. Notice what your partner and/or children are doing to self-manage.
Our next post will focus on social awareness, and ways to better understand and support each other as a family as we continue to move forward.
By the way, one way to recharge is through meditation, and there are some great free resources on meditation and mindfulness. Check out Calm, Liberate Meditation, Insight Timer, and Headspace to try it out!