ABOUT EFT

WELCOME to Emotional Fitness Training Inc.   (EFTI). Learn about why I founded this self help company and a bit about how Emotional Fitness Training™ works. 

ABOUT ME AND WHY I FOUNDED EFTI    My name is Katherine Gordy Levine.  I am also called Chrysthemum, Mom, GrannyKat, sometimes Cranky Old Lady, and occasionally, nastier names.  Why the nasty names? I challenge ideas.  My family is my first passion; all families and children my second passion; and reading, writing, and sharing knowledge my third.  I write about  how to get, stay, and live emotionally fit which is why I founded Emotional Fitness Training, Inc.

I have many “expert” credentials  including teaching human behavior at two prestigious universities, directing children’s mental health crisis teams, and authoring two well relieved books.  For almost 14 years my husband and I were special need foster parents.  Nearly 400 boys and girls, mostly teens lived with us as members of our family.

I had been in the ivory towers of academia, and returned to the trenches as all of our foster children were all in trouble with the law. Being a foster parent, not only tested my sanity but taught me perfectly good parents and perfectly good kids were not sick or crazy or bad as so many wanted others seemed  to think. Much of what I had learned as an expert needed revising.

Perhaps the most important lesson I learned was that if I did not stay in control of my emotions, I could not expect my foster children to stay in control of theirs. This set me to exploring what was known about feelings and feeling management.  I practiced what I learned on myself.  Eventually what I learned lead me to  found Emotional Fitness Training, Inc.  If you want to read more about my professional credentials click here.  What follows next is a bit about Emotional Fitness and two exercises to give you an idea I try to help you get, stay, and live strong.

ABOUT EMOTIONAL FITNESS TRAINING™ Emotional fitness is about controlling negative feelings.  Such feelings seek to control you.  Negative feelings are signals telling you something is wrong and you need to take care and to act to change the situation.  Negative create two problems:

First problem: Negative feelings often  send confusing or and even false signals. Acting on a confused or wrong signal usually creates more problems then it solves.

Second problem: Negative feelings energize you in their effort to get you to act quiekly.  To a negative feeling everything is a 911 emergency.  The negative feeling’s energy pushes you to act  without thinking; doing so often makes the situation worse.  Moreover, when you act without thinking  means the feeling has hi-jacked you, owns you, and controls you. Not good news.

SOME GOOD NEWS: You already own many of the skills you need to stay strong and in control.  Emotional fitness is about stopping to think before  you act.  ”Think before you act” is the most frequent advice given children by the grown-up surrounding them.  Learning to do so was not easy and remains difficult for many of us. The more stressed we are the more difficult it becomes to delay acting on negative feelings.

Six skills are involved: Feeling awareness, feeling measurement, self-soothing, thinking about what to do, acting wisely on what you can change, and letting go of what you cannot change.  Every Emotional Fitness Training™ program is designed to strengthen those skills. The following two exercises are examples of those used in all our programs.

Exercise one: Remember What Matters.  Too often we fret and worry about the small stuff.  What really matters? As all the sages have preached and the researchers are showing is practicing kindness.  It strengthens you, it helps others and it moves the world toward peace.

Exercise two; Calming Breath.  Take a deep breathe in, hold it for a few seconds while you think about what matters, then breathe out slowly, smile gently and say “Ahhhhh.”

Lots of practice is needed for these exercises to work, but they work.  Follow EFT’s Blog and we will send a link to down load our Remember What Matters poster.  This will remind you to practice these two exercise.  Doing so will help you get, live, and stay strong.