We talked in a previous post entitled "Extend your Vocabulary to Stressbust™" about the relevance of the words we use and think with to expanding our StressBusting™ capability
And this week, we had to put this into action in real time.
The circumstances occurred on only the 2nd day of a last minute working vaction we treated ourselves to - see our post entitled "There is nothing at all wrong with a "Busman's Holiday" - and it is sure better than no holiday at all!" for further background context.
Now we love spending time with Her Majesty the Baby and we cherish every moment.
But this week our limited time at a local holiday park had to be carefully mapped out to enable us to continue to work while enjoying some quality down time together in the process.
And we rely on the Nursery as many paying parents do to enable us to make such plans.
But alas, on only the second day of our stay, the Nursery rang to ask us to collect Her Majesty, a 20 month old baby, because she had the audacity to have a "dirty" nappy twice in the same day (readers are invited to educate us as to what other types of nappy 20 month old babies have!), thus breaching their infant attendance policies, necessitating her taking a full 2 paid days out of Nursery.
So up went our work vaction in smoke.
The 2 days that ensued showed without doubt that there did not appear to be a jot wrong with Her Majesty, but those 2 days cost us £100.00 on Nursery, as its fees continue to apply in the case of absences dictated by unilateral application by them of discretionary policies.
We found that this situation, eminently avoidable as it potentially would have been by the exercise of a little patience and plain common sense, upset us a lot.
By sharing our feelings, we calculated our Stress Management Index™ had reached a high 8 - see "Have an SMI™ (Stress Management Index™) to accompany your BMI" to see how we calculated this.
And we concluded that this elevated SMI level was being caused by a combination of senses of anger, frustration, disappointment, helplessness and invalidation, not only for ourselves but for Her Majesty.
We tried to find a word that encompassed all of our feelings but came up short after extensive review of our existing vocabularies.
So we set about creating a new one.
The word we arrived at was "fizzworthy" because we felt it embodied the following:-
● the idea of "fizzing" over with a mix of emotions, like an opened champagne bottle
● a recognition that the facts resulting in our feelings were "worthy" of us feeling the way we did, so it was perfectly natural
● the concept that, like a lively opened bottle of champagne, the uncomfortable sense of fizzing over would eventually pass and be replaced by a more settled identification of a logical, corrective course of action.
By inventing this new word nowhere to be seen in the dictionary, we provided ourselves with a manageable context for our feelings, imprinted a limited lifespan on them and generated an outlet for ourselves.
Once we had done this, the uncomfortable feelings started to subside and we reminded ourselves that we had the rights as working parents if we wished to exercise them to seek sight of relevant policies being relied on and regular progress reviews, if it came to a point that denying there may be a problem became overtly troublesome "The Dangers of Denial to StressBusting™".
Because after a simple mathematical calculation exercise, we determined we simply could not and would not continue to afford wasted cost - see our post entitled "Break Time Quickie - The Importance of a Stressbusting™ “WTP” Analysis".
Creation of our new term - "fizzworthy" - in other words, enabled us to "Learn to "Observe" as opposed to merely "See" to Stressbust™ efficiently".
In other words, in the circumstances and on the facts, it empowered us to take positive and constructive action rather than to continue to dwindle and dwell.
For further techniques to help deal with the types of emotions described above, please see our previous posts entitled:-
"The Mirror Diffuser Strategy for Stressbusting™"
"Break Time Quickie – Disperse Aggression with an Ancient Technique"
As always, we would welcome thoughts from readers on the content of this post and comparable experiences of their own.
Fizzy love,
MikeyM™&LouLoU™ 😊😍😎🧡💛💕 xxxx