What Students Say About Practicing Mindfulness

At the end of every mindfulness unit, I ask students to write a brief note to a friend who knows nothing about practicing mindfulness. In the note, I ask each student to describe how it feels to rest in mindful meditation, and how the student now uses mindfulness in daily life. 

Below, I have listed comments straight from students who have completed a mindfulness unit with me. I have quoted student comments verbatum; so, spelling errors were not left out.

• I think mindfulness has definitely helped me become more aware of focusing. I learned to bring my attention back when it wandered. Mindfulness helped me with hard and confusing tests. 
• It feels sort of strange at first but it is very peaceful. I can’t really tell exactly how I use mindfulness at home, but I do know it helps me when I am mad at my brother. At school it helps me focus on the work I need to do.
• Mindfulness will help you concentrate. I use it every time I have a hard test or a lot of work to do because it brings my attention back to the test and the problem.
• When I am sad or kind of in a bad mood I take about 10 breaths and I get relaxed. I learned this from mindfulness. I enjoyed learning about mindfulness because it helps me forget about my problems so I can focus on the things I need to do in peace and focus.
• Mindfulness is a way of understanding and being aware of feelings. It feels very relaxing to practice mindfulness and helps me focus. Mindfulness helps me before I start my homework because I get relaxed so I will do a better job.
• Practicing mindfulness has given me so much stress relief. I used the mindfulness things we learned when I am stressed out, or when I have an anxiety attack. This has been the best thing I have learned to help with anxiety.
• Mindfulness is something I learned from my counselor at school. I have learned to breath, and focus my thoughts on now instead of the past or future. This feels very calming and helps me feel more confident about my work, and helps me focus my attention in the right places. Mindfulness helps me most when I am nervous or stressed about something.

Best,

Kristine Kilgour, M.Ed., LPSC

School Counselor, Consultant, & Mediator

rfhscounselor@gmail.com

Social Media Cleanup Before Applying For Colleges or Jobs

Social media background checks are gaining prevalence in the modern world of applicant screening from college admissions boards to employers at major corporations. While the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) isn’t so sure about the ethicality of social media background checks, they have still become commonplace for many companies and organizations throughout the United States.

In other words, if you are applying for college and/or hunting for a new job, chances are good that your prospective educational institution and employers are going to investigate your social media profiles. Where traditional background checks are generally instituted to look into the criminal histories, educational background, and experience of applicants, social media background checks investigate a different set of criteria. While unsavory social findings may not seem like they would have the same stakes as a major criminal conviction for schools and employers, they can still have the same ultimate result, which is losing your chance at the college acceptance and/or job you are seeking.

Luckily, your social media profiles are easier to clean up than any criminal history you may have. By viewing your Facebook profile, Twitter feed, LinkedIn page, Instagram page, blog, Flickr photostream, and other social media formats as extensions of your resume, and your college or job application, you can build your social media profiles and posts into resources that position you as the perfect candidate rather than unflattering posts that can potentially shatter a potential school or employer’s positive image of you. 

In order to do this, you merely need to know what colleges and employers are looking for when conducting their social media background checks.  

To get started in making sure your social media profiles shed a positive light on you, consider the following:

1. Watch Your Statuses and Comments: When employers browse your Facebook or Twitter pages, they look at the kinds of comments and statuses you have made in order to get a better sense of your online behavior. The theory is that, while you try to present yourself in a very favorable light during interviews, social media behavior can give prospective colleges and employers an idea of who you really are outside of school and  work. Profanity, complaints about former teachers, schools, or employers, or comments with a sexist, racist, or otherwise discriminatory connotation are all social media red flags that may cause colleges and employers to reconsider you as a competitive applicant.

2. Look Through Your Photos: Photographic proof of lewd or reckless behavior can be a huge turn off for schools and employers when it comes to assessing their applicants. Facebook photos depicting drug use, excessive alcohol consumption, full or partial nudity, vandalism, or any other destructive or illegal activities will cast you as a reckless partier rather than as a serious student or seasoned professional. Questionable photographs on social media sites are an especially large problem for recent graduates looking to gain college acceptance, or to break into the job market. 

