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Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
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Onward summary
Elena Aguilar
Cultivating Emotional Resilience in Educators
20 mins
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Table of Contents
Onward
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Key idea 1 of 7
Understanding the cycle of emotions is key to building resilience.
As a new teacher, Aguilar used to believe that she was far too busy to deal with her emotions. Whenever she felt sad or angry, she swallowed her feelings and soldiered on. But now, as an experienced educator, she understands that exploring and accepting emotions is a crucial step toward building resilience.
Think about the last time that you experienced a powerful emotion. How would you categorize that feeling? Was it a thought, an experience or merely an impulse? According to the author, it was all of these things. Each emotion you experience, she believes, is actually a series of events and reactions that together form a six-part cycle.
Let’s take a look at how an emotional cycle might play out.
Each cycle starts with a prompting event. This is something that happens in your external environment. If you’re a teacher, for example, this event could be a fire drill that interrupts your lesson. The next stage in the cycle is interpretation, where you mentally explain the event using your pre-existing assumptions and beliefs. You might interpret that fire drill, for example, as proof of your principal’s blatant disrespect for your teaching time.
This interpretation leads to a physical response – just thinking about your principal’s disrespect causes your body to release stress hormones, making your heart beat faster. Almost immediately, you feel an urge to act – perhaps you start thinking of all the furious things you’re going to write your principal in an email.
This impulse is swiftly followed by action – as you lead your class outside, you might give your principal an angry look. After school, maybe you fire off that furious email. Finally, you feel the aftereffects of your emotion – the ways in which this emotion influences your other thoughts and emotions. Your anger toward your principal, for example, could trigger feelings of physical exhaustion.
Understanding this cycle enables you to intervene, shifting the way you experience the emotion and creating a better outcome. You can intervene at any point in the cycle. When you begin interpreting the principal’s actions as disrespectful, for instance, you can catch yourself in this negative assumption, and put a different spin on things. If you feel your heart rate soaring, you can recognize this response, and change it by taking some deep breaths to relax instead.
Understanding her own emotional cycles has given Aguilar more energy at work and improved her ability to handle interpersonal conflict. Today, she’s never too busy to explore her emotions.
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What is Onward about?
Onward (2018) explains how educators can cope better with adversity so that they and their students can thrive in the classroom. Filled with rich insights from author Elena Aguilar’s experiences as an educator, these blinks also explore mindfulness and change-management techniques.
Best quote from Onward
In the words of George Bernard Shaw, we dont stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.
—Elena Aguilar
Who should read Onward?
- New teachers struggling to cope
- Experienced educators seeking fresh insights
- Psychology buffs wanting a new angle
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