My personal Sense of Control
Recently, more and more parents express that they feel exhausted, more irritable and frustrated. They often feel like they are failing in their parenting role as they are trying to juggle online or hybrid school, work from home, driving to the office, cooking, cleaning, and finding time for self care. Sometimes I hear parents saying that they don’t like their kids, that playing with them is boring and exhausting, that they are tired of cooking, cleaning, and wearing sweat pants every day. They say that they don’t want to play this “home game” anymore. They don’t like everyone being around and not having an outlet to go out, have a date night, dress up for a business meeting in person and not through the lenses of the camera when no-one sees their worn leggings and slippers…. What I had realized is that most of us still try to adjust to this new reality and that recently we all started to feel the underlying effects of the pandemic and the fact that our situation is not going to change soon. So what are we suppose to do now? Well, I believe that we need to try to find normalcy in such abnormal circumstances. Who said that we cannot have a date night in our living room, dress up, order fancy take out and dim the lights. Who said that we cannot let our children play tennis or frisbee with one of their closest friends and who said that we cannot go to the shore off season or camp on our back yard? Maybe theses are not the perfect ways of spending our time but for sure they will bring us a little joy and will bring some fresh air to our weekly “abnormal” routines.
The important life lesson is to focus on those aspects of our life that we have control over. The truth is that we all struggle with our personal sense of control. We tend to focus our attention not on things that we can control but on everything that we cannot change. It is not easy to shift our focus and acknowledge that our life do consist of things that we can control. If we cannot change something we need to let it go and not get upset about it. We need to focus on what we can change and stop worrying about everything else that is not included in our personal circles of control. We need to focus on things that we have influence over , impact on , and interest in. The secret to our personal sense of control lies in choices we make about our emotions, quality of relationships, and everyday decisions. The more self-awareness we have, the greater our sense of control is going to be!