Last June 25, New Beginnings invited life coach Pia Nazareno-Acevedo to share valuable tips with us moms on emotional energy. Emotional energy would be defined as the emotions we feel as a result of our experiences of another person’s emotions or a
given situation. There are 2 poles to emotional energy — positive and negative. Here’s a short excerpt from Coach Pia’s handouts:
You harness positive energy within you through compassion, courage, creative work, laughter and movement. If you imagine a pitcher and you fill it with positive emotional energy, you feel energized about your life — you are hopeful, positive, charitable, caring, patient, focused and loving.
The negative energy depletes the pitcher and keeps you small and unhealthy, alienated from your best self. Your emotional energy is depleted when there is continuous criticism, abuse, fear, self-loathing, rage or shame. You will find yourself feeling inadequate, tired, critical, bitter, withholding and hopeless.
There are just 2 paragraphs above but as I read them, I realized that I often have this “depleted emotional pitcher” experience. We moms run the household, have businesses or corporate jobs, deal with customers, toddler tantrums and helper issues all in the same day, or maybe even in the same hour. We know we will always be grateful for the blessings of our families but we have to admit that there are times that we experience bad days and just get plain frustrated as moms.
In the talk, I realized that my emotional pitcher level affects how I act when I get home or when I interact with my kids. Sometimes when I get frustrated, I justify my behavior by saying I’m tired or had a bad day. However, as a parent, I have to be conscious not to transfer the negative energy to our home. I have to be conscious of the level of emotional energy in my pitcher and if I realize that it is depleted, I have to find ways to refill it with positive energy.
Coach Pia’s suggests that you ask yourself how you can recover from the negative effects of the day.
Do you need 15 minutes of peace and quiet? Do you just need a hug and smile from your 10-month old baby? Do you need to munch on a bag of potato chips? No matter what it is, try to figure out what helps you refill that pitcher.
Another tip from Coach Pia is to leave the negative energy outside the home. Try to tell your partner and kids how you feel (Example: Say a simple “I’ve had a really bad day.”) to involve them in what’s going on with you and at the same time consciously working on making the day better and refilling that pitcher.
Here’s an activity Coach Pia suggested to harness your own positive energy:
- Draw a pitcher. Draw a line to represent the level of emotional energy that is currently in your pitcher. What percentage do you currently have? Make a basic assessment of the percentages of your positive and negative emotional energy.
- Make two columns, with the headings: “life giving” and “life draining”. As quickly and honestly as you can, list all the people and activities under the appropriate column. By understanding these things, we become more conscious of what gives us positive and negative energy.
Filling up your emotional pitcher is an amazing tool to help me grow towards being a progressive parent. New Beginnings is probably the only community that I’ve seen to help parents like me take this progressive approach and it’s very refreshing. I’m looking forward to more progressive parenting talks and tips from Coach Pia in the New Beginnings community at http://www.facebook.com/newbeginnings.com.ph.
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About the Blogger:
Kris de Guzman, a self-confessed “OC” pens the blog OcMominManila.com. She is a wife and hands-on mum to her two lovely daughters. She is also a momtrepreneur running two businesses – a marketing firm called Your Brand Story Inc. and a water filter business called Aquasana Store.
