Is anyone in your family ever tired and grumpy right when family home evening is supposed to start? Or do you have a mix of tired adults and wired little ones? Whatever the case is at your house, one thing’s certain: everyone’s mood affects how family home evening unfolds.
You can be a powerful influence on the overall mood during family home evening. If you learn ways to show up to FHE happy and excited, it will rub off on others. If it doesn’t, there are ways to address “off” attitudes.
Here are 3 tips for dealing with mood issues.
MOOD ISSUES
1 – Think 15 minutes FHEs to start with.
First, if you have a good resource for lessons and activities, that immediately relieves stress and lifts your mood. Then if you have an amount of time in mind, you can focus on tuning into family time for only that amount of time. Having a time boundary helps relieve stress, too. Could you disconnect from whatever else is going on and jazz yourself up for 15 minutes? I promise, everything will be right back where it was when the 15 minutes are over. And this is a way to show your family members that they are more important than the phone calls, cleaning, bills, and all the other work you have to do.
My favorite way to quickly de-stress and re-focus is by using a process called “Speed Through Stress” developed by Dr. Rob Pennington. Here’s a short video of the method and here’s a link to Rob’s site where you can sign up and get a 20-minute video + a 50-page workbook for free. This has been a life-saver for me. I highly recommend that you check this out.
2 – Connect with how others are feeling.
Each member of the family comes to family time with feelings and needs, and sometimes those feelings don’t help contribute to a pleasant family time. What do you do? Well, if you did step 1 and are in a pretty good place emotionally, then you can start to connect with people and mentally guess how they are feeling and what they need. If you can figure those things out, ideas will come for how to shift things. If you can’t figure it out, maybe start everyone on something FHE-ish and pull the person who’s having a rough time aside and gently ask some questions. Get curious and ask how they feel and what’s going on. Then listen! Listen for how they are feeling and what they need. Don’t put any judgements or criticisms out there – stay curious and help them figure out what’s going on.
Is it worth the time to do this? You bet! If you don’t connect with your family, FHE will bomb. If you do and you can connect heart to heart with someone in your family, that’s fabulous! Isn’t connecting what it’s really all about anyway?
3 – Are you getting enough sleep?
Do you know how much sleep YOU need? Not how much you can get by on, but how much your body actually needs to feel energetic all day long?
Frankly, at one point, I didn’t even know what it would feel like not to be at least a little sleep deprived every day. I had no idea how wonderful I would feel when I consistently got enough sleep. If I had known earlier, I would’ve made sleep a higher priority a long time ago.
MOODS MATTER
Mood issues are a big deal and I encourage you to address the thing in this post that stood out to you the most and experiment with it. Whether it be figuring out how YOU can show up to family time excited and energized, how you can connect heart to heart with your family, or how much sleep you need, do yourself a favor and go for it!
As you get better at these things you will enjoy more and more …
Happy Home Evenings!
No Comments Yet