Do you know how many emotions a human being can experience? It is somewhere around 34,000. Who would know when we use about 3 of them to describe how we are feeling. Growing our emotional intelligence is a way to both deepen our personal understanding of our inner life and more accurately help us deal with the true emotion we may be experiencing. The Feeling Wheel was developed by Dr. Gloria Wilcox from the Gottman Institute. The wheel is a wonderful way to either help clients or use for ourselves to begin to identify feelings and dig deeper to understand what might actually be behind or underneath some of the ways we may be experiencing a particular day, hour, or moment. (Please see Feeling Wheel Below) The inner wheel is created with six basic emotions; mad, scared, joyful, powerful, peaceful and sad. From these six, we can move further out to explore other emotions that may be underlying the more general feelings we may be experiencing. We can then move one more rung out to another ...
I used to really enjoy mowing the lawn and attending to the landscape. I would weed whip and rake and water. I don’t know why or when it happened, but I lost the will to meticulously manicure a yard. Don’t get me wrong; the yard still looked good because as a perfectionist, I can only let things go so far. I had not bought flowers for the landscaping in probably two years. If they are going to survive, flowers have to be watered and tended to almost daily. I’ve lost many a flower pot because I fell down on my watering and pruning duties. That all changed this summer with the pandemic. I took a new look and liking to manicuring and shaping up the yard and landscaping. It started one day in late April on a trip to Kroger. Masked up and feeling uncomfortable, as I walked in, they had some really beautiful flowers, and it stopped me. I looked them over and chose two healthy Geraniums. It felt like a commitment to buy these living things with the realization I had to take care of them if th...