Understanding emotions: solving the mystery

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Often what motivates clients to contact a coach or therapist is that they cannot understand – make sense of – why things are as they are. They might know they are stuck or in difficulty, but the ‘why’ is shrouded in mystery. Before seeking professional support, clients will often spend a lot of time trying to work things out by themselves or with their existing support network. This often results in a wild goose chase of looking in all the wrong places. Exhausted and demoralised, they pick up the phone to a coach or therapist.

What if there was an easier way to make sense of why things are as they are? Well, there is an easier way: understanding emotions, which is the subject of this post and extract from my upcoming book How To Transform Your Life With IMPACT: Unlock The Best Of You.

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How to have great therapy

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When someone decides to speak to a therapist, they are commenting on their existing conversations, and that is, they are not making the difference they are after. If they were, they wouldn’t be talking to the therapist. The reason therapists exist is to give us what our existing support network can’t or won’t. A client leaving a therapy session must be able to say, ‘That was exactly what I needed. No one I know could or would have talked to me that way.’

A therapist’s job is to give someone a Conversation With Impact because only these result in the personal breakthroughs we need to achieve good mental health and wellbeing. In this post, I look at how you can make sure your therapist does this for you.

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Personal boundaries – are yours in place?

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A personal boundary can be considered anything that we ask others to respect. They exist as the individual rules, guidelines, moral and ethical principles, which determine how we act in the relationships we form. We create them in the mental and physical space we share with people, from fleeting moments of interaction to lifelong commitments.

Examples of boundaries include:

– Physical: our body, personal space and possessions
– Emotional: what we feel strongly about, what upsets us and excites us
– Sexual/intimate: sexual preferences, consent to touch
– Intellectual: our opinions, beliefs and values
– Financial: money and other forms of wealth and value
– Professional: work/life balance

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