Ep #241: Emotional Vocabulary

Welcome to The Life Coach School Podcast, where it’s all about real clients, real problems and real coaching. And now your host, Master Coach Instructor, Brooke Castillo.

Well hello, my friends. How are you today? Today is the most amazing day. Every day is great, but today is super awesome. I'm so excited about today. I just got off six days of an intensive that I did with a group of 10 of my coaches that are involved in what I'm calling my 100K mentoring, and I've committed to all 10 of them that they will make 100K within one year if they follow my process and my program and all of the procedures that I recommend to making a 100K.

There is a very clear process that if followed, makes being able to make money online as a life coach actually quite easy. Now, easy in the sense that you follow the steps, difficult in the sense that you have to get your brain out of your own way, which of course, is always challenging. But as life coaches, we have those tools.

So I always feel like we have a very special advantage as life coaches because of the Model. And one of my new goals that I'm going to be creating a full video series on is the power of being able to create success within our industry using the life coaching model and so I've set a goal for myself to help 100 coaches make 100K within the next three years.

So, game on. It was really interesting. I was at this training with these new coaches. I was like, getting totally excited and totally freaked out as if it was me doing the same thing, and even though I've made millions of dollars as a life coach, I can still like, really feel that anticipation and that excitement of that first 100K, so I had the best time. I normally don't work nine to seven every day, but I did. I went and stayed with them the whole time, we worked on their businesses and geeked out on all the technology and all the copywriting and all of that stuff.

So that was super fun. So I'm super happy that I got to be able to do that and now I'm back to the podcast and to y'all. So, since I recorded last, I have created a whole new list of upcoming episodes and I could not be more excited about what is on the docket in terms of upcoming podcasts. We are working on a very special podcast series that is going to be produced by a production company and I'm super excited about it, so I can't wait to share that as it's upcoming to you and also some really new concepts.

One of my favorite things to do as a life coach is to come up with new concepts and new ideas that help all of my fellow coaches in the industry. So that's what I'm going to be sharing with you. And we're going to start with today, which just talking about emotional vocabulary. This is such an important topic, and I've kind of had some new insights on this that are new for me.

And one of the things - I was just telling this to a colleague of mine that sometimes I don't like teaching brand new beginners the Model because I have done all my own self-coaching for so long that I'm kind of taking my own coaching to this level in terms of the emotional space that - it's just too advanced to teach to brand new beginners. But it's also super awesome.

So I know that many of you are still beginners and I'm going to expose you to these concepts, but if you're just learning the Model, please don't get too caught up or confused by it. Just listen to it as a concept and then as you're moving towards really understanding and utilizing the Model more, you can apply this concept.

So, there's two books I want to recommend on this topic. One is How Emotions are Made by Lisa Barrett, and the other one is a really cool book called the Dictionary of Emotions by Patrick Ryan. And the Dictionary of Emotions is just a bunch of emotions. It's really cool. You can flip through it and just pick emotions and explore them, and that leads me right into what I'm going to talk to you about today.

So let's talk about and review what creates emotions. And the way that I've always described emotions is that they're a vibration in the body. Now, literally, they're caused by chemical reactions and neural transmitters and we can get very scientific with all of it, but one of the things that I really want to emphasize is that the biology of emotion is still in its infancy in terms of scientists being able to agree on what is actually going on in there that there's this big debate over the limbic system and what's really happening in terms of chemical reactions and we're just starting to get a hold of it and study it.

So I think what's important is not to make sure the exact science is perfect because we're utilizing this as a way of not to get it accurate and pass the test but more how do we apply it to our lives in a way that is useful. So I want you to think about the idea that I taught you in the Model, which is our thoughts create our emotions.

So what are thoughts created with? And thoughts are created with words, and vocabulary, and language. And so the words that we choose to think are very important, and I have talked a lot about utilizing creativity and utilizing new vocabulary in terms of the thoughts that we think in order to create different experiences of emotion.

But what I want to talk to you about today is how we talk about emotion affecting our way of experiencing emotion. So, often when I'm working with clients, one of the things that they need practice doing is experiencing and feeling emotion. And one of the first things that we do when we're learning how to do this is we name our emotions. We say, I'm feeling - whatever the emotion is.

