Garbage Can Tool

Concept: The Garbage Can Tool is used to help keep our inner selves clean, uncluttered, and free from harmful junk that can get us angry, make us feel worthless or ineffective, and distracts us from the important things in life. Negative words and actions from others are not necessarily personal attacks and we don’t need to react to them as such. The tagline is “I let the little things go”.

Hand Gesture: Have students stand up and place a hand on their waist, holding their elbow out to the side. Explain that this is their Garbage Can. With their other hand they can toss the offending garbage away. Have students pretend to throw pieces of garbage into their Garbage Cans.

Suggestions on how to introduce the tool to your students:

• Ask students What is garbage? What do you do with it when you don’t want it anymore?

• Explain that the Garbage Can Tool is where we place small irritations so they don’t get in the way of our day. Some behaviors are like trash…yucky, rude, and inappropriate, and not worth further attention. We can throw them away and forget about it. Little things we can throw away, big things we might need to address.

• On the board make a list of things that students say are little stuff, and those they say are big stuff. What are the similarities and differences between the two columns?

• Role play some of the little stuff situations with the students.

• Have a discussion of how and when you may be able to resolve of the of the big stuff issues.

Practice and implementation- choose from the following:

• Model the Tool by expressing appropriate upsets you realize you were holding onto (e.g., “I was upset by being in a rush this morning on my way to school and look, I’m going to throw that away so I can be here with all of you.”)

• After a transition do a “Scan for the Can” of any upsets from earlier in the day or the night before. Invite students to throw away any trash that might be remaining so that they can be focused and present in class.

• Extension conversation: you can talk about “recycling” as a metaphor for pulling garbage out of the can if something needs to be addressed and consider using “composting” when we simply need to sit on something until we are ready to deal with it.