Brain Fact Friday on ”Improving Self and Social-Awareness” After Reading Dr. Perry‘s ”What Happened to You”

Welcome back to the Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast for Brain Fact Friday and EPISODE #169 on “Improving Your Self and Social-Awareness” through Dr. Perry’s What Happened to You[i] book and our insightful interview with Dr. Perry and Steve Graner on EPISODE #168. In Today’s Brain Fact Friday, You Will Learn: ✔︎ How to improve your self and social-awareness after reading this book by thinking about the areas that hit you on an emotional level.✔︎ Tips for cleaning up your emotions, so that we can be more resilient in the face of adversity.✔︎ Strategies that you can use right away to apply The Neurosequential Model in your classroom, sports, or other work environments. After speaking with Dr. Perry and Steve Graner this week on a deep dive of the book he wrote with Oprah Winfrey What Happened to You, I could pick out many important lessons to focus on for this week’s brain fact Friday, and will revisit this interview in future episodes, but if I had to pick just one, it would be to see if you can use the lessons in his book to improve your self and social awareness. Dr. Perry reminded us that “there’s motor, cognitive, social and emotional capabilities that remain unexpressed in many people” and the purpose of this podcast is to help us as parents, teachers and coaches to understand these SEL competencies in ourselves, and others, with strategies that we can all use to further develop these skills that are not automatic. They require practice. I picked out 6 SEL competencies to focus on in this podcast, and you can go back and listen to the Lessons Learned from our TOP 100 Episodes[ii] that ties in these 6 SEL Competencies as a review. HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR SELF-AWARENESS: As you’re reading Dr. Perry’s book, whether it’s your first read, or 21st read, I encourage you to think about what parts give you an emotional charge. Dr. Perry mentioned that he went back and forth from Oprah’s difficult emotional stories, to challenging neuroscientific topics on purpose, to provide a regulating back and forth pace, just like we do with athletics, and high intensity interval training,  There was an intentionality to the way the book was written to help us to not become overwhelmed with the content and they do remind us in the beginning, that if we do, to just put the book down, and come back to it. The end of the book powerfully ties in Oprah’s story where she makes sense of her life and relationship with her mother. With this lesson in mind, can you make sense of your own life by looking for themes of what happened you? What themes came up for you while reading the book? If you haven’t read the book yet, it’s not difficult to think about things that push your buttons, whether at home or in the workplace. Think about your interactions with others and whether these themes show up in your life. Dr. Dan Siegel[iii] talks about being able to “Name it to Tame it” and Marc Brackett from the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence reminds us that we can unlock the power of our emotions with the “Permission to Feel.”[iv] Write them down and when you are ready, you can pick the one that stands out the most to you and clean it up. Self-awareness goes a long way here. Go back and listen to Dr. Carolyn Leaf’s BONUS EPISODE[v] on Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess to help you to make sense of whatever it is that comes up for you when reading this book.  She has a simple 5-step process that can be used to help you to unpack and make sense of these emotions that we all have, (Dr. Leaf herself uses this process to keep her mind operating optimally) so that emotions are expressed and healed, instead of turned inwards into toxic thoughts that will impact our mental health and well-being. This does take some time to first of all identify emotions that are bothering us, and then making sense of where they came from, to clean them up, but there’s nothing like the feeling of having a clear mind when we are able to do this. HOW TO IMPR