Coach as Instrument: Helping Clients Uncover the Emotions They Can't See

This Week's Attunement

“Your emotions make you human. Even the unpleasant ones have a purpose. Don't lock them away. If you ignore them, they just get louder and angrier."

— Sabaa Tahir

At an intuitive level, we coaches, know that our clients' emotions are an important source of information for them. However, our clients often aren't aware of when they are experiencing their emotions. So, they aren't asking to explore them.

Given that's the case, how can we coaches help our clients uncover something they aren't seeing?

Let's start by looking at what makes this challenging.

How Do We Learn About Emotions?

Most of us humans develop language literacy way before we ever develop any degree of emotional literacy. That's because most of us aren't explicitly taught about emotions.

Ideally, from an early age, our caregivers would teach us how to notice and name our emotions and help us sort through their meanings for us. (Such as, "I see that frown on your face. You look sad. What's going on? Did you lose something?")

When we learn to recognize that we are having an emotion, that there's information in it for us and that it matters, we begin to understand ourselves, others, and our lives better. We develop trust in ourselves and in our experience.

Unfortunately, too often, our feelings aren't fully acknowledged or accepted by our caregivers (usually because their emotions weren't acknowledged and accepted by their caregivers). Instead, we learn indirectly what emotions are acceptable, which aren't, which are tolerable and which aren't, and which are "good" and "bad" to feel or express. (For example, we may learn that it's "bad" or "wrong" to feel angry or express anger.)

When our emotions aren't accepted, tolerated, or labeled as "bad", we'll tend to suppress them. And we'll do that at such an early age and so often that by the time we enter adulthood, we don't know we're doing it.

What Happens When We Aren't Aware of Our Emotions? 

When we aren't aware of our own emotions, they will continue to influence us, our thinking, our impulses, and our behaviors. We'll simply be blind to it.

Though we are mind blind to our emotions, our bodies still experience them. Our emotions, pushed out of our minds' awareness, can get stuck in our bodies and can lead to health issues later.

Even when we push our emotions outside our awareness, our emotions will continue to do what they were designed to do: protect us from real or imagined threats. We may "think" we are making decisions and taking actions "logically." Instead, we'll be driven by unexplored emotions. Our emotions will run our show; we just won't know it.

How Can We Help Our Clients See the Emotions They Are Missing? 

We can help our clients uncover emotions they can't see by paying close attention to their bodies, body language, gestures, facial expressions, intonation, and narrative.

Bodies hold a great deal of information. Doing a simple body scan with our clients can help them be aware of emotions they've been storing, stepping over, or putting on the back burner.

Body language can give us a good sense of our client's emotional mood. Amy Cuddy has suggested that body language governs how we think and feel. If you aren't sure what emotion your client's body language is expressing, try it on for yourself. Assume their posture and see how you feel and what emotions arise. There is a good chance that what you feel when you take on the posture is what they might feel. You can mirror your sense of it to give them more language and access to themselves.

Gestures can provide hints about emotions as well. Every image I've seen depicting anxiety shows a person with their hands on their heads as if they were trying to sort through their thoughts with their fingers. Notice what your clients are doing with their hands, offer it back to them, and ask about it. (e.g., "I noticed that when you said you were tired of getting work dumped on you, you made a chopping motion with your hand. What's that about?")

Whoever said the eyes are the windows to the soul was on to something. Notice and ask about the changes in your client's facial expressions and eyes. I had a client who professed not feeling much of anything. But I could see that at times in our conversation, his eyes would water. Even though he dismissed any meaning in it, I knew we were getting to the heart of something, and I'd stay on the topic we were on.

Watching for incongruence between our client's narrative and facial expressions can also be helpful for the awareness of emotions. I had a client who routinely talked about profoundly distressing experiences, all with a smile plastered to her face. Mirroring back my experience of her gave her more access to her emotions and opened up the conversation.

These are a few of the ways you can use your and your clients' bodies, eyes, ears, senses, and intuition to create awareness of the emotional experiences of your clients.

At Learning in Action, we've taken some of the mystery out of that. We've created an instrument that reveals what emotions someone accesses, how much, and in what proportion. For example, our approach reveals precisely how much anger a client accesses and if that's more or less than the general population and more or less than is healthy and relational.

Our instrument, the WE-Q Profile, measures one's ability to access a full range of feelings. It provides a distribution that indicates the extent to which they access seven core emotions: anger, anxiety, fear, joy, love, sadness, and shame (or guilt), all relative to an ideal and relative to the 25,000+ population.

If you are curious about your own emotional range or that of your clients, I invite you to try the WE-Q Profile Experience.

By first experiencing the WE-Q Profile, you can gain a deeper understanding of the instrument and unlock the potential for more meaningful conversations with your clients. Not only will you gain a new level of self-awareness and develop a vocabulary for personal growth, but you'll also be able to help your clients achieve faster transformation by uncovering their emotions and patterns. With this newfound understanding, your clients will have greater choice in their relationships and be empowered to create the life they truly desire. Learn more here.

Never doubt that we coaches are doing important work. We are instruments of the universal drive we humans have for self-knowledge and self-awareness.