Name the core emotion, and address it directly.
One of my clients was feeling scattered in our session, where he had a lot of nervous energy and was working on a lot of things on his to-do list, but didn’t feel like he was making progress. When I observed that he was feeling scattered and anxious, he agreed.
So I asked him “What are you feeling anxious about? What are you worried is happening or not happening?”
He paused to consider the question, and realized that he was concerned that his team wasn’t aligned with the big picture vision he had for them. As soon as he stated that, his brain started ticking off how to address that concern: he was going to communicate the vision more clearly, he was going to tie each person’s responsibilities to that vision, etc.
But the key moment was condensing the feeling of anxiety into a specific problem to be addressed. And that started with naming the emotion and digging into its concerns.
Emotions are signals from our body that there is some need that is not being met. But they are nonverbal signals that send our body into loops of automatic reactions unless we consciously interrupt our patterns. My client’s default response to anxiety was to go into action, so he started working on his to-do list to feel busy and productive, but it wasn’t addressing the core need.
This translation of emotions into conscious action is why mindfulness and emotional intelligence are valuable skills to develop. When we can interrupt our automatic reaction patterns, we can break out of our unconscious loops by feeling the core emotion fully and directly addressing its needs.
What emotions have been driving your actions recently? How can you interrupt your unconscious reactive loops to find the unaddressed needs lying underneath those emotions?