Pro's:
Got to talk with Maggie! It's been... I don't even know how long. Two months? That we've been trying to connect. (More than the nightly short texts. Well, short on her side. Sometimes short and sometimes long on my part, since my schedule is considerably less crazy than hers.) Despite my worries that the lack of face to face connection may cause the relationship to dry up a bit, when we are back together, it really is like getting together with an old friend. We just start back up where we left off. Despite not knowing each other that well. And yet perhaps we do... here, story time: I wanted to squeeze all the goodness out of the call that I could, so I read through some of Gottman's literature (author of "The Seven Principals for Making Marriage Work" which I definitely recommend if you're in a romantic relationship and you want to make it work) and found a fun exercise to "build love maps" as Gottman calls it. Getting to know each other.
We played a twenty questions game, and even though many of our answers were based purely off of intuition, they ended up being right. I'm chuckling to myself as I right this, at the continued improbability of it all. I was more expecting we'd get it wrong, laugh about it, and then share what the right answers were and get to know about each other that way. But apparently that is to some extent not even necessary. I continue to be dumbstruck in gratitude at the universe for what an incredibly good match it's found for me. One example of many: my favorite instrument is the violin. Her main instrument is the electric violin. I can only fall at God's feet in grateful surrender and do my best to be worthy of the gifts given.
A Con was around the end I said something that accidentally was opening a can of worms a little and felt bad about doing so, but we worked it out fairly quickly, and ended on a nice note. Gratitude to my partner for being able to do that. She is amazing.
I hate hurting peoples feelings. I try so hard not to, but I'm not perfect. And what with needing to be more firm in my teaching style, I'm probably going to have to do things that hurt some small people's feelings a bit, out of care for them and their overall long-term development. Healthy boundaries, high expectations, follow through with my word.
Other pro's:
Mother's day! Got to talk to mom.
Cleaned up much of the living room.
Got some important things on my todo list checked off.
Went contra dancing.
Con's:
Stayed up late and got completely off of my schedule.
Felt really bad about having left the unpacking/organizing in my aunts living room for so long.
Sucked into less important tasks and interesting but time-wasting stories.
So much that I still needs to be done, at least one important thing that is certainly going to be late.
Making lemonade, some of these bad feelings are good fodder for getting into the shoes of students. I can see when kids shut down, when they're being told they've done something bad. And now I have a fresh memory of what it feels like, so I can sympathize. Gottman would call it emotional flooding I think. And the bottom line is once you've emotionally flooded your student, it's close to impossible to get them to listen to you deeply. They can do manual tasks, but the heart is shut down, so if your asking them to engage in empathy or creative problem-solving or self-awareness, you're going to fail.
Gottman talks about "soft start-up" and "complaining without criticizing." These ideas are super useful for any kind of relationship. From husband wife to parent child to teacher student to friends. It's important to voice the issues that are coming up for you, and what you need, but if you want to keep the relationship healthy, and be listened to well, you need to use a soft, non-attacking start up, and then keep the conversation non-attacking, even as you talk about the specific actions that the other person is doing and your own feelings. It seems like a tricky skill, especially if the other person is super sensitive to criticism, but also an incredibly useful one. Any time you have a conflict with another person, this skill is useful. Even without a romantic partner, if you have a work associate that it's hard to get along with, you can use this same principal. (Link is to an article on that subject)
OK, I have the motivation to go to bed early, I have the time to get ready for bed, before it's actually bed time. I've got one more thing I need to do before that, so let's see if I can restart myself now.
This is one of the most useful skills I've learned: when I go off the rails, doing something and then regretting it afterwards, rather than my previous method of just ruminating on how I'm bad and a failure, I simply feel the regret and desire not to do it again, look back and analyse what whent wrong, make a plan to avoid that mistake in the future, and then get on with my life, starting up again on the right track. There's very little drama, there is sadness and regret, but they are not lingering, because I immediatly start making amends, doing everything I can to avoid that same outcome. And I make similar mistakes again and again, but the iteration cycle is fast, and so the learning cycle is fast, and before I know it I've gotten much better at handeling x distraction or situation. Lots of attempts, lots of failurs, no giving up. Just like all fast learning happens. And it's not excessivly stressful, because I'm not dwelling on the mistakes, I'm not fearing them. They are stepping stones that I'm using to climb. This is a very growth mindset way of functioning, and it's also a very enjoyable way of functioning. That question, "What would you do if you couldn't fail?" isn't an impossible hypothetical. It's very much within your grasp with this MO.
Good night! Good week. Or if it's a bad week, may you learn much from it, may you learn from each failure and turn it from a millstone around your neck to a stepping stone towards your dreams.
Is failure a bad thing, or a good thing? Remember it's all just a matter of how you frame it, how you think about it.
"...there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."
-Hamlet
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