Understanding and Reconciling The Seven Primary Emotional Drives

Emotional Regulation (Tame it)

This process of separating the client from their immediate emotional experience can carve a space to regulate emotion and make more conscious choices. The client can then begin to learn from this new relationship with their feelings and over-time change how they are responding to them. These processes of noticing and labelling provide us time to make more deliberative, rather than instinctive responses. By practicing this we can realise, in the words of Psychiatrist Dan Siegel, that by naming it, we are able to tame it.

Conclusions: Bringing It All Together

The poet W. H. Auden wrote that, “We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.” This phrase describes how much of our mental life is swirling below the surface of our cognition, powering our thought, feeling and behaviour. However, our behaviour is not completely determined by these powers — we have the capacity for choice, and as coaches, we can help ourselves and our clients develop the skills to increase this capacity. The great task of mental development is to find an equilibrium that enables conscious choices that supports our growth and sustains our relationships. By cultivating practices that maintain this equilibrium we can begin to integrate our competing emotional drives, the feelings which mediate our learning and the conscious choices we make.