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This week, in particular, is Children’s Mental Health Awareness. For this reason, I wanted to focus on how we can teach our kids more empowered ways to address their emotions. If you don’t have kids, don’t worry, these strategies will work on you too, as well as others who may not even be keen on expressing their feelings.

Okay, before we begin, take a few deep breaths. Here come the statistics, which demonstrate the deep need to apply emotional well-being techniques with children.

Stress is impacting our children as young as 8 years old. They are reporting that they experience physical and emotional health consequences often associated with stress. While nearly 70 percent of parents of teens and tweens say their stress has little or no impact on their children, only 14 percent of children report their parent’s stress doesn’t bother them.

Psychologist Katherine C. Nordal, the APA’s executive director for professional practice, said in a statement “It’s critical that parents communicate with their children about how to identify stress triggers and manage stress in healthy ways while they’re young and still developing behavioral patterns.” Nordal added, “If children don’t learn these lessons early on, it could significantly impact their physical health and emotional well-being down the road, especially as they become adults.”

Given these statistics, APA Chief Executive Officer Norman B. Anderson PhD states “America is at a critical crossroads when it comes to stress and our health.”

Okay, it’s over, you can breath again. Now what I don’t want you to do is start berating yourself that you haven’t handled your kids stress or emotions well. The truth is we are in a huge learning curve regarding emotional well-being. Emotions have just found their way to becoming “public” in the last few decades. This has been progress compared to the years where feelings were not talked about at all. We are now just learning the ways to address and understand our feelings. This is our part of the learning curve and is something that, if we get, we can pass down to the next generation.

You being a part of this community, is you doing your part to pass down to your kids, your nieces/nephews, grandkids etc… an empowered approach to emotional well-being. Are we cool? Good!

This leaves us to answer how we can address our own feelings, as well as other’s feelings from an empowered approach.

If you know my work, you know the core process I teach for you to gain emotional empowerment in the moment a negative feeling arises. If you are new to my work, sign up for my free training kit here:
http://mbersell.wpengine.com/feel-training-kit/
My F.E.E.L. Training Kit will give you the core concepts to apply an empowered approach to your feelings.

One of my most successful techniques with children and adults (myself included) is to use the You are Right No Matter What Technique.

Here is the You are Right No Matter What Technique in a nutshell:

This technique is about validation whatever feeling your child ( or yourself, or your spouse) is experiencing. This technique also allows for expansion of perspective. The bottom line to this technique is whatever you/she/he is feeling you/she/he has a right to feel.

What I would like you to begin to teach yourself and others is that within each feeling you experience you have a choice between an easy response versus an empowered response. BOTH ARE RIGHT. Neither are wrong. It is just that one will lead you to feel better more quickly.

The easy response is the path we choose when our fear leads us. It is the response that feels hurt or blame. This easy response is called “easy” because it is typically an automatic response that occurs with negative feelings.

The empowered response is usually a more challenging response but is one that will lead us to a greater sense of happiness, fulfillment, and inner peace. The empowered response challenges us to find our power in any given circumstance. The empowered response guides us to step into more of our truth.

Now let’s take this to a real life example that you could use with your child. Let’s say your child comes home feeling sad because someone picked on them. They are right to feel sad because it doesn’t feel good to be picked on and feel bullied.

The normal response to being bullied is to feel bad about yourself. This is common because what the bully said hit a nerve. The important point to share is that your child is sad because they are agreeing with the bully. This means the real reason why your child is sad is not because of the bully but because they are believing something about themselves that IS NOT TRUE. The truth is they should feel sad when they are believing something about themselves that isn’t true.

Isn’t that great how their feelings are there to protect them from believing in stuff that isn’t true?!?

The empowered choice is to see how they were giving their power away by believing what the bully said. The empowered choice of their sadness is to choose to believe in their truth rather than a lie.

Neither response is wrong. It is simply showing how the empowered choice will make your child feel better sooner.

You can also tell your child how you too sometimes choose the typical reaction at first. Then you remember it is not fun if you stay their long. That is when you choose to respond from a place of making yourself feel better from the inside, by letting go of the lie and coming back to your truth. When you do, the sadness releases automatically because you are no longer believing in something about yourself that is false.

Our emotions are always trying to teach us more about ourselves. If we learn to receive our emotions in an empowered manner, they aren’t so scary or overwhelming. Instead, they simply become a guide, telling us when we are buying into fear rather than love. Teaching this to those you love, reinforces emotional empowerment within you. This is how you gain emotional mastery, which is mastery with rather than mastery over negative feelings.

In my Big Breakthrough Forum, we gather as an intimate group to explore how to gain mastery with rather than over our negative feelings and the results have been astounding. In just the few times we have met, huge insights have come forward, which have led to making big changes in how participants view themselves and live their lives. I will be opening up a few slots for the Big Breakthrough Forum shortly, so you too can begin to have mastery with each and every one of your beautiful, life-affirming feelings. Stay Tuned!

Please give the above technique a try – either on yourself or your child. Let me know how it goes here below.

It is time the world learns that love exists within every aspect of ourselves that our fears want to fill with shame and judgment. Now is our time to bring this gift to our children. In doing so, soon there will be generations of people who honor every aspect of their emotional well-being, as they see their feelings as one of their greatest gifts and strengths!

I, for one, can not wait!

Be Fearless – Choose Love,