Developing Emotional mastery: What, why and how?
Some people naturally experience emotions as loud, distracting, intrusive, or even overwhelming. For other people, emotions are barely noticed most of the time until something specific happens, then they surge into awareness and take control. The real key to becoming an expert on managing your emotions (or ‘emotional mastery’) is recognising that there’s a set of skills to develop here. When you’ve recognised these skills and incorporated them into your life, you’ll be smarter, more confident, more decisive, more consistent and better at handling relationships.
If I asked you at any moment how you’re feeling, would you know, and would you be able to tell me? Are you good at noticing and naming those feelings? Can you express your emotions to the important people in your life, even when those feelings are intense?
Are there some emotions that leave you overwhelmed or unable to think clearly? Are there situations that you avoid because of the emotions they trigger in you? Are you held back in your life by chaos in your feelings?
During my early sessions with a new coaching client, one of the things I’m quietly assessing is their emotional landscape. Is this person voicing their emotions? Do they express them directly or do they infer them with metaphors or stories? Do they seem to manage their own feelings internally or do they seem to hand them over to others to process for them?
Some of my clients are emotional masters from the moment I meet them. I can just rest assured that the box marked ‘emotional skills’ is ticked, I don’t need to focus on that area. They’ve clearly done the work and they can immediately have highly sophisticated conversations with me about what they’re feeling, why, and what they need to do about it.
At the other end of the spectrum, I sometimes speak to clients who don’t want to talk about emotions. These guys get very uncomfortable about their feelings, and they seem annoyed that I’d even mention them. “I didn’t come to you to talk about my feelings, can we focus on my career please?”. To me, these people seem vulnerable, confused and lost, but they they tend to protect themselves from seeing any of that by telling themselves that emotions are silly, irrelevant or childish.
Most people are somewhere in between.
I can tell you that until you develop mastery of your emotions, you’re missing out. Being unaware or unskilled with your emotions is like being a blind person in a sighted world. People around you know things you don’t, feel things you don’t acknowledge, and may find you uncommunicative, confusing or frustrating.
Now this is a huge topic and my goal in this article is not to teach you everything about mastering your emotions. All I want to do is remind you about some of the most important lessons in emotional management, to clear up some common misunderstandings and hopefully inject a little motivation to look at this in yourself.
If you’d really like to develop your understanding and skills with your emotions, then the core book I would recommend is The Language of Emotions by Karla McLaren. Also my YouTube video about the Four Aspects Model includes a lot of guidance around how emotions work.
If you’d like to explore more elements of my core philosophy, I have a range of books that are available worldwide.
What are the benefits of this work?
The effects of things like emotional blindness, or emotional overwhelm, or poor emotional management, or an inability to clearly express your emotions will vary between people, but you may have some work to do if you experience:
Relationships where your basic needs (or those of your partner) aren’t met. Things might feel distant, unsatisfying, lacklustre or precarious. Over time this can cause distance, resentment and strain in a relationship that doesn’t need to be there.
Conflict or poor communication at work
A sense of always ‘missing out’ or not getting enough from life
Trouble setting consistent boundaries in all areas of your life
Erratic choices and regular changes of direction
Vulnerability to manipulation from bad actors, who can see your feelings even when you can’t, and can say and do things that manipulate your choices
Not understanding why people do things
A believe that you are out of control, or that you’re powerless, or even a sense of victimhood in one or more areas of your life
You may not feel safe, or others may not feel safe around you, but without acknowledging this you may just be confused about why things seem so unpredictable around you
Meanwhile, the benefits of emotional mastery include:
A far richer experience of life, feeling the waves of responses you have to important moments. We might tell ourselves that the most important things in life are external, but it’s the emotional richness of special moments that we truly crave.
Immediate awareness of why you make the choices you make, giving you more power to author the direction your life takes
A far more rewarding experiences of connection, love and intimacy than emotionally closed-off people can reach
Being really great at empathising with others, which will make you seem more relatable, more trustworthy and more skillful to other people
More stability, consistency and therefore more success
More trust in your own strength, which is immensely satisfying and relaxing
Far more potent leadership, which will impact your work, your relationships, your parenting and your friendships.
More sophisticated management of all types of relationships
The main reason people don’t develop emotional mastery
Some very lucky people develop emotional mastery in their childhoods. Research shows that more girls than boys develop emotional skills early in life, because parents and teachers tend to use more emotional language with girls than with boys, and I believe this explains the growing divide between performance of girls and boys at school. However, most of us have entered adulthood with big gaps in our knowledge and skills around emotions (women just sometimes have a head start).
