rec_pw_parenting

What do people mean when they tell us to grow up? What does it even mean to be an adult?

We don’t learn about this stuff in school. In fact, we have to figure it all out as we go along. We watch the adults around us and get mixed signals as to what adulthood is really all about.

We notice that many adults don’t always act grown up. We notice that they sometimes lose their cool and act immature.

Growing up seems like a process of trial and error. But this is because we have never been given some basic ground rules for growing up.

That is exactly what we are going to learn about during this unique educational experience. It won’t be like schoolwork because we don’t even have to try and learn…learning just happens automatically. All we have to do is follow the instructions andcomplete the process just the way it is designed.

We will learn a whole bunch of things about life but these all boil down to one reality—FREEDOM! That word sure is music to our ears. Growing up is supposed to be a process of learning HOW TO BE YOURSELF. In fact, that is the toughest job of all.

If we are to have freedom in our lives, we will have to learn about the 80/20 rule of life.

• 80% of the quality of your life comes from how you deal with what happens
• Only 20% of the quality of your life has to do with what actually happens

Being happy has more to do with how you deal with what happens then it does with what actually happens.

Have you noticed that many times you do things that you really don’t want to do? It’s like a button gets pushed and all of a sudden you say or do something as if it has “control over” you?

This happens to all of us – young and old. Some things are so ingrained they have become automatic. They seem to happen without our permission.

There is a logical explanation for this phenomenon and that is what we are going to explore in this learning system.

We will explore four very important aspects of ourselves:

• How we see the world (our perception).
• How we see ourselves (our attitude).
• How we reason and rationalize (our thinking).
• How we react and respond to other people (our behavior).

The more we understand how our perceptions, attitudes, thinking, and behaviors determine the quality of our lives, the more control we will have over our lives. Now we can live by the 80/20 rule of life and that is what freedom is all about.

We can’t always control what happens to us but we can control how we see things, how we see ourselves, how we think, and how we respond to whatever happens to us. That is what growing up is all about.

Now we are ready to begin this adventure of discovering more about who we are and what makes us tick. But before we begin, let’s cover some details so that we can get the most out of this unique learning experience.
Have you ever noticed that the common denominator for most of our problems in life is that we lose control of ourselves emotionally? How many times do we get angry and say or do things we later regret? Or, how many times are we afraid to say what we really need to say to people and then our silence eats away at us? These are examples of not exercising Emotional Self-control.
We all come into the world with five basic needs that must be fulfilled. These needs are for:

• Survival
• Freedom
• Usefulness
• Love
• Self-Identity

When these needs are not fulfilled, we feel fear. This fear often turns to some form of negative behavior. We may try to cover up our real feelings by trying to control how we react, but we begin to notice that we either erupt in anger or slip into negative feelings about ourselves and act depressed.

As a teenager, these mood swings are confusing. It’s like something has control of us. We don’t really know how we got to feeling this way in the first place and we sure don’t know how to get out. The grown ups around us don’t seem to have it all together either.

Adults have simply learned how to manage these feelings these negative feelings that come from not meeting our basic needs for survival, freedom, usefulness, love, and self-identity. We have learned how to compromise these basic needs by changing the order of their priority. For example, if we are afraid of LOVE because we have been rejected and hurt in the past, we think the answer is to stay “in control” of love.

Controlled love is conditional love and is never really satisfying. Nevertheless, we will sometimes change the priority of our needs and settle for being useful.

We make “love” less important and make “being useful” more important. This seems appropriate because we have incorrectly learned that we have to “earn love.” We measure being loved and being useful in the same way. These are both measured in terms of how much attention, respect and appreciation we receive.

But there is one major difference between love and usefulness. Real LOVE is based on who we are. Being USEFUL is about what we do. Being loved for “who we are” is a basic need that cannot be replaced.

As we accumulate experiences of “settling for being useful,” we notice an empty hole in our gut and an ache in our bones. When we replace love with being useful, we begin to feel “used.” We begin to feel and think that nobody really cares about us and that we are only wanted based on what we do. Sooner or later neither our need for “love” nor “being useful” are fulfilled.

The more useful we try to be, the worse we feel. Loneliness and anger begin to take over our feelings. Thoughts about love become painful, hurtful, and sometimes hateful. We don't really know who or what we are. We begin to feel that life is just too hard to live. When we don't fulfill our basic human needs, our feelings take control of us and determine our behavior.

