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I hope you had a successful week, and you’ve completed last week’s coaching challenge.

This week, I want to share with you a vital step that resilient high performers use when managing their emotions and how to put it into action.

Emotional Triggers

I bet that during each working day, you experience negative emotions.

I know I do.

They are usually triggered by people, situations and internal saboteurs.

Cast your mind back to the last time a person triggered a negative emotion in you.

Did it impact your behaviour towards them, or did you supress the emotion and stay positive?

You know that your leadership behaviour can impact your chances of reaching the executive level.

But did you know that studies over the last few decades have shown that suppressing emotions can impact your mental and physical health.

I know that you will reach the executive level, but I don’t want you to burn out on the way.

Naming Emotions

Emotional Intelligence gurus tell us to intercept an emotion and if need be, change the way that we would naturally react to it.

What I also learnt is that naming the emotion is a vital step in this process because it makes the emotion less intensive.

A study by a UCLA professor of psychology – Matthew D. Lieberman concluded that:

When you put feelings into words, you’re activating this prefrontal region and seeing a reduced response in the amygdala. In the same way you hit the brake when you’re driving when you see a yellow light — when you put feelings into words you seem to be hitting the brakes on your emotional responses. As a result, a person may feel less angry or less sad.

Your Coaching Challenge

This week, your coaching challenge is to simply name your emotions.

I said simply, but to be honest naming an emotion can be hard.

So, I am going to share with you a tool I and my coaching clients use called the emotion wheel.

It was originally developed by Robert Plutchik and modified by the Junto Institute who realised it wasn’t detailed enough from the feedback they got from leaders who used it in their leadership development courses.

When an emotion is triggered and during random times in the working day, I want you to name your emotions using the emotion wheel.

Next week, we’ll look at the next step after naming the emotion.

Your Virtual Coach
Nick