5. Was there a specific event, person, or interaction in your life that significantly altered your emotional style? Was this shift for better or worse?
5. Was there a specific event, person, or interaction in your life that significantly altered your emotional style? Was this shift for better or worse?
Certain aspects of my emotional style were forced to develop at a young age because I played basketball, soccer, and danced. These time consuming activities (along with school) left me little free time. My attention style quickly fell towards the focused end. I had to learn to manage my time and focus on what needed to be done at a certain time, and tune out everything else I needed to complete also. Basketball and soccer both shifted my social intuition style to the socially intuitive side, as reading the competition’s body language became important for me during games. However, my resilience style was significantly affected when I tore my ACL the night before the first league basketball game. I had always worked hard in my athletics and dance, but they all came fairly natural to me. Being set back by a year long injury, I realized that if I wanted to return to any kind of athletics that I could not let this unfortunate situation become an unshakeable ordeal. It was throughout the next year of physical pain and mental difficulty that I realized the strength of my determination and tenacity. This shift, personally, was for the better because it allowed me to get past the especially tough days and gave me the ability to shake off the small setbacks that accompanied my rehab. If this injury hadn’t forced my resilience style in the way of resilient I would not have returned to basketball and I would no longer be dancing either.
While I agree that momentous changes can often bring about a large change in emotional style, I have found that incremental changes have made the largest impact on my emotional style overall. My mother has helped me to make the greatest changes in my emotional style.
When I was young, I had a very interesting way of speaking which made it difficult for other people outside of my family to understand me. Of course, I spent a lot of time in speech therapy. One therapist recommended my mother “model” how to speak correctly. This meant that every time I’d speak she’d repeat what I said the correct way, and often ended up speaking for me. This heightened my sensitivity to context and placed me in the more “tuned in” range because I knew I didn’t need to speak clearly when my mother was around. However, my social interactions were also navigated for me so when I was younger I was at the very puzzled end of the social intuition dimension.
When I went off to school I didn’t have the luxury of having a personal translator all of the time. Instead I had to depend on my skills in sensitivity to context to make up for my puzzled social intuition. Luckily, with resilience, I was able to completely shift how I interact with the world and through lots of hard work I now act as my mother’s voice when we go places. Luckily it was a shift for the better.
When I was about 12 years old, just starting the 6th grade, I took an aspirin without drinking any water. The aspirin attached to the walls of my stomach, literally burning a whole through my stomach lining. It was unbearably painful. I was throwing up blood, passing out, and I ended up staying in the Intensive Care Unit at the hospital for a number of weeks.
Even at such a young age, this event significantly altered my Outlook on life. Once having a mostly Negative or pessimistic Outlook on life, staying in a hospital bed for so long caused me to be thrilled by even the most simple aspects of life. I used to always expect the worst and see the downside in everything. After release from the hellish hospital, the sunshine was gold. Mexican food was gourmet dining. My friends and family were angels on Earth. Ever since the incident, I have retained this largely Positive Outlook in my Emotional Style.
The shift was undoubtedly for the better, but I’m curious as to whether this dramatic change in my Emotional Style is a cause of my experience staying in the hospital, age, or a combination of both. I often wonder what my Outlook would be like if I hadn’t ever experienced the hardship. Genetically speaking, one of my parents has a highly Negative Outlook while the other is hugely Positive. I suppose I could have naturally gone down either path.
Major shifts in Emotional Style often accompany big changes, thus it is not surprising I slid almost entirely from one end of an emotional continuum to the other when I moved in seventh grade. In grade school, I had been on the negative end of the Outlook dimension, and it wasn’t hard for my parents and teachers to figure out why. The coloring assignments and basic arithmetic worksheets of grade school hardly kept my mind stimulated, and as soon as I grew bored I would get frustrated and sad. This gloom tinted my whole experience, and while most people associate childhood as a time of freedom and exploration, I remember it as a time of limits, boredom, and overall negativity. When I moved, though, my whole experience shifted. I suddenly found an abundance of stimulating coursework, interesting elective classes, and supportive teachers at my disposal. I traded in a metal playground for a mental playground, and I could not have been more excited by the upgrade. Suddenly school was not a source of frustration, it was a catalyst for growth. My whole outlook changed and everything felt right. Where before I saw only negative possibilities, I now saw a whole world of opportunities and potential. This positivity carried over into other aspects of my life and I finally felt like I was in the right place.
Last summer I spent six weeks living in Africa working with street children. I was going alone and we had planned for me to go live with friends of ours in Nairobi. A couple of weeks before I left our friends moved, leaving me with a plane ticket to Africa and no where to go. My family and I spent two weeks searching for a place for me to go. About a week before I was supposed to leave we found a place in Uganda that I could go to. The whole trip caused me to become much faster to recover from setbacks. Being in Africa and working in an orphanage also increased my positive outlook on life.
