Abbie: Hello and welcome to the CosmoParenting Podcast brought to you by the CMM Institute for Personal and Social Evolution. In this space, we invite you to see yourself as someone who is curious about and actively participating in creating your own meaning around parenting.
This is our ‘Animate’ episode, where we offer some strategies to integrate into parenting so you can bring to life the things we talk about here on the podcast. Let’s begin.
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Abbie: Today, I am joined once again by gifted educator Stephanie Higgs, to offer us a best practice from a teacher’s perspective. Hi, Stephanie.
Stephanie: Hello, Abbie.
Abbie: So, Stephanie, we have spent this month discussing perspectives. What is the strategy you are offering us for this theme?
Stephanie: Abbie, as we are nearing the end of our year-long exploration of universal themes, it’s really beautiful to see the way that they all tie in to each other. That is the whole idea behind a universal theme; it should be something that we see everywhere. The strategy I’m going to share today is one of my all time favorites for people of all ages. I know I’ve probably said it before, but I really mean it this month. And when you hear it, you’ll think how beautifully this would fit into several of our universal themes from conflict to regulation to this month’s topic of perspectives. That is the beauty of there universal themes! They are everywhere and they are interconnected. Today’s strategy is so special that after I used it with one of my very young students, this kiddo went home, hours and hours later, told mom how effective the strategy was and asked her mom to use this anytime that she was feeling upset.
So here we go. Allow me to introduce you to the ‘5-5-5 Strategy.’ It’s as simple as this: when someone is feeling dysregulated, we can ask them to evaluate how much this will matter in 5 minutes, 5 days, and 5 years. Oftentimes, we become dysregulated because we are in conflict with someone based on different perspectives or considerations. The ‘5-5-5 Strategy’ allows us to identify, name, and honor the validity of our feelings before determining how much emotional currency we want to invest. By asking ourselves if this is a 5 minutes, 5 day, or 5 year issue will help us to better regulate the intensity of the emotions we spend here.
As we reflect on that current perspective, we can ask ourselves what our perspective will be in 5 minutes, 5 days and 5 years. We can do the same for any other stakeholders who might possibly be involved in this conflict. If we assume positive intent, we might find that this is a 5 minutes frustration, but when we do the math and we say, well, okay, it’s tuesday… five days from now… by sunday this will be a long distance memory, we can sometimes talk ourselves out of a situation becoming a larger issue than is warranted.
On the other hand, we do sometimes experience issues that will be 5 year issues. There are careless remarks made to us in childhood by teachers, or peers, or parents that we often remember well into adulthood. So, it very well may be a 5 or more year issue. And offers us additional legitimacy to the depths of our feelings or perspectives.
Abbie: Stephanie, all of this is good, but I’m especially glad that you made the distinction you did right at the end there. That this practice is not about minimizing the feelings of the experiences we have. This practice is not supposed to talk you out of feeling like things are a big deal when they are, it is just meant to help you determine, like you said, how much emotional currency- and I love that emotional currency language- how much of that you want to spend in a moment.
I hear a lot of people talk about “picking their battles”- in a lot of situations, but especially parenting- and I think this is a great tool to help you do that, going back to the decision making of parenting. And also, you can adjust this practice for your needs I think. For kids, a better 5-5-5 might even be 5 minutes, 5 hours, and 5 days and that can be just as useful, too.
Also, relating us back to this month’s theme of perspectives, this tool broadens our perspectives in a few ways. We can use it- like you said- with others, like our kids, friends, or other family members and better understand another person’s perspective. But also, we can consider our own different perspectives across time. We don’t only have one perspective that never changes. We are always learning so our perspective is always changing. And we can use our imagination here in this practice to empathize with others ,but also with our future selves.
So, Stephanie, thank you so much for joining me today! And thank you to everyone listening for joining us as well. You can connect with Stephanie on Instagram @littlemissgifted and you can check out our other CosmoActivities and additional resources at www.cosmoactivities.com. We are so grateful to be on this journey with all of you. And we will see you next week for the final episode of the month where we will talk communication on the theme of perspectives.
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