Back to School


It’s Monday morning and I have just arrived in the office. This is the last day where I can have a more leisurely commute from my home in Hampshire to my offices in Oxford. Schools start back properly tomorrow for the autumn term after the long holidays and various inset days. For me that means the flexibility of leaving home pretty much anytime is gone and in order to avoid the worst traffic delays I need to have left the house by 6am or not even attempt it until gone 9am.

In the great scheme of things it isn’t the worst problem in the world but I am stuck by how my year is now marked by journey times to and from work. Of course, when I was a teacher, it was very much marked by school terms for different reasons. I wonder what the school holidays and terms mean to you? For some reading this it will be all about spending time with the children, either as parents and carers or as aunties, uncles, grandparents and friends, both quality time and keeping them occupied! For others it might determine workload levels and even if you do not work in a field directly impacted by educational terms then you will undoubtedly know people who are, either because they work in those fields or because they are responsible for small humans themselves.

At The Centre for Emotional Health our model of the seven assets of emotional health are a great resource to help think through what these transition times mean. For some it might be something as simple as journey times and for many others it will be more significant. September feels like a new start in many ways, how does this make us feel? How do we respond to others who are affected deeply by these changes? What is coming up on the horizon for us both in work and outside of it? Do the autumn months moving towards winter fill us with anticipation and excitement or with trepidation or even dread?

Having identified these emotions what do we then do with them? What are our strategies for dealing with both the events themselves and the emotions which arise within us? For me there is a practical response - making sure I am in bed earlier to respond to the earlier alarm call. I also need to consider my personal power in this situation. I cannot control the amount of traffic on the road but I can control when I leave home, what I listen to in my car which might be constructive for work such as a relevant podcast or something which brings me joy like my favourite album.

Times of transition can be a challenge but tuning into our emotional health and using the seven assets can help us to navigate these times successfully which has a positive impact upon us and the other humans around us – both small and large.



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