Dear Poppyxo:

When you think regarding your students: “If you just listen to me & try these things out your suffering will ease or end all together”, it is the same “people saving mode thinking” you referred to in your Nov 17 (five days ago) reply to a member. You wrote there regarding your mother: “I went  in to ‘people saving mode’ thinking I could save her, I can help her, I can make her  see her ways.”

In that comment you indicated this people-saving-mode thinking doesn’t work. You wrote: “never worked, never does, you can’t change people, only your response or yourself. So now, when this arises, I simply keep my cool”.

Oct 17, in regard to your boyfriend, you wrote: “I am results driven so I say ‘ok so what are  we  going to do about this?’ …I feel, that his situation could be made better if he took a different approach to his current one”.

No wonder the same people saving mode  of your thinking which applied to your mother, to your boyfriend, also applies to the students you work with.

Habits of thinking-feeling-believing are very difficult to change.

Based  on my experience with my own people saving  mode  of thinking is that when in that mode I misunderstood people and reality. People are not predominantly rational. People are predominantly emotional. So when you offer your rational solutions to the students, you are offering them the rational, ignoring the reality that it is not the rational that drives them.

You can’t go inside the brain of a student and ease that fear, calm it, make it  go away. If you could, and  did, then you could present your rational suggestion, or the student may see  it himself or herself right away.

Fear is a  very  powerful emotion. Reason doesn’t soothe it.

What  do you think of my input so far?

anita