This means that in order to become an emotional expert, you need to go backwards before you can go forwards. You cannot switch off your emotions: they are always with you, all the time. They’re part of the human experience. However, without much knowledge about what to do with our feelings, many people try to suppress them or ignore them. We tell ourselves little stories about why we do things so that we don’t need to acknowledge the emotions that actually drive our decision-making.
In order to become an expert at emotions, you need to begin by feeling your feelings, and without all of the skills to manage them, this can (initially) be scary. You’ll be admitting all these confusing feelings in your heart and in your body, and you won’t know what to do about it. That’s the first stage, and it cannot be skipped, and that’s why most people don’t do this work. Most people would rather remain ignorant, confused, erratic and vulnerable than begin the work, because the first stage means feeling all the things that are going on inside us, and that can feel like losing control.
If you want to develop your emotional skills and get all those benefits listed above, you’re going to need to start by acknowledging and processing your own feelings. It’s scary, yes, but all the rewards are on the other side. Do it in small steps, set aside time each week to drop into your feelings, notice what’s going on, and journal about it.
Emotional processing doesn’t mean losing control. It’s quite the opposite. But you will find yourself more exposed to what your feelings are telling you, and at first that can be distracting and disconcerting. Don’t quit at this point! It’s just the beginning of an amazing journey.
Acknowledge but don’t attach
One of the skills behind mastery of your emotions is the ability to notice, acknowledge, feel and accept a feeling, without becoming totally fascinated or attached to it. Emotions can be addictive. We can become deeply attached to our anger, or resentment, or sadness, or happiness, or self-loathing. Any emotion can expand to fill our world, to become the totality of our existence.
Try not to get stuck. Emotions flow like water, that is the nature of emotions. At any one time, one emotion may emerge from the background ocean of your unconscious to bring you some important information. Our job is to feel the feeling, understand its lesson, and then let it flow back into the background state of your emotional awareness. Pain, stuckness or a sense of powerlessness is waiting for all of us if we become fixated on a particular emotion.
Take em all or leave em all
Emotions are a ‘job lot’, you either have all of them or none of them. A common mistake people make is wanting more of the ‘positive’ feelings and less of the ‘negative’ ones. I’m afraid it doesn’t work like this. Your emotions are triggered by the experiences you have (which can mean events in the outer world or things happening inside you that nobody else knows about). Emotions just respond, that’s what they do. If you are experiencing a lot of difficult emotions, that’s not the emotions’ fault. Your feelings are like signposts, bringing your attention to where it’s needed. They’re very wise, and if you learn to understand their lessons they will help you to unravel difficult situations and solve complex problems.
But you cannot pick and choose which feelings exist within you. Learning to experience more joy, happiness, gratitude, peace and wonder will also leave you open to more anger, sadness, grief and fear.
Emotional mastery means developing the resilience to feel it all, to be vulnerable to life and be strong enough to bear that beautiful intensity, and maintain control and separation from the emotions at hand.
Your mind can respect your feelings, your feelings cannot respect your mind
Your conscious mind is good at thinking things through, making plans, using words and imagining things. Your emotions work completely differently and follow different rules. Your emotions will just do what they do. When the situation demands it, you will feel angry. At the appropriate time, you will feel sad. When triggered by the right things, you will be filled with joy.
The smart way to combine these aspects is using your rational mind to plan the course of your life, incorporating information that your emotions have provided. A feeling comes up, and the emotional expert recognises its lesson and incorporates that into the conscious plan. Over time, the course of your life shifts and things tend to get better and better.
Your emotions will never respect your thinking, though. They won’t wait until it’s a convenient time, and they won’t reshape themselves to suit your conscious mind. Emotional mastery doesn’t mean you only feel things when you want, rather it means you get really good at acknowledging, understanding, processing and (where appropriate) communicating your feelings in real time.
You are responsible for your own feelings
It’s really common to routinely hand over responsibility for your emotions to other people. People who aren’t good at owning and managing their own emotions will do this all the time, in subtle or obvious ways. It’s a trap we all fall into from time to time, and it’s something we all need to progressively train ourselves not to do.
Examples of this might be:
Saying “you made me feel shit”. No, they didn’t. Try to avoid this kind of language. If someone’s behaviour has made you feel bad, then you should challenge that behaviour and speak to them about improving things, but when you directly blame someone for your feelings, you’re giving them all the power about how you feel. With simple statements like “You made me feel X”, you’re actually inferring all sorts of things that aren’t true. Try to keep your language clean, so rather than blaming someone try saying “When you did X, I felt Y”.
Manipulative or passive-aggressive behaviour. Here, you don’t have the confidence or the self-awareness to speak your feelings directly, so you try to manipulate people and situations to solve the problem. This might mean putting subtle pressure on people, giving people the ‘silent treatment’, acting like you’re helpless so people rescue you or crying to avoid conversations.
