Even those providing professional services are to keep their feelings and personal stories to themselves. Many professional clients and clients in positions of authority have shared with me that I am the one person with whom they can share their emotions and the basis for these emotions. They anticipate that disclosure at their worksite would be unacceptable.
The higher the position, the more power and the more authority one has, the greater is the possibility that anticipations will be based primarily on emotions, rather than on an accurate appraisal of one’s setting. Feedback from other people is likely to be distorted and inappropriately motivated. Rewards that are anticipated from one’s environment are often absent, while unanticipated kickback may frequently occur. As a result, accurate cognition and appropriate behavior are sometimes quite elusive. As a leader, one is likely to rely on Emotions, given the unreliability of either cognition or behavior. This is the opposite of what should be expected from those in a leadership role.
Emotional Anchors, Signals, and Coaching
As we bring anticipation into the picture, the concept of Emotional Anchor is important. There are points or events in our daily experience that bring us back to a fundamental emotion. The identification of emotional anchors can be of great benefit when we serve as a coach. Offering an appreciative perspective, we can help our client identify those moments and events that elicit deep emotions in them.
These moments and events can help our client identify not just their goals and aspirations, but also the baseline(s) that they use when anticipating something in their life. While a psychosocial template can be engaged to assess threat, it can also be used to assess potential pleasure and gratification. Working with a client, we can help them appreciate the emotional anchors in their life and the way(s) in which these anchors can be introduced into their psychosocial template.
Clearly, our Anticipations are often rooted in our emotions. The question to be posed is: How deep is this rooting, and how pervasive is the influence of emotions on our anticipations? One of Sigmund Freud’s later conceptions concerns the role of anxiety as an emotion that signals the potential emergence of unconscious content that will be threatening to us if allowed to enter consciousness. A splash of anxiety across our face moves us to anticipate unacceptable urges that could get us in trouble. Our anxiety might even arise from our genuine sense of Guilt. Our potential actions are not aligned with deeply held values.
As a coach, we should be aware that our clients’ emotions (and our own emotions) are strongly influenced when appraising our current setting by unconscious forces. While these forces may arise from some super-ego or God-driven condemnation of certain urges, they might also arise from our attraction to certain “shiny” objects, people, and events. We are animated in our anticipation of something we find attractive, compelling, and exciting.
We are also animated by the unconscious pull toward or away from other people. Our attractive and our troubled relationships with other people are subject to such dynamics as psychic splitting (this person is either all good or all bad), projection (moving part of oneself that is unacceptable or disturbingly powerful to the other person), and/or containment (looking for someone who can help contain our anxiety).
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