During the middle of my senior year, my teachers and staff chose to strike. This was a challenging time for myself as well as my classmates as we tried to maintain positive outlooks on the situation as well as maintaining our grades. The Resilience style measures one’s ability to recover from setbacks, and when the strike ended, it was a sink or swim type of situation. I could have chosen to give up on my classes and only focus on graduation. That would have been the easy option. Instead, I, and several of my classmates, chose to recover quickly from the setback, even staying after school for several hours to catch up on material we had missed during the strike. I discovered how quickly I needed to catch up in my Advanced Placement classes in order to take the final AP test at the end of the year. The aftermath of the strike was a wakeup call to myself that I needed to recover quickly and put in extra work if I wanted any college credit. While the strike itself was a saddening thing, it brought out my inner drive and positive outlook to do what needed to be done to get the credit I wanted.
I think my emotional style has changed a lot in the past few years, especially this past year. I think that in my earlier teens, for various reasons, I became very self-aware, to the extent that I was constantly questioning whether anything I thought about myself was real. For the most part, this was because I had internalized the doubt others had in me. However, I think I shifted back towards equilibrium somewhat. I’m now more confident in who I am, and my overall outlook has become more positive as well, though it still varies a lot day-by-day. As such, I think I’ve become a lot more outgoing and opinionated than I’ve ever been before.
Growing up with a difficult childhood forced me to be at the extreme low end of the Resiliency Dimension. Going through many rough patches in my life forced me to have to be “Fast to Recover” in order to survive and live a normal, happy life. While I see resilience as a positive feature in myself, I think that it also sometimes makes me callous and insensitive to people who are slower to recover. When people are upset over things I find trivial, I sometimes think “get over it” or “it could be so much worse.” Sometimes, I envy people who are able to be upset over small things, because it indicates to me that they have emotional space for small things, and that their mind is not being overwhelmed with bigger problems. The resilience in my emotional style is a great feature, but if I could trade it for a less traumatic childhood I would without question.
Being diagnosed with Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome, Celiac disease, and lactose intolerance all within three years has forced me to adopt a stronger sense of Self Awareness. Often times my POTS will make me tired or drowsy resulting in an ultimate lack of emotion and I must be aware of this sudden change. Having these disorders has forced me to become willing to ask for help and more aware of how my body feels. My emotions can be sporadic when my POTS or Celiac’s flares up and I have to be aware of my symptoms and how to treat them. I have become more aware of my emotions and feelings, and am much stronger in coping with my disorders. Becoming more Self Aware has been extremely beneficial and is a strength that will assist me throughout life. Being in touch with your emotions and your body provides you with the knowledge to cope in adverse situations.
There have been a few events that have shifted my emotional style, changing me from a very introverted, shy kid into a much more confident and outgoing person. One of the biggest events was when I went on an immersion trip for three weeks to Germany. The combination of an entirely new culture, and the desire to not squander this amazing opportunity forced me to consciously get out of my comfort zone, speak up, and change how I acted for an extended period of time. The immersion trip changed my emotional style, mostly the self-awareness dimension and the social intuition dimension. For the self-awareness dimension, I became more aware of how I acted in different situations from trying to overcome my shyness and quietness. For the social intuition dimension, I became more socially intuitive through noticing the differences in German culture and American culture. Overall, I think the shift was very positive, since after that immersion I was much more open to trying new activities and clubs, and became a lot less shy.
A series of events and interactions — and people themselves — altered my emotional style intensively in a variety of levels when I first became interested in foreign languages. English is not my first language, so the learning process has overall shifted my emotional (and cognitive) mindset completely. By learning a new language, I had to indirectly immerse myself in a different culture of mine, so it has been causing implications on how I can express my emotions through an odd language to a group of people whose communication means are not the same of the one that has modeled who I am — Portuguese language. For example, in order to become proficient in another language, I believe we must work on the following emotional traits: attention, social intuition, and sensitivity to context. The first one, attention, is a must when we are taking the very first steps when learning a different language — I would point out grammar as clear example of that, since it requires time, patience, and dedication. In addition, different cultures have different social codes and we have to learn them in order to communicate effectively. Finally, social intuition may vary as we become more sensitive to the context we found ourselves in. It feels like we become a new person and therefore more resilient and tolerant. If we speak a different language, we perceive a somewhat different world because we do change our emotional style.
Poxa, super curtir seu comentário! Parabéns, Duck.