3. Trim Down Your Groups, Likes, or Apps: Are you a passionate Farmville player? Do you list “Alcohol” as one of your interests? These are just a few of the behaviors that colleges and employers might not want to see from their applicants. Social media games aren’t necessarily a turn off for employers; however, someone who spends their days playing Farmville or Candy Crush on Facebook doesn’t always appear to be the most professional choice for a prospective student or job.

4. Consider Amending Your Friends List: Most colleges and employers won’t care too much if you have a couple thousand friends on Facebook; however, it’s never a bad idea to go through your friends list and trim it down to only the people you know well and frequently communicate with. If there’s a friend on social media who you think could make you look bad by either by posting obnoxious things on your wall or tagging you in inappropriate photos, it is a good idea to put that social media friendship on hold for now.

5. Check Your Blogs: Whether you’ve blogged on Facebook or on a separate website, read through your posts to see how they make you come across to others. Some blog writing can be professional, thoughtful, and perhaps even a boost to your college acceptance employment chances; and, these blog posts will be good to keep. Other blog writing can be petty, profane, and immature; and, when this is the case, you will want to delete or return these blog posts to draft status.

6. Look at Your YouTube Account: Many people forget about YouTube when cleaning up their online presence; however, if you’ve been a frequent video poster at any point in your time spent online, it’s worth a look. In most cases, YouTube videos are harmless; but, if you’ve ever uploaded anything that that could be considered offensive or anything that infringes a copyright, take it down just to be safe.

7. Restrict Tagging: One of the reasons that Facebook, in particular, represents such a threat to your chances of of college acceptance or getting hired is that it is unpredictable when tagging is involved. Even after you’ve cleaned your profile, you never know when a friend is going to tag you in a comment or photo that casts you in a questionable light. By adjusting your privacy settings so that you can review all tags before they show up on your profile, you can have better control of the story your Facebook profile is telling the world.

8. Set Your Profile to Private: If you absolutely don’t want your future college and employers looking at your social media profiles, then get to work making everything as private as possible. Twitter is inherently a public social networking site, and LinkedIn is a place where you should want to be found by potential college and employers. Facebook, on the other hand, makes it possible for users to set safeguards for their privacy. That way, certain profile elements, such as photographs, statuses, groups, and pages liked, can be kept invisible to non-friends; and, since most college acceptance committess and potential employers won’t be friends with you on Facebook when considering your application, privacy settings can be a good way for you to privatize your private live from those prying eyes.

9. Set Your Albums to Private: Alternatively, if you don’t want to entirely shut  potential colleges or employers out of your social media world, you can tailor your privacy settings to allow non-friends access to only specific parts of your profile. In other words, you can show off your statuses and info, but restrict access to your photo albums. Although it's not completely private, this generally serves as a good compromise, especially if most of your unflattering social media actions are contained to your photos.

Of course, if you have photos that you absolutely don’t want potential colleges and employers to see, it’s best to take them down. You might even consider adopting a “no photos” policy on Facebook, and resort to storing your photo albums on another cloud-based service that sees less traffic from potential employers.

10. Match Your LinkedIn Profile to Your Resume…and Vice Versa: Make sure your LinkedIn profile is up-to-date and accurate in relation to your resume. If you are presenting different information between the two resources, potential colleges and employers will red flag your application. Synchronize all of your information, and work to make LinkedIn a place for colleges and employers to learn more about your educational and work history.

Four Tried & True Anger Management Techniques To Help Your Teens

November, 2015 Parent Update

Self-Control/Anger Management

Watching your teen in a moment of anger can be scary.  Anger management with adolescents is not something most parents want to deal with; but unfortunately, it's something that often can’t be avoided. 

