On Sunday morning I got the dreaded NHS notification that I’d been near someone who had contracted CV-19 and that is the first time I’d experienced that feeling of dread. I had a sore throat and a blocked nose but I felt ok and had upped the vitamin intake, so thought nothing of it, until now.
I was going to see my Mum, and have lunch out with her and the family, so I immediately did a test to check things out. Fortunately I was negative but I still checked in with my Sister just to see if they were ok with me having been ‘pinged’ and also with my sore throat etc.
We had a fantastic lunch and it was great to spend time with my Mum as I don’t see her as often due to her moving to live with my Sister. It’s a strange feeling going from seeing her almost every day to doing FaceTime calls and ,possibly, a fortnightly visit. When my Mum did live near me I use to moan about the traffic when I picked my her up to go to the beach or back to ours for dinner but I now realise how lucky I was to have her live so close for nearly 5 years.
The older I get the more obvious it is to me that, the things we moan about now are the things we tend to miss when they are not there any more. For example moaning at my Daughter for leaving a mess around the house, when she lived with us, to missing the interaction (not the mess) and conversations we had on a daily basis, when she moved away. I know I moan about my dog barking at 2am, 4am and 6am for attention of some sort, but I will miss his snoring and need for cuddles, when he is gone.
To embrace all things as a positive is almost impossible, especially when you are sleep deprived and have to get up and go to work whilst the dog sleeps on the sofa all day! I do have a slightly different way of processing some annoying things though and, most of the time, I can spin it and even smile about it. When I can’t change my building emotions, I have to make sure it doesn’t get out of hand and ruin relationships beyond repair.
Like most of you, I have ways of calming myself down to make sure things do not escalate out of hand. The first of these is talking to someone that I think will be honest and objective. Often this would be my wife or a good friend and they tend to hold no punches, give a neutral perspective and offer advice. Other times I don’t need to talk and I just need to ‘get over myself’ which is when I’d go to the gym or do something to distract me for a while and get rid of some negative energy.
I do think that I have become more patient as the years have rolled on, maybe too patient with some things. Although sparks still fly when I experience a situation that crosses the boundaries of things I deem as important. Things that link to my values of good and bad, right and wrong are real triggers for an emotional response. David Rock did a piece on a model SCARF (Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness) that is something I relate to, and often use, in some programmes I deliver.
Potentially having CV-19 could have, negatively, triggered all of those in one day and could have made my Sunday a completely different experience if I had lost the plot…
This is a 15 minute TED Talk by David Rock and is worth grabbing a coffee and biscuit to watch.
It may help to understand a bit more around emotional intelligence and self regulation, if that is important to you is these uncertain times.
Click here to watch the video