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- Anger (experienced at the base of the spine) sets clear boundaries. Expressed negatively, anger can be destructive and frightening but when expressed without aggression it is the energy that commands attention, says "No" and protects us and others.
- Hatred (the gut) ends things, destroys the old. It helps us get rid of what is over and confront stuck situations that are being denied.
- Grief (lower chest and diaphragm) is the rhythm of sadness, of letting go, of surrender - it is what allows us to empathise with another's pain.
- Love (the heart) is accepting, welcoming and inclusive, it is the rhythm of concern and caring.
- Eros (mouth and hands) expresses sensual pleasure and excitement. This rhythm excites interest, entices and engages others.
- Joy (mostly expressed through the eyes) celebrates and affirms the positive, goes right through the body as in jumping for joy.
- Awe (top of head) is breath-taking, revering, going beyond ourselves, the rhythm of what transcends, being in touch with something we cannot name.
Tip 38 – Understanding Emotions and Sentic States
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Emotional Intelligence (EI) is the ability to recognise and manage emotions, in yourself and other people. EI is increasingly being recognised as being at least as important as IQ for success in business, relationships and life in general.
In his best-selling 1995 book Emotional Intelligence, journalist, Daniel Goleman indicated that Self-awareness ie knowing and labelling one's own emotions as one of the most important abilities to develop.
Our bodies communicate with us to tell us and others what we need. The better our communication, the better we feel. Emotions help us to establish our boundaries and have the potential to unite and connect us. They can serve as our inner moral and ethical compass and are essential for good decision making.
So by learning to recognise, describe and label emotions at increasing levels of detail, we can differentiate more emotions and respond more appropriately – for ourselves and with others.
But what is an emotion? More than 90 definitions have been offered over the past century, and there are almost as many theories of emotion - not to mention a complex array of overlapping words in our languages to describe them. An interesting and helpful model comes from Plutchik in American Science August 2001. He offers an integrative theory based on evolutionary principles: Emotions, he says, are adaptive - in fact, they have a complexity born of a long evolutionary history - and although we conceive of emotions as feeling states, Robert Plutchik says the feeling state is part of a process involving both cognition and behaviour and containing several feedback loops.
Plutchik suggested 8 primary bipolar emotions: joy versus sadness; anger versus fear;
acceptance versus disgust; and surprise versus anticipation.
A coach can help you widen your emotional language and expression and in a myriad of other ways.
Each feeling is associated with a stimulus event and a behaviour that is intended to give a desired effect. In the home or office environment it can be useful to have this understanding, making it easier to determine a root cause, in yourself or others, for particular behaviours.
Plutchick goes on to present a three-dimensional model describing the relationship among emotions. The cone’s vertical dimension represents intensity, and the circle represents degrees of similarity among the emotions. The eight sectors are designed to indicate the eight primary emotion dimensions defined by the theory arranged as four pairs of opposites.
In the exploded model the emotions in the blank spaces are those that are mixtures of two of the primary emotions i.e.
Optimism - Anticipation + Joy
Love - Joy + Acceptance
Submission - Acceptance + Fear
Awe - Fear + Surprise
Disappointment - Surprise + Sadness
Remorse - Sadness + Disgust
Contempt - Disgust + Anger
Aggressiveness - Anger + Anticipation
Sentic States
Many people are good at building rapport with a wide range of people by matching language, posture, breathing etc - and, in particular, by utilising