And in the beginning, some of my clients, they're just numb. They don’t know how to describe their emotions and there's no emotional vocabulary to really develop this understanding and to distinguish between even like, the major ones. Are you happy? Are you sad? Sometimes my clients really can't even go to that level, which is really fascinating because what's happened is we haven't been taught how to experience or describe or process emotion. There's no class.

We're basically taught the words of emotion in school, we're taught happy, sad, mad, glad, and shown pictures of happy faces, and we've read in books experiences of characters maybe talking and said, "He said gladly, he said sadly," to give us kind of a sense of the experiences that would create different types of emotions.

But in terms of really associating emotion with the vibration in our body, there's very little education on that, and very little acknowledgment that how we label and how we speak about our emotions actually has an effect on our emotional intelligence, on our ability to really understand and process our own emotions.

So this is some of my personal work that I have been doing lately is really trying to get distinctions in terms of write down to almost splitting hairs, what exactly am I feeling, instead of just mad. Like, is it anger? Is it irritation? Is it rage? What are the difference between those three as I experience them? And does it matter how I label them? Does it matter how I name them in terms of my experience of them?

And I think the answer is yes, and that's especially when we're experiencing an emotion but even more powerful when we're trying to create an emotion. When we are doing our models, on our intentional models, on the things that we want to create and really thinking about what are the emotions that are available to me and can I choose them and create them on more purpose than I have been?

If we give ourselves five emotions to pick from, which are happy - let's say we're trying to generate positive emotion. If we give ourselves five emotions to pick from, it's like, happy, excited, motivated, cheerful, and joy, we've given ourselves five options. One of those options may not be the best emotion for what it is we're trying to create. And so I have found recently, really spending some time on my intentional models and really thinking about all the emotions that are available to me, and then really refining and picking the one that will be the most useful.

It's kind of like using our emotions as tools and having like, this full tool belt of all the different - have you ever seen those tools where there's like, 700, seems like, screwdrivers? Can't we just grab one screwdriver? And I think most of us do. We just grab the big emotion and we try and generate that.

But as we start being more kind of discretionary with our emotions, I think we can generate the energy of the exact emotion that's going to produce what it is we need. So if you notice in the books that you've read or the thoughts in movies that emotion is often created within us, when we are being entertained by fiction, when we are being entertained by movies, and the way that that happens, especially in books is just through words. The author is able to create emotion within us by the words that they've given us, and the scripts and the lines in movies. Those are the words that generate emotion.

Now, in the movies, what's cool is they can play the music, which actually intensifies the vibration, but even - I don't know if you've ever read a book where you're just bawling because you're so sad. It's so fascinating to me that that's just words that are creating those emotions.

Now, authors of fiction spend a lot of time choosing their words really carefully so they can create the emotion within you, and they use a lot of emotion words to help you kind of refine your experience of the book. And one of the things that I want to recommend is that you utilize that same skill in kind of writing your own story, in being the author of your own story and creating your own emotional experience by the way you tell the story of your future.

Now, the study of ourselves is always going to include the study of our emotions, hopefully, if you're doing it the way that I teach, and we're only limited in the study of ourselves to get down to the refinement of our emotions by our vocabulary. So deciphering between different emotions, naming the emotions, finely tuning the way that we decipher between them and just recognizing that those distinctions matter.

The difference between ecstatic and happy and joyous. Do you know how those feel different? Have you studied how those feel different in your body? And I think kind of at the mastery level, that is the invitation. Can we go into really understanding those differences, and first of all, how we experience them differently, but also how we create them differently? What words do we use to create the feeling of happy in terms of our thinking? What words do we use to create the feeling of ecstatic in our thoughts?

Now, sometimes you may say, I don't know how to do that, but if you think about a fiction author, they know what they're trying to create in terms of the feeling in the reader. And so if you thought about it that way, if you were like, insert thought here to produce emotion, first of all, you need to know what the emotion is and then you need to practice writing the script that will create that emotion, writing the script for your brain.

So that's really what I have been practicing with myself. It's kind of what I've been teaching you guys about living from the future and creating those scripts for yourself to practice being the person who already has what it is you want to have, and being the person who already is who you most want to be, and then living from within and from those emotions and taking them to the next level. Not just excited, but what is the difference in your body between certain and hopeful and excited and motivated and determined?

