Week 2 of Mindful May and it's about the COB's

It has been a week since I asked you about your thoughts on the two chaps who were rude. Lots of you were quite shocked that this happened to adults as well as younger people.

It was very sweet of you to want to reassure me they were wrong. But that was part of the lesson. They were in the wrong and the two words that came up from all of you are cowardly and bullies.

This is what we are going to do with those words, we are going to use them to help protect ourselves from such attacks in the future. We are going to label them: when you label people like this you are making a conscious effort to distances them from yourself. That distance diminished the effect they can have.

So, we are going to label these bullies “Cowardly Opportunist Bullies” – COB’s for short. They are cowardly in that they would not normally behave like this if there was any change of being caught. They are opportunists because they are people who take advantage of opportunities as and when they arise, regardless of planning or principle. They are Bullies, because they expect their behavior to impact on another in a negative way, regardless.

As many of you said, these Cob’s are not real threats to anyone - just nasty people. Because they do this randomly we can’t plan for this interaction and nor should we. The best way to protect ourselves is to:

1. See them as Cob’s

2. Feel sorry for them because deep within them they have this need

3. Ignore their words and deeds

I want you to imagine that like a skunk they have great clouds of stench around them. You would want to avoid any whiff of skunk landing on you or your clothes. So, emotional stay away from the words and deeds, do not let them get anywhere near you. You can illustrate this, as a poster, to remind yourself what to do.

Next week, we will talk about some of the bulling you have experienced yourselves.