Yet another busy week with ABC news here on Monday. I am looking forward to seeing IFS on the news. The students were awesome!
Last Friday I was pleased to listen to each Year 9 student present their posters to the class. I have enjoyed leaning more about each of them and thank them for sharing aspects of their life with me.
It has been most interesting to observe each students reaction to being placed in the spot light for a few minutes. Some embraced it some were nervous and most really did not want to do it. Each one of them at some stage were stretched well and truly out of their comfort zone. However, each rose to the challenge and hopefully the next time publically presenting their work will not be such a daunting task.
I spent a little time with my mentor group this week and have a great mixture of personalities. Being put out of our ‘comfort zone’ was the hot topic up for discussion and I was a bit sneaky! I wanted to do an experiment, telling them all that they would all have to stand up and sing the national anthem! In response to this they noted what their emotions/behaviour and thoughts were immediately after I told them. It was agreed that they were feeling embarrassed and fearful of which negative thoughts and emotions were evident with comments such as ‘why me?’, ‘I don’t know the words’ and ‘this is silly’.
I had no intention of them singing but I wanted the group to realise that we will be challenged in our life- often daily, put out of our comfort zone to do things that we do not really have the courage or desire to do. However, perhaps we dread this not because of the event itself but because of our interpretations of such event which leads us to have certain emotions and behaviours.
As a group we discussed the notion that we are in control of how and what we feel, think about events in our lives and we need to therefore challenge our ‘unhelpful’ thoughts to give us alternative and find more helpful ways of thinking to help manage stressful situations that produce negative emotional responses.
Our challenge is to embrace the opportunity to be out of our comfort zone and tell ourselves that ‘maybe I will be ok!’ and ‘yes I can do it!’.
It is important to do this, to modify our thinking because who knows what we are capable of achieving if we are only working within ourselves?
Joey says
Wow Sal, powerful stuff! Love the cheekiness…my first thought was ‘Ahhh!’ 🙂