You and I are in the midst of an FFT. What’s an FFT you ask? We are living through a F@$king First Time! The family friendly version is called Terrible First Time (TFT). Take a listen to Brene Brown’s first podcast that breakdown FFTs.
Like many of you, my family and I have lived through the first week of being hunkered down. I have to be honest in telling you that I’ve been struggling a bit with regulating my emotions. But after listening to Brené Brown’s Unlocking Us Podcast, I finally realize why I’ve been on such a roller coaster of emotions.
Here are the Steps
Brené shares what to do when your dealing with a Terrible First Time. Here’s a brief description.
- Name the situation – she says that we are constantly trying to make meaning of what’s happening in our environment and we use language as the handle bar to create that meaning.
- Neutralize – Once you’ve named the situation, now you can begin to normalize so that you can begin to downshift your heightened emotional state and begin to readjust the frequency. (Just a side note here, I prefer the word neutralize rather than normalize).
- Put it in perspective – leaning on past experience, you can begin to put the situation into perspective.
- Reality checking – as you re-shift your perspective, you can compliment it with naming your expectations in handling the situation.
As you listen to her describe the steps, she will offer her own real life examples that will help you understand what you can do during a Terrible First Time.
In addition to my practice of Pause, this definitely will help me tune into a calmer frequency and actually looking forward to the upcoming week!