Angry outbursts, tantrums or smashing things, rather than actually talking about your anger.
Emotionally dumping on people who haven’t agreed to it.
Always deferring to your partner to have emotional conversations instead of having them yourself.
The 3 core areas for emotional mastery
So how do we develop emotional mastery? Well, there are 3 areas to focus on…
1.Notice and name your feelings
It sounds so simple that many people rush straight past this step, then come unstuck further down the line. You must become really, really good at listening to what your body and your emotions are telling you, as it happens. Notice when your gut clenches, or your chest gets tight, or your voice changes, or your pulse quickens, or your face changes. Get curious about what’s happening inside you. Sometimes it’s helpful to just sit with a physical sensation that’s happened - don’t try to think about it, don’t try to rationalise it, don’t try to smother it or get rid of it. Feel the sensation, and let it be. Just witness, get curious. Breathe, gently, into that part of your body.
At the same time, be learning the language. Read The Language of Emotions and have Karla’s Emotional Vocabulary sheet on hand. As you learn which emotion is which, you can get better and better at quietly saying to yourself: ok, this gurgling in my tummy, I can name this feeling. This fizzing sensation in my head, I know this emotion, and I can name it.
That’s all the skill is. Notice and name everything you feel. Learning to do this brings a lot of benefits in itself, the main one being the gap that it introduces into your response to feelings. An adult way of handling feelings is to feel, then pause, then act. Many of our problems in life stem from immediately taking action when we feel something.
You will also, slowly, develop resilience as you get more and more accustomed to feeling your feelings. Intense situations will become more manageable because you’ve spent time with this feeling, you know it, you’ve seen yourself get through this without it paralysing or overwhelming you.
2. Manage your feelings
Once you can feel everything you feel and accurately name what you’re feeling, you can begin to do things about it. This is more complex and personal.
There will be some feelings that just immediately tell you what to do. Anger, for instance, brings us the message that a boundary has been crossed in our lives. Your conscious action, then, is to find the boundary and restore it.
There will be plenty of situations where you can’t take action, at least not quickly. In those cases you will need to learn your way to manage your feelings. Take conscious control of your breathing and breathe deeply while the emotion surges within you. Perhaps write about the feeling, to ensure it goes somewhere. If you need to, find your own self-soothing practices that you can use while you’re holding strong emotions. These can be nice things like a luxurious bath or a cup of calming tea, or taking out your feelings on a punch bag or through a vigorous run, or speaking with beloved and trusted friends (making it clear you’re not looking for answers, you just want them to hear what you’re feeling).
If your emotions are often triggered by internal stuff (that is, not by things actually happening outside of you) then you may need to engage in therapeutic work to figure out and process the things inside you that keep making you feel that way.
Some feelings don’t want action. Some feelings just want to be felt, until the feeling is done. Grief is often like this, but there are times when every feeling is just bringing your attention to things, and those things must be felt, and you will need to continue functioning even when those feelings are very strong. Sometimes you may need to take a break from these feelings, by numbing yourself or distracting yourself, but these feelings will be there until you’ve given them all the attention they need.
Ultimately, your feelings have things to teach you. If you keep experiencing the same feelings, you probably need to make some changes. This might be a difficult conversation, or reading self-help books to understand yourself better, or changing your job.
3. Express your feelings
Relationships between two people are usually emotional. Even the most dry or distant relationship, perhaps you and a very formal boss at work, are still based on the connection between two feeling beings. So expressing your feelings is an essential skill to navigating relationships.
Find your language to tell people how you feel. Sometimes it’s important and necessary to directly name the feelings, to avoid confusion and make sure the other person knows exactly what you’re saying. “I feel angry” or “I’m feeling happy”. Everyone needs the ability to do this from time to time, and simply naming your feelings out loud can be very helpful in all sorts of ways.
At other times, especially when you know someone well, you might develop your own ways to share your feelings, and it won’t always be necessary to say them directly. Old friends will have phrases they use, or memories they’ll reference, to express how they feel. This can be smart, effective and seamless…just make sure it’s doing the right job. If it steers you away from raw expression of your feelings, it won’t always be appropriate.
If you’re not used to talking to people about your feelings, it can feel clumsy and awkward at first, but it’s important you don’t just hold things inside. Sometimes, when you’re starting out, it can help to create some language that tells the other person that you’re about to express your feelings. “I’ve got something I’d like to say” or “Can I tell you something I’ve been feeling?” This sets the scene, and it gives you permission to speak. It also makes it difficult to back out if you suddenly get cold feet!
These skills only come through practice. Begin by practising with safe people, then try it with other people. Do some reading or make yourself notes, if that helps. Just don’t let yourself keep holding your feelings inside.
Would you like to know more? My books are available worldwide.
