What's ALIVE in You? Importance of Regulation and Co-Regulation

“Emotional agility is about loosening up, calming down, and living with more intention. It’s about choosing how you’ll respond to your emotional warning system.”

― Susan David, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life

We are all wired to connect, to feel, and to sense into what is "alive" in us. It’s how our species has evolved to survive.

Our ability to understand our emotions is an important life skill. Emotions help us to communicate with those around us and can move us to act. So understanding what we’re feeling helps us to dig deeper into our behaviours and choices and communicate what we want with more clarity.

But we can go further than just noticing and acknowledging how we feel.

We can develop “choicefulness” in how our emotions impact us, and learn how we can regulate those emotions in ways which are mature, healthy, and sustainable.

Through strengthening this ability to regulate ourselves, we can then learn to regulate those around us through a process called “co-regulation”. This process evolved so that caregivers can regulate the nervous system of their offspring when it’s not developed enough to regulate itself, and is different at different phases of child’s development. But our ability to be regulated by someone else is something that we retain all of our lives, and receiving this kind of support is often easier than regulating ourselves - especially during times of distress.

In this workshop, Anya, Lana, and Saskia will

• give an introduction on Regulation and Co-regulation
• provide two tools that you can practice with yourself and with others

About the facilitators:

Anya Pearse

Anya is a writer, intuitive coach, and positive psychology educator who draws on her lived experience of almost two decades chronic illness. She combines her MSc in Applied Positive Psychology - “the science of what makes life worth living” - with her passion for self-compassion, psychological flexibility, self-as-instrument, and polyvagal theory. She enjoys helping positive difference makers navigate their experience with more kindness and understanding, providing the ‘missing link’ between positively impacting themselves and positively impacting others.

Lana Jelenjev

With more than 20 years experience in the field of educational consultancy, curriculum design and learning experience design, Lana brings her wealth of experience, dedication and passion in creating educational reforms to NEA. Her wish is to see equitable, inclusive and progressive schools that greatly amplify learners' strengths.  She loves facilitating spaces for conversations around the themes of giftedness, neurodiversity, strengths-based curriculum design and community building.

Saskia Wenniger

Saskia is a learning designer, a media scholar and Strengths based life coach specializing in ADHD and other neurodivergencies. She adores learning, interacting in communities of practice and collaborating with people who have similar interests and values, especially when it comes to co-creating a more (neuro)diversity-friendly future that can uplift the next generations into solving the problems of the future together. More emotional flexibility is key to that kind of collaboration.