Straight from the horses mouth
Last week we read a lovely personal blog post from a client, of which she’s very kindly allowed us to post here. We think it captures the essence of what we do at Rising Vibe around getting to grips with emotion to build resilience.
As working from home became the new norm served regularly with a side of uncertainty, I guess like many I found some comfort from emails and posts on HOME for updates. One email in particular sparked an interest and later that day I found myself listening via Zoom to Lou Banks from Rising Vibe, an organisation, who use emotions to help drive culture change.
Before the session, I’d have said resilience was our ability to bounce back from managing a set back or challenge in life. However, we heard there’s a little more goes into a mix of resilience, such as ‘appreciation and acceptance’ of our feelings, without that ingredient an individual could find themselves ‘enduring’ a situation, a very different kind of cookie. Understanding how we feel, especially negative feelings, is important and can itself help us feel more positive. It’s like getting permission to say its okay you’re feeling that way, which in-turn allows you emotionally to stop dwelling and move on.
The Rising Vibe approach encourages a realistic attitude towards feelings, taking small steps when faced with challenges. For example, telling yourself ‘this might not be as bad as I think,’ which we’re more likely to believe than just saying everything is okay. Lou was keen to emphasis resilience wasn’t about being positive all the time, which is just not possible.
We used a tool called the Rising Vibrational Scale to help us identify our emotional state. The tool is a list of emotions ranging from fear and helplessness to happiness and joy. Once emotions had been identified, it was possible to start to figure out why you felt this way and in-turn enable you to move forward, regaining control and start to feel better. It was useful to have the scale to hand as lockdown was announced and emotions where all over the place. In summary, we learnt resilient people have awareness of situations, their own emotional reactions and behaviour of people around them. And in order to manage feelings, it’s essential to appreciate the root cause of the emotion. This awareness helps us to manage a situation, whilst thinking how to tackle issues.
The opportunity to talk with Lou and colleagues was invaluable – using simple tools like the Rising Vibe scale enabled you to easily understand what you are feeling and give clarity to what often can feel like very mixed emotions, which can cause clutter and obstruction in your mind. Excellent initiative!
The Rising Vibe concept was interesting and easy to grasp especially having the Rising Vibe scale to help identify our feelings. I’ve occasionally struggled with depression and anxiety, which has been exacerbated working at home during lockdown. I hoped this session would be a good way to find ways to prevent this by taking measures to improve things for myself. I found sharing the experience with others who were supportive was helpful in its own way; I would thoroughly recommend learning about resilience to other housing colleagues.
I found the Rising Vibe session interesting – certain parts were more relatable than I had initially thought. The session was easy to understand, the discussions were thought provoking and anything that was said was listened to; it always felt like a safe space to share views. I feel I got a good deal out of the session; I have even made use of the scale in other aspects of your life where you hold different roles, such as daughter, sister, girlfriend and friend. It was a great learning initiative and I feel it would be highly beneficial for all colleagues across the business, especially those with direct line management duties.
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