“Notice it, name it, tame it”
How we can help to reconcile our emotional drives
As mentioned earlier, a coach helps a client help themselves, by helping them “learn to learn” about themselves and their relationships. Helping a client develop insight into their inner states of emotion, feeling and thought can form a foundation for becoming aware of, and in time regulating those states. The repressive power of the executive functions of our brain (and the difference between the adult and the toddler) is that we are able – through self-awareness and language – to regulate the vagaries of our emotional experience.
Emotional Awareness (Notice it)
We cannot regulate what we are not aware of, so this process begins with cultivating emotional awareness by becoming mindful of our inner world. By becoming mindful of our inner world, we can start to pick up on cues relating to thoughts, feeling, behaviour, sensation — and start to learn from them.
Emotional Literacy (Name it)
Becoming aware of emotions forms the basis of being able to notice and label those emotions with language. This ability of being able to name what emotion is occurring (“ah, that tightness in my chest is anxiety,”) not only develops a vocabulary, but separates the client from their experience. By transforming the unarticulated nature of a feeling into an object in language, the client can begin to recognise and take steps to deal with these sensations. The client then reclaims a sense of themselves as experiencing anxiety, rather than being consumed by anxiety. It is the difference between saying, “I notice a feeling of anxiousness,” compared to, “I am anxious”.
This process involves a simultaneous curiosity about our emotional life, but also the ability to step back from it. In my coaching practice I use the process of ‘feeling/saying’ combined with ‘tracking/reflecting.’ During this process the client is encouraged to notice their sensations and say what they feel — regardless of how fuzzy or indeterminate that feeling may be. It is the coach’s role to track in mind what the client is saying and reflect this feeling as they hear it. This process then becomes a ‘mindfulness-for-two’ practice as we both pay attention to the here-and-now of each other’s experience. Through this practice, the client begins to sharpen their awareness and develop a literacy of their emotional life by labelling and hearing the reflections of their thought.
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