Changing Your Head
Earlier this week, my
daughter Mia woke up on what she refers to as the wrong side of the bed. She proceeded to bury herself under the bedclothes, making it quite clear to anyone who approached what kind of mood she was in. The rest of the family decided to tread carefully and wait until the storm had subsided.
Half an hour later, the sun had come out over Mia's bed. She emerged, dressed, ready for breakfast, all smiles and happy hellos.
“Wow, Mia!” I exclaimed. “What’s happened? You’re in a
completely different mood!”
She then explained how she had decided to ‘change her head’,
switching from her ‘bad-mood’ to her ‘good-mood brain’. She said that some
people did it via a flap, but that she was able to make this change happen at
will, without using her hands, “or anything at all”.
As a coach, trainer and NLP practitioner, I’m fascinated by
the possibility of choice, our ability to select, from a myriad of options, what
to think and how to respond to situations that come our way.
And I’ve noticed that children, when they put their mind to
it, seem to do this quite naturally, as a route to happiness, comfort or a way
out of frustration.
The key to our feelings
One book that Mia loves is The Soul Bird, by Michal Snunit (thank you for the gift, Esther Goodyear!). It describes the human soul as a
little bird who lives deep inside all of us. This special bird can open and
close the drawers of our soul, and each of the drawers houses a different
feeling.
The book’s a brilliant way of helping children to articulate
their emotions and a simple lesson that, in the end, our reactions are just
drawers, which we can open and close, at will.
What I love about small children is the ‘cleanness’ in which
they move through emotions. For Mia, once the storm had passed, all she could
see was the sunshine: the bad mood had washed away.
And so perhaps the key is not only to choose which drawers to
open, but also to make sure that once one drawer is open, we decide to fully
immerse ourselves in it, have a good rummage around and enjoy the feeling that
we’ve chosen to have.
How to change your head
·
Spend some time observing
how you, and the people around you, respond to situations
·
Notice when you feel in
control of your reactions, and when you feel like situations are controlling
you
·
Try using the drawer metaphor
– or create one of your own – to enhance your ability to select how you feel
·
Watch how children
process information and deal with challenges. What else could we learn from
them?
This article also appears as Kaizen Training's Tip of the Week: www.kaizen-training.com/
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