Those are all three very different emotions and which one is most going to help you create the result that you want? I've been doing a lot with certainty and how much I love the feeling of certainty, and how tricky it is to create when you have huge goals. If we could feel certain all of the time, it would let our brain kind of chillax. Our brain loves certainty, but it thinks that certainty comes from outside of us. But if we can generate it from within us, then our brain kind of settles down because it doesn't feel like - it's like, oh, we're certain, we don't have to keep looking for danger. It's almost like a brain hack that we're doing.

So what's so interesting when you think about emotion from kind of a - you back up a little bit is there's a big debate and she talks about it in the book, How Emotions are Made, there's a big debate on whether emotions are something that happen intrinsically, or they're something that is taught to us. And I had never really thought about it this way, but I find it fascinating that different cultures teach different emotions, and different families teach different emotions within the structure of the family unit and the culture and the way that we're raised. We're taught to feel emotions on purpose.

A lot of times we're taught to feel patience and we're taught to feel regard and we're taught to feel respect, and we're taught to feel joyous. I've had a lot of clients that were never taught how to feel excited, and I find that totally fascinating. I was thinking the other day about the emotions that I was taught to feel as a child, and my mom did, I think, a really good job at trying to create excitement. I think about how she did Christmas and the anticipation of Christmas and the excitement of Christmas.

And I'd never thought about that being a taught emotion, but it was. She really taught me how to get excited for something, how to anticipate something. She taught me how to feel gratitude for things by pointing out, you know, how to think about a certain thing to generate that emotion and be thankful for it.

A lot of families, I feel, do a beautiful job of teaching their children to feel reverence for certain things. My sister is really into nature and loves everything nature and she's taught her girls to be very reverent of nature and all things in nature, and we used to laugh because her little girls would be out in nature and there'd be a spider or a snake and where other little girls are running away and freaking out, Wendy's little girls are running towards the snake and running towards the bugs and they want to touch them and delight them and have reverence for them and treat them with respect.

It's so fascinating how the association of certain emotions with certain things, always of course, cause our actions, but because they were taught to revere nature and delight nature, their actions were to move towards it and to embrace it, whereas other children maybe were taught to be afraid of it and we're taught fear.

I know that for many of my students, there was a lot of fear teaching. Teaching how to feel fear in association with a lot of things in the world, and all of the emotions, if we think about them all being taught to us and all being taught to have a certain level of importance in our lives, it's very clear why many of us take the actions that we do take because of the emotions that we were taught to experience on the regular, and we're taught that were normal emotions that we should experience.

So take a think about that. Think about what emotions you experience on the regular and are they different than maybe the emotions that your friends experience on the regular and question why that might be. Instead of all of our emotions kind of being built in, maybe they are learned emotions and if that is the case, we can learn to feel different emotions more regularly.

I have an exercise that I do with my certified coaches, I teach them so they can use with their clients, and one of the things that we do is we talk about what are the top three emotions that you have on a regular basis. This is actually a really fascinating question to ask your children. I hadn't asked this to my kids until just really recently, and I was super surprised by their answers. I was super - my son Christian was like, stress, was like, his main emotion. And he's like, the most laidback kid in my perception of him and he said one of his main emotions was stress. I was really surprised by that.

And I asked the same question to my son, Connor, and again, was totally surprised by the answer, but just a beautiful question to ask your children to answer because it's not a threatening question, but it might be surprising. Ask your significant other, ask your friends. For sure, ask your clients if you're a coach.

So think about the top three emotions that you experience and what are the top three emotions that you want to experience. Are you creating emotion on purpose? Are you deliberately generating the emotions that you want to feel that will create the results that you want to create? That is the secret to creating your life is to becoming aware of what's going on in your mind and in your emotional life so you can change it to create more of what you want.

I think for me, one of the turning points in my life was when I was talking to a colleague of mine who has the Model, who understands the Model, and I realized in one flash moment that I could put whatever I want in that R line, the result line at the bottom of the Model. And so all I had to ask myself was what is the emotion that I need to generate the action that I need to take no matter what to create any result that I want, and that's been a game-changer for me, for sure.

