Resilience Hack #4: Emotional weather forecasting 🌈

What does the weather look like today? Chance of feeling gloomy? Foggy thinking? Periods having a sunny disposition? Today’s hack is about being your own emotional weather forecaster. Choose some common weather symbols you’d like to use, a small number is often better but if you want to get fancy and go all in on a true meteorological reading be my guest. Maybe you’ve chosen these common weather patterns:

• Rain 🌧
• Cloud ☁️
• Partial Sun⛅️
• Sun 🌞
• Thunderstorm ⛈

What’s your expected weather pattern? Sunny periods ☀️? Rain ☔️followed by cloud ☁️? Expected emotional thunderstorm around 4:00pm when you have a meeting with your boss ⛈? There are two ways this exercise will help strap a rocket pack to your resiliency.

1. You build emotional awareness. A critical part of activating resilience involves self-monitoring. If your weather forecast has lots of downpours, thunderstorms or heavy clouds you’re creating an expectation that those feelings will dominate your day. Perhaps you can include a brief period of high winds where a resilient mindset ‘blows’ away the rain, cloud and gloom to prepare for sunny periods.
2. You notice and name. Our first resilience hack introduced psychological distancing as a way to avoid becoming how you feel. Noticing and naming is another way to put some distance between our feelings and behavior. Rain, cloud and thunderstorms may not be ideal weather patterns but they can’t actually hurt us. The same is true of our feelings. While they may feel unpleasant, only we can give them the power to hurt us. Weather forecasting allows you to neutralize or nullify painful of difficult feelings by labelling them as simple weather patterns. Booyah!

Today, create an emotional weather report for your morning, afternoon and evening. Happy forecasting.