Below are four tried and true strategies (I've even used these with my own children) to help you, and your teen, deal with those moments in which anger takes over:

1. Communication: “There’s nothing wrong with feeling angry.”

At times as a teenager, my now adult son, would become so angry that we needed to help him regain control. Though he's heard it many times before, it was important for us to communicate to him the following message, “There’s nothing wrong with feeling anger; the important thing is what you do with it.”  By acknowledging his anger as a real, valid emotion, we took the first step in successful adolescent anger management.  Second, we gave him the opportunity to regain control by taking a few minutes to gather his thoughts; and then, by taking those moments to enable him to calmly talk about the incident, he could reconnect with his reasoning skill which had shut down during the episode.  As parents, it's important for us to put ourselves in our children's shoes when they're having any issue; and anger is no different.  As you know, it's difficult for any of us to react appropriately or effectively "in the moment" of extreme anger. Speaking out loud, or “verbalizing” about his anger, actually worked to help diffuse the angry situation.

Another central part of communication is listening. Listening to your teen sends the powerful nonverbal message to him or her that, “What you think and feel matters to me. I may not agree with or like what you say; but I’m willing to listen and consider your viewpoint.”  This is one of the best ways we helped with our teen’s anger management.  When kids know that we, as parents, as willing to listen to them, they become much more open. Listening also allowed us, as parents, to show understanding.  We imagined ourselves in our adolescent’s position, and attempted to see things from his viewpoint. Of course, this isn't always easy, and, active listening is definitely a skill that takes practice; but, it's probably the most effective skill you can aquire for your role as a parent.

2. Maintain a healthy lifestyle: Never underestimate the power of exercise.

Getting rid of stress by exercising regularly is very helpful for everyone, especially teens. Also, eating healthy, nutritious foods helps the body maintain proper energy levels, keeps the brain happy, and helps in behaviors related to not feeling well due to improper nutrition.  People who exercise regularly, and who eat well, are less likely to overreact to those annoyances and inconveniences that often crop up in daily life.  School sports, working out at the local gym, bike riding, and walking are good activities for teens to include in their schedules.

3. Improve time management skills

Teens are really busy, and planning their time wisely can be a real challenge.  However, one of the most common anger stressors is poor time management.  When our oldest boys were teens, and even before, we worked with them on maintaining a realistic schedule that would accommodate school, home, friends, and leisure activities.  When your teen is in a rush, and something goes awry in the schedule, he or she likely may react in anger.  Learning how to manage time effectively is a great way to avoid outbursts of anger in your adolescent. 

4. Create a positive learning opportunity

After the negative feelings exacerbated by the angry incident have subsided, we made sure to take a few moments of mindful reflection with our children in order for them to effectively process what had happened, and why it had happened, in order to help prevent the same situations from occurring again.  Of course, new situations will arise; and, at times, children will repeat the same behaviors that have triggered their angry outbursts before; but, remember, we're all a work in progress, and there's no such thing as an instant fix...consistency is so important for behavior change. When reflecting with your kids, try sharing some similar struggles and experiences that you have had, and suggest strategies to avoid such anger meltdowns in the future. Also, ask them for their input with strategies they can try, things that can be done differently next time, etc.  People very often misdirect anger that may be caused by a valid, yet completely different, and often bigger, issue, onto everyday annoyances and inconveniences.  There are valid reasons to become angry, but there are also triggers (sometimes called hot buttons) that can provoke an angry outburst.  When you're processing the occurrence, help your teen recognize the actual trigger of his or her anger, then brainstorm for effective ways he or she can try to handle it.  Remember, not everything works for everyone; so, there should be an interactive, brainstorming, and experimental process in which you help your teen find coping skills that work specifically for him or her.

Once your teen learns to recognize his or her anger triggers, he or she can take steps to avoid them; and, at that point, your teen will be much more effective at considering what reaction(s) he or she could have that will not produce unproductive anger responses when the trigger occurs again. This will help him or her have a more appropriate reaction in future anger producing situations.

As much as many adolescents like to assert their independence, they actually feel more secure when their parents are in charge of the situation, and able to pay attention to their concerns.  Adolescent anger management is an ongoing challenge in many families; but if you have strategies to use, your home can be a much calmer, happier place.

You will find that you may have additional tips to add to this list as you're working through anger management and coping skills with your kids.

Kristine Kilgour, M.Ed., LPSC

School Counselor

Rockport-Fulton High School

1801 Omohundro

P.O. Box 907

Rockport, TX 78381

(361) 790-2220

kkilgour@acisd.org