Emotional Vocabulary

Go beyond happy, sad, and fine to understand—and deliberately create—your emotional life.

How are you doing?

Fine. Good. Busy. Hanging in there.

We can give those answers without ever considering what we mean. They become a vocabulary we repeat by default, even though there is a whole range of emotional experience available to us.

I love answering that question with amazing. Not because something extraordinary has to have happened, but because I want to be deliberate about the experience I am creating.

Emotional vocabulary gives us more than interesting words. It gives us a way to study ourselves, understand other people, and choose the emotional fuel for what we want to create.

Name what you are actually feeling

I describe an emotion as a vibration in the body. In the Self-Coaching Model, our thoughts create our feelings, our feelings drive our actions, and our actions create our results.

When someone is learning to feel an emotion, one of the first things we do is name it.

Some people have very little practice with this. They may feel numb or struggle to distinguish even happiness from sadness. We learn basic emotion words, but we are rarely taught to associate those words with the experience in our bodies.

As we practice, we can become more precise.

If you say you are mad, are you angry, irritated, or enraged? What is the difference between those experiences for you?

I have been studying those distinctions in my own coaching. The label matters because it helps me understand the feeling and how I relate to it.

Give yourself more emotional tools

When you create an intentional Model, you choose a result and consider the actions, feelings, and thoughts that will produce it.

If you only give yourself five positive emotions to choose from, you may miss the one most useful for the work.

Hopeful, certain, excited, motivated, and determined are not the same experience. What does each feel like in your body? Which one will drive the action you need?

Think of a tool belt. You could keep grabbing the same screwdriver, or you could understand the tools well enough to choose one that fits.

I have been practicing certainty. My brain loves it, but often wants it to come from outside me. Practicing creating certainty through my thinking is a different experience from waiting for the world to provide it.

Refining your vocabulary helps you refine that practice.

Write the emotional script for your future

A novelist chooses words carefully to create an emotional experience for a reader. You can read a book and cry because of the meaning you give the words on the page.

Consider bringing that care to the story you tell yourself.

What thought would create the feeling you want to practice? What words would help you experience it?

This is part of living from the future: practicing being the person you want to become before you have all the results. You create the thoughts that let you feel as that person and act from those feelings.

Do not settle for a sentence that barely moves you simply because it sounds positive. Study the words and the emotion they actually generate.

Explore the emotions you learned

I find it fascinating to consider how our families and cultures teach us to experience certain emotions.

My mother taught me excitement through the anticipation of Christmas. She also helped me learn gratitude by pointing out ways to think about what I had.

My sister taught her daughters reverence for nature. They moved toward bugs and snakes with delight while other children might run away in fear.

The different feelings created different actions.

What emotions did you learn to experience regularly? What did your family teach you to fear, appreciate, or anticipate?

If you have learned to practice some emotions more than others, consider that you can also practice new ones.

Ask about your three most frequent emotions

An exercise I use with coaches is to identify the top three emotions you experience regularly.

Then identify the top three you want to experience.

Are you deliberately creating those feelings? Do you know the thoughts that generate them?

This can also be a beautiful question to ask the people you love. When I asked my sons, I was surprised by their answers. One named stress, even though I perceived him as laid back.

Do not assume your view from the outside tells you what someone is feeling inside.

Ask what the emotion feels like too. Two people can use the same word and describe different experiences. Curiosity helps you understand instead of assuming your experience is theirs.

Distinguish happiness from pleasure

When I ask people what they want to feel, the most common answer is happy. Peaceful is another frequent answer.

Those can be beautiful choices. But have you thought them through, or are they automatic answers?

For people working on overeating, drinking, or another compulsive behavior, I especially want to distinguish happiness from pleasure.

Think of the last time you felt each. How did they differ? What did each drive you to do? What result followed?

Take the feeling all the way through the Model. The word is not just a description; the experience it names fuels action.

Try on a new feeling

I like the idea of an emotional dressing room. You can try on words and see what they generate.

Selected. Guided. Disciplined. Courageous. Intrigued. Resilient. Self-esteemed.

Self-esteemed means having respect for my own abilities. What would that feel like as you went through your day?

Another exercise I use is a rampage of appreciation, which I learned from Abraham. Fill a page with things you appreciate. Keep finding different things rather than repeating the same list.

That practice expands your ability to appreciate. You can also study the difference between appreciation, gratitude, and wanting what you already have.

Include the negative emotions too

This work is not about feeling positive all the time. You can deliberately allow the negative half of the human experience.

Get precise there too. Are you sad or lonely? Scared or feeling pity? Angry or feeling mean?

When I recognize that I feel mean, I can see the urge to do mean things. Naming it helps me curtail my behavior instead of justifying it with a vague label.

Give yourself options and notice which one fits the vibration in your body. Then practice allowing that feeling rather than immediately trying to replace it.

Your emotional life has more possibilities than good or bad, happy or sad. Explore them. The more carefully you study your feelings, the more deliberately you can use the Model to create your life.