Year-to-Date: 729.8; May 2023: 80.7; Last Week: 23.3
As we approach the end of the school year and the beginning of summer break, it becomes easier for emotions to control us rather than how we control our emotions. As one way to raise everyone’s awareness and to identify personal strategies to manage emotions, I guided an inquiry into a personal inventory for zones of regulation. The Zones of Regulation are simply a color-coded graphic organizer to identify (and hopefully change) emotions. Blue signifies emotional states associated with low energy (e.g., sad, bored, tired, sick, etc.) Yellow signifies high energy that’s mostly directed inward but can be directed outward (e.g., worried, frustrated, silly, excited, etc.). Red signifies hight energy that’s mostly directed outward but can be directed inward (e.g., overjoyed, panicked, angry, terrified, etc.). Green signifies focused energy (e.g., happy, joyful, calm, proud, etc.).
Since the school counselor taught a few whole-group lessons introducing the zones of regulation and some tired but true universal strategies earlier this school year, my intention was to guide students through some simple questions to personalize their inventory or set of strategies. After everyone was clear about what each color signified and what emotion was most prevalent for that type of emotion, I asked a set of questions: What activities might you do to change your emotion? What contributions can you make for others to change your emotion? How might you imagine a change in emotion, even when you stuck within an unpleasant one? What might work to temporarily push those emotions away to make space for new ones? What images or words might help you reset your emotions? What are some options to soothe your senses in order to change your emotions? Students captured the gist of the dialogue with many strategies and used a template to personalize how they regulate their emotions.
What was so interesting was how some solutions were problems for others. For example, some students stated that when they felt overwhelmed with high energy that they were directing outward (i.e., red zone emotions), they run. Vice versa, some other students stated that when they had to run (e.g., as part of the PE curriculum), they became overwhelmed with negativity (i.e., those students hated that kind of physical activity). What’s a release for one person is a trigger for another … During summer break, when you feel overwhelmed with parenting your child(ren), go back to your child’s personal inventory as a reference point to help your (almost sixth grade and definitely pre-teen) child reset. What’s great about this too is how the protocol can be used to adjust for any new strategies based on conditions. In this way, everyone builds a vocabulary to best describe, analyze, and manage their emotions. The more we do this the more we build emotional resilience.