I hope you are all safe during this unusual time. It can be hard to stay calm when there is fear and unease in the media, stories of self-quarantine, and shortages of key supplies. Times like this often brings out fear, stress, and deep emotions.
How do we stay informed and keep our anxiety at bay at a time when you are surrounded by uncertainty? I would like to share a few tips to help you maintain your mental health wellbeing.
Relax your body: You can achieve this by doing things that work for you such as —taking deep breaths, stretching, meditation, praying, or engage in activities you enjoy.
Reward yourself: Pace yourself between stressful activities, and do something fun after a hard task.
Express your emotions: Take the time to talk about your experiences and feelings with loved ones and friends. Avoid keeping emotions bottled up.
Sit down and journal: Maintain a sense of hope and positive thinking; consider keeping a journal where you write down things you are grateful for or that are going well.
Shame is the major reason that keeps a lot of “Sexual Assault Survivors” in silent. Often many survivors think that it is their faults to what have happened to them and they choose not to speak up because of the shame they carry.
Today, I would like to talk about how shame developed and three ways to develop shame resilience.
Brain structure building is a continuous and complex process, which began before we were born. During the first few years of our lives, billions of neurons transmit and exchange electric signals to form different circuits and connections. Our experience and environment will also affect the development of our circuits and connections.
Today I want to talk about our brain structure and the famous “Amygdala”, it is the alarm that triggers the “Fight and flight” response.
Recently it has been my honor to be one of the speakers at the promotion of the Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative (YSEALI) project that is jointly hosted by the state government and Brown University.
As part of the project, I hosted a workshop relating to leadership ability and style. The workshop mainly used the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) to test and assess these young leaders’ leadership ability and styles. MBTI is a character assessment theory that was developed based on a Swiss psychiatrist, Jung’s theory of psychological types. Approximately 3.5 million people participate in the MBTI assessment annually. 80% of the top 500 financial corporations in the world utilize the MBTI assessment for important decisions such as recruitment, the pairing of staff and roles, establishment of teams and departments etc. MBTI can also be used for career planning, social network development and interaction, marriage education, improvement of learning and workplace efficiency etc.
MBTI indicates a personality trend, there is no right or wrong answer because every person has different habits. MBTI suggests that every person would express his personal behavior, skills and attitude based on his own personality type, and every MBTI personality type has its potential as well as shortcomings.
MBTI assesses and describes a person’s personality trend in receiving messages, making decisions and perceiving life in four dimensions. These four dimensions are:
How we get energized:Extraversion (E) – Introversion (I)
How we take in information: Sensing (S) – Intuition (N)
How we make decisions:Thinking (T) – Feeling (F)
How fast we make decisions:Judging (J) – Perceiving (P)
None of these personality results are better or worse, our society needs different types of talents. The important point is to understand one’s direction of development and make a wise career plan, improve learning and workplace efficiency and improve interaction with others. Similarly, a corporation can only design the appropriate encouragement mechanism, establish the ideal team to fulfill its needs and improve interaction between different departments if it has a full understanding of its staff.
Acceptance and nurturing are the first steps to taking back control. We tend to avoid, hide or numb our emotions. However, emotions don’t disappear just because we won’t face them. It will change form and may show up destructively in different areas of our life.
Today, I will talk about how to identify, express, and manage our emotions.