Few of us, teenagers and adults alike, have never really been taught how to meet our basic human needs on an emotional level. We have never been taught how to process and resolve the natural emotions that are part of the human experience.

As children, we learned about our emotions by observing how others dealt with life. From these observations, we came up with our own ways to survive. We decide that what we have learned works because at least we are alive today. This process of observing other people and mimicking their behavior results in forming attitudes and perceptions about others and ourselves. The things we learn become part of our belief structure.

Our belief structure determines how we see the world. These beliefs are like “a pair of glasses.” Everything we experience in life is filtered through what we already believe is true. We may grow up physically but we may continue to see the world emotionally through the same “pair of glasses” worn as children. We go through life trying to maintain things we believe to be true, even if they are not true.

This reality supports the saying; “It’s not what you don’t know that’s the problem. It’s what you do know that ‘ain’t so’ that causes the problem.”

Many times we find ourselves trapped in perceptions, attitudes, thinking, and behaviors that don't always get us what we want in life. This causes us to lose Emotional Self-Control. We try to change, but somehow we can't seem to break loose of our habits. These habits of thinking and behaving were formed as a result of living life. These life experiences have been translated into beliefs about others and ourselves:

• Some of these beliefs are true.
• Some of these beliefs were only true at one time but are no longer true.
• Some of these beliefs were never true.

Our challenge in life is to constantly re-examine our perceptions, attitudes, thinking, and behaviors to keep our beliefs updated. This process allows us to make new discoveries about others and ourselves. Now we do not become stubborn and rigid.

We are about to begin an educational process that will teach us how to let go of emotional issues that prevent us from having what we want in life.

Every one of us has accumulated unresolved issues about families, friends, leaders, coaches, teachers, life, and ourselves in general. These unresolved issues get in the way of learning new things. When someone tries to teach us something new, what we believe to be true prevents us from being taught.

We experience the phenomena of “don't confuse me with the facts” or “don't confuse me with the truth.” We insist on holding onto beliefs even if they are not true. Why do we do this?

It has something to do with how our mind works. The average person's mind has about 40,000 thoughts a day going through it. The interesting thing is that only about 2,000 of these thoughts have to do with the present. That means that about 38,000 of those thoughts come from the past. Why is this?

We go through life experiencing things and making decisions about what they mean. When something happens that we don't understand or seems unfair and can't be solved, we are told by others to forget about it and go on with our lives.

The truth is, we can't forget. These unresolved feelings are stored in the subconscious part of our mind and they leave us with a deep unresolved question of, “Why me?” “Why did this happen to me?”

When something happens to us today, which reminds us of an unpleasant and unfair event of the past, the old feelings also come back. They warn us of a possible danger. Along with these feelings come a flash of thought that “jogs the memory.”

This often occurs so fast that we don't notice it, but it happens just the same. This is part of our automatic recall learning system and once again we feel, “Why Me?” We refer to these phenomena as having our “buttons pushed.”

This Pocket Wisdom Insights eMod will allow you to:

• Uncover what is not working in your life
• Discover an achievable solution
• Discard what is not working
• Replace what is not working with what will work

“Pocket Wisdom Insights for Life Part 2: Passage To Adulthood” is very different from traditional education or linear learning used in most workshop and classroom experiences. Linear learning process is appropriate for learning new information. eMod Learning Systems, powered by Personal Learning Technology™ is appropriate when a process of unlearning and re-learning is required.

This eMod course presents information in a way that allows the mind to sort through life experiences without discarding information prematurely. The process can be compared to assembling a jigsaw puzzle, each section of this learning module gives you more pieces. You don't want to throw any of them out. Each piece of information will fit into its proper place by the end of this course.

All you have to do is to be willing to gather all the pieces of information and let your natural process of resolution work for you. In other words, change is a natural ability we all have. When we have all the necessary information, we can change those things we need to change. This Pocket Wisdom eMod course is designed to allow you to gather all the information you need, to make whatever changes you choose.

This is a process of looking at your life from a new perspective and deciding if there are any beliefs about yourself and others that ‘ain't so’.

When we let go of beliefs about others and ourselves that are no longer true, we can develop Emotional Self-Control.

With Emotional Self-Control:

• We would no longer allow other people to push our buttons.
• We would no longer react to the anger, blame, hurt or guilt of others.
• We would be able to set our goals and not get side tracked by others.
• We would no longer react to control or be controlled by what other people think.
• We would no longer be vulnerable to emotional manipulation by others.

---