So, the point is that we can decide what to feel and question the answer that you think you want. So a lot of times - here's what I mean by that - a lot of times, I will ask people, what do you want to feel? And the knee-jerk reaction for most people is, I just want to feel happy. I've asked this to, I don't know, hundreds of people, and that's the most common answer I get. The next common most answer I get is peaceful. I just want to be at peace.

And beautiful answers, of course, nothing wrong with those. I think they're knee-jerk answers. I don't think they necessarily have been thoroughly, deliberately thought through. Is the point of life to feel the emotion of happy all of the time? And I think if the answer is yes, many of us get that confused with pleasure.

And so that's one of - for those of you who are trying to lose weight or cut back on drinking or cut back on any other compulsive behavior, one of the most important distinguishing things to look at is what is the difference between genuine happiness, genuine joy, and pleasure? How are those two different? How do they feel different?

If you think about the last time that you truly experienced happiness, and then you think about the last time you truly experienced pleasure, how were those two different? And if you were to choose one over the other, which one would you choose and why?

Now, remember, if you're going to put those in the F line, take it all the way through. What does the experience of pleasure create as a result? What does the emotion of happiness create as a result? What does it drive you to do? What does pleasure drive you to do? And what does happiness drive you to do? And also take it deeper. Like, what about being ecstatic? What about being exuberant? What about being joyous? How do those all create different experiences in your life?

It's kind of that deeper study into ourselves. So one of the exercises that I have some of my master coaches do is an exercise that I got from Abraham, and it's called a rampage of appreciation. And one of the things that we do is you just fill up an entire page of things that you appreciate, so a rampage of appreciation. And if you're up to it, it's a brilliant thing to do because it requires effort. It requires skill. It requires you to pay attention. It requires discipline.

And every day, to write down everything you've appreciated in your day, and not to just repeat the same things but to have different things every day really expands your ability to appreciate. Isn't that fascinating? And it's something that if you see it as an activity, as a skill, you want to be more appreciative, then practicing appreciation is what you do.

But one of the things that she said was so interesting is she goes, I think this list is so different than a gratitude list. It feels very different than a gratitude list for me. And so I'm like, well, that's exactly what I was talking about in terms of emotional vocabulary and creating those distinctions and deciphering between the two. That's when your self-coaching work becomes, I think, more sophisticated and more interesting.

So when you think about what is the difference between the two feelings, what's the difference between feeling gratitude versus appreciation, versus wanting. I like to do an exercise where we talk about wanting what you already have. How does wanting what you already have being appreciative of what you have and feeling gratitude for what you have different?

And I want to suggest that it's really important to spend the time understanding the difference for that deeper study of yourself, to take all of this to the next level. I've talked about this before a little bit in the podcast, but I want to bring it up again. I think using an emotional vocabulary in your speaking life is really important.

A lot of times, people will ask me how I'm doing and I will say, amazing. I love the word amazing, I love the feeling of amazing, and that's how I answer the question. But most people, when you ask them that question, they say fine, I'm good, I'm fine, can't complain, doing well. It's like, those knee-jerk reactions that most people have learned in terms of their vocabulary that creates their experience.

So when somebody asks you how are you doing and you say fine, you're going to feel very different than if someone asks you how you're doing and you say amazing. That's one of those things that most of us haven't really thought through on how they want to answer that question consciously. They haven't thought about what do I want my answer to that question to be? We've just defaulted.

So it's fine, very well, good, busy, we've been busy. A lot of people say that. Hanging in there, I'm okay. Those are just knee-jerk, pre-programmed answers that we've probably learned by listening to other people say them. So one of the things I want you to do as we're working on this emotional vocabulary and this lesson is I want you to decide how you want to answer that question.

Now, people will say to me, "Well, I always want to answer honestly." And that's good. Answer honestly, but deliberately. Because your experience of how you are is created by you. It's either created by default or it's created consciously. So you get to decide how you are. You get to decide how you're doing.

So think about it. What emotions would you like to have in your repertoire? What emotions do you want to choose from? Here are some to think about. Awesome, happy, content, thrilled, relaxed, joyful, hopeful, inspired, prideful, adoring, grateful, blissful, flow, tapped in, aligned, guided, committed, secure, selected, accepted, disciplined. This list, I have them written in my journal here that I pulled from the book, the Dictionary of Emotions, and it was really fun to kind of try them on.

