GÜLTEN EMINOVSKI
- REINVENTION OF WELL-BEING FOR CHILDREN
Gülten has a true fiery soul, and throughout 15 years she has developed and authored the ideaStopMob (StopBullying), which she uses for her job in an elementary school. She believes that children’s comfort is crucial to their learning as well as their personal well-being. In this article, we go in depth with the idea of the author and who she is.
By Kasper de Miranda
Published November 19, 2021
What do the culturaldifferences mean?
I get Gülten on the phone and am immediately met with a talkative (chatty, talky) bundle of joy who is ready to tell me about her new, exciting project. It quickly makes sense that she helps create comfort for others because I am already smiling from ear to ear shortly into our conversation.
Gülten is 46 years old and lives in Albertslund with her two children. her parents came to Denmark from North Macedonia in 1973 to earn money and create a career, and they actually had the intention to travel back. The family stayed in Denmark, which became Gülten’s home country, and she grew up here in a big, shared apartment with her family; there were ten people in a four-bedroom apartment. The shared apartment was a place filled with love and care – the parents wanted a good future for Gülten. Even so, it was not completely possible to avoid cultural differences in Gülten’s school life, which is why she, already at a young age, began to reflect on herself psychologically. Because Gülten was not experienced enough to take care of these psychological questions herself, she developed an extreme lack of confidence during her high school years, and this had an impact on her performance in school.
How the idea blossomed
Throughout her education, her confidence grew stronger. She was accepted into pedagogical studies, where she quickly found that she had a big interest in the topic. From here, she started developing her written and professional skills, and she did well in her exams.
When she soon after started working at an elementary school, she was not entirely done with her education. She chose to pursue an education in psychotherapy, which ultimately served as a springboard for the creation of the StopMob (StopBullying) project.
While taking her psychotherapy degree, she had a talk with a teacher. Gülten says, ”A teacher told me, ’Imagine you’re swimming in the ocean. Right now, you are close enough to the shore that you can still swim back. But if you keep going, you will either drown or end up on the other side.’ I did not understand a word of what he meant, so I thought, ’Yes, yes, I will just keep going,’ but after two years, I understood what he meant. When you study psychotherapy, you work on yourself, your thoughts, and your feelings. You become aware of things in your body you do not understand. That was very different from what I was used to.”
Gülten realized that the things she learned during her education had a big positive impact on her ability to influence her own thought patterns. If she could learn that from the high level of the teacher, she must be able to teach it to children so they could learn the same things early on in life. She was an adult before she learned to identify negative thought patterns, and she wanted to help children develop this skill from the very beginning of their school years. She started recalling different moments from her own childhood when she had naturally felt uncertain.
This was where the development of the methods began. She started visualizing and creating images when she talked to children. Her idea came from a thought she had that well-being is not a school course with only one correct result, but that you can help influence children’s thought patterns in a positive direction through habits and repetitions through organized methods. With this understanding of comfort and well-being, children could gain access to a life with more happiness. The book is based on the belief that positive growth and self-awareness can be encouraged through playtime and dynamic learning, which can be done by implementing a methodical approach to comfort and well-being at schools.
Through Gülten’s work with StopMob (StopBullying), she has ended up in many funny situations. Laughing, she tells me through the phone about a situation she was in where two children had gotten into an argument and a substitute teacher had not been able to control the situation. The substitute, who did not know about Gülten’s methods, pulled the children toward Gülten, and Gülten told them, ”Okay, so your elephant is big and blue. But yours… I can’t quite decide.” The children immediately recognized Gülten’s methods, saw the situation from a different perspective, and the conflict between them dissipated. A noticeably confused substitute stood beside them, smiling, when the children went back to playing. Gülten continues, ”By talking about the methods for the feelings, you can talk more effectively about the feelings when you are ready for it. Even though the book’s methods are for children, it also works for adults.”
Becoming a writer
Gülten tells me that she has written a lot of things throughout the years, but that so far, StopMob (StopBullying) is her biggest project. Years ago, when she lost her voice because of a lump in her vocal cords, she stumbled upon a competition on a website for Reach for Change. The competition was searching for ideas on how to change children’s everyday lives for the better. She sent them her idea, StopMob (StopBullying), and its goal and purpose, and they contacted her within a couple of weeks. They wanted her to take part in the competition. From here on out, things went uphill; StopMob (StopBullying) won second place among 60 applicants in the program. This allowed her to strengthen the creation of the project. It was difficult to get it up and running on top of a full-time job. She became set on turning it into a book. After some time, the project started participating in elementary schools’ anti-bullying strategies, and the program received financial support so it could be used in classrooms. This gave Gülten the confidence to believe in the project, a confidence that needed to be preserved after having been met with some resistance.
Gülten believes that it was important to write the book because the methods can create serenity within children. This means that they will be able to leave elementary school more emotionally independent and more confident in both themselves and their social skills, which will also lead to a reduction in anxiety and depression.
“I’m fighting for well-being to become a course at school. There is math, Danish, English, and so on, but there’s nothing called well-being. And I wish there were. Right now we have class meetings, but that is incomplete and not enough,” Gülten says on the phone with the clear confidence she told me she had developed. The cognitive angle has meant a lot to her since she got her education in psychotherapy, and she expands on her reasons why: “Behind every thought is a feeling, behind every feeling a kind of behavior, and behind every kind of behavior is a body. This can be both positive and negative. Negative social circles give you low self-esteem, and positive social circles give you high self-esteem. If we had a course called ‘StopMob’ (StopBullying) or just something related to well-being, I don’t care, it could really help build up that self-esteem. It is these things that children know about a lot of the time, but we have to articulate them through these methods.”
To Gülten, it is a gift to be among the people helping to bring out these tendencies in children. According to herself, she has reached her goal when the children have become more able to reflect on their lives and when they can look at situations from the outside rather than feel anxiety from them and get stuck in their thoughts. What children learn is to develop themselves as individuals.
Gülten emphasizes that if she were to give one piece of advice to other fiery souls with meaningful ideas, it would be to make sure their ideas make sense. If you believe in the idea, it is legitimate–– and you will be met with resistance as well as success. It is crucial to stay committed to your ideas, like Gülten has incorporated Danish culture and humor into her project, even though this can also be a risk in terms of international recognition. The essence of the project is found in the creator’s vision, and the essence of StopMob (StopBullying) comes from Gülten’s own philosophy of life.