So I want you to imagine that we're going into the emotional dressing room. I'm like, come on into the dressing room with me, let's try on these emotions. So what was fascinating to me is that the emotion, selected, felt amazing to me, and it felt different than guided. Selected. What a cool emotion. I can just choose to feel selected. I can just choose to feel approved. I can just choose to feel disciplined, guided.

Self-esteemed was another one I pulled from there, and I looked at the definitions. You want to feel self-esteemed? It's having respect for my own abilities. Isn't that gorgeous? Isn't that just a beautiful way to think about yourself?

Can you imagine if you just had respect for your own abilities? If you went through the world with that self-esteemed emotion? It would be funny if someone asked you how you were doing. How you doing? Self-esteemed. Very self-esteemed today. Self-respectful.

Some other ones were self-reliant, successful, self-starting, self-understanding, bodacious, bold, brave, courageous, intrigued, intuitive. I want you to imagine the buffet of emotions that we have to choose from that we can create for ourselves by simply creating the thoughts that generate these emotions and how many of us are leaving all the delight on the table and settling for, how you doing? I'm fine.

Really? Of all the emotions you could pick from, you're going to go with fine? You're going to go with okay? You're going to go with busy? You're going to go with hanging in there? I love it when somebody says how you doing, and I say amazing, and they say, wow, why? I'm like, it's Tuesday. I am amazing. I own that.

People think, oh, that's prideful. I'm like, yes, I'm very proud of myself. Zero apologies. Prideful in the sense that I think I'm better or I'm boasting than somebody else is not what I do. That doesn't feel good. One-upping other people doesn't actually feel good. It comes from a place of insecurity. But feeling abundant and excited and proud of myself and self-esteemed and loving all the people around me, that's when it gets really good.

Feeling loving as an emotion is wonderful. I feel loving. That's what I'm going to create, that's what I'm going to generate. You can generate the best emotions. So think about that for yourself. What are the very best emotions? What's the best emotion you can imagine feeling? And memorize it and practice it.

I was just watching the World Series with my husband. It was so fascinating to watch the players as they hit home runs and as they anticipated winning, and the pure joy and excitement of winning that game. And I was telling my husband, I'm like, "You know, men in sports get to jump around and jump on top of each other and scream and just delight in each other and I feel like in business, we should be able to do that too. We should all just huddle up and jump around when we have a big win. I just think it would be so fun."

And then I was watching as the Dodger pitcher was like, pitching and he pitched a home run to the other team and he took his mitt and threw it on the ground and had a little bit of a temper tantrum. I'm like, "Yeah, they can do that at work but we can't do that at work. We can't throw our stuff on the ground and have temper tantrums and have people think that that's normal, but it's totally normal on national TV in front of everybody."

So funny. But more than that, I try to memorize like, what is it that they're experiencing in that moment when they win? And what it is that they're experiencing when they're pitching? What is it they're experiencing when they throw that amazing double play? And right before they do that, level of focus and determination and confidence is so fun to watch and to memorize and to think about how most people rely on only just a few emotions that were kind of just defaulted.

Have you ever guys been on a computer and been in a software program that only has like, one font to choose from? And it's an ugly font and you can't even bold. You can only like - you can only just do light bold and maybe italic and underline, but you want to be doing all the different colors and all the different fonts and all the different things but you're so limited?

I feel like some of us do that for ourselves. It's like, we have so many emotions, so many fonts that we could choose from, and we just - we stick with just the basic ones because we don't put any effort into adding fonts, adding emotions to our wellspring of what's available to us. And that's really what I want to encourage you to do, and the way that you do that is simply by increasing your emotional vocabulary.

Practicing the names of words of feelings that you may not use, scintillating. I don't even know how to pronounce it. Brilliant, clever, fantastic. What are other words that you can come up with that generate a different level of emotion that just good or bad, happy or sad?

Remember that your feelings are going to create your results. So if you think about the Model as a recipe and the recipe includes thoughts, feelings, and actions, what combination do you need? What do you need to be thinking, feeling, and doing, in order to consistently create the result you want?

And I love this idea of being a chef and you make the most beautiful dishes based on the most beautiful ingredients. And when you start with really high-quality ingredients, you're going to create a high-quality result in your dish. And I think the same is true for us. When we use really high-quality sentences and high-quality words and high-quality actions, that's when we're going to create the results we want.

So it's almost like you create your models as your masterpiece by taking some time and energy on your intentional models to use words that really generate an emotion. Like, when I think about the emotion of courageousness, I think I want to be courageous, I want to be self-esteemed, I want to feel selected, I want to feel disciplined, what does it feel like to feel disciplined? What does it feel like to be focused? Bodacious? Blooming? Bold?

All of these different words that we can use to plug into our models to generate, I think, a higher quality level of emotion and action. So think about some of these emotions. Honored, fortified, confident, free, what about chosen? I love that one. It's kind of like selected, right? Chosen. Decisive, agile, resilient, fun, funny, powerful, important, heroic, helped.

These are all words. You guys got to get that dictionary and just pull words out and be like, do I want to go into the dressing room and try this one on? And when you try it on, does it make you want to do great things? Does it make you want to create the result that you want?

And the last piece that I want to add here, because I think it's very important to understand is that it's not always about just feeling positive emotion. It's not always about feeling happy and motivated and excited. We also can choose negative emotion on purpose and be deliberate about that.

We can allow ourselves to be human and to have both sides of the human experience. And so often, I have chosen on purpose to feel what I'm feeling, and it makes the experience of the emotion very different than when I fight it. And what I've been doing a lot of experimenting with lately is naming the emotion and using words that aren't just sad or pain or loss, but words that are more distinguishing like broken-hearted, disappointed, scared, raging, self-loathing, lonely, offended, confusion, overwhelmed, obsessive, mean.

I was thinking about this emotion, mean. Have you ever felt mean? You know, where you're just like, I feel mean right now. I want to say mean things to people. It's very different than saying I feel angry, saying I feel mean. It really helps me to curtail my behavior when I acknowledge that that's how I'm feeling because when I feel mean, I want to do mean things.

So instead of saying I'm angry and justifying doing mean things, owning that no, this isn't anger, this is me feeling mean, it's like a level beyond it and identifying and distinguishing between that. So the next time you're feeling a negative emotion, see if you can explore and like, give yourself a multiple choice. Be like, am I really feeling sad or am I feeling lonely or am I feeling scared or am I feeling pity? What am I feeling? And kind of give yourself some options and see if you can distinguish between two different emotions, and how do you know when you're feeling one over the other?

And really learning how to label them in a way that serves you so you can process and allow emotion and be present with your negative emotion instead of always trying to be positive. And I'm going to leave you lastly, with this, which I think is super fascinating is if our emotions are learned and our experience of them are based on our language about them and the vibration we experience in them, it's fascinating to know that what I experience as maybe anger or fear may be very different than what you experience as anger and fear, and what you label your vibration and your experience may be very different than mine.

And so I think that that's interesting to think about in our relationships. When we go back to asking our loved ones what are the top three emotions that you have, what are the emotions that you want to feel, and what do those emotions feel like? Because I've had conversations with colleagues of mine that I'll say this is what joy feels like to me, this is what contentment feels like to me, and they'll describe it the same exact words in a different way.

And so I just think it helps us understand each other instead of making these assumptive conclusions that my experience is your experience because we're using the same word to describe it. So if nothing else, I think emotional vocabulary is fascinating in terms of exploring our humanness and our relationships with ourselves and with other people, and creating the emotion that we want.

So I hope that you'll play around with this. Pick up that dictionary. Let me know if you have any other awesome resources for finding cool words to describe emotion. And there's a lot of people out there that make up words that describe emotion and I think that's fantastic too because there are no rules. All of the words that were ever made up to describe emotion were made up by other humans and nobody has more of a right to name what we're experiencing than us.

So please enjoy and be creative with this process because it will only take you deeper into your experience of awareness. Have a beautiful week everybody. I'll talk to you soon. Bye-bye.

Hey, if you enjoy listening to this podcast, you have to come check out Self-Coaching Scholars. It's my monthly coaching program where we take all this material and we apply it. We take it to the next level and we study it. Join me over at the TheLifeCoachSchool.com/join. Make sure you type in the TheLifeCoachSchool.com/join. I'd love to have you join me in Self-Coaching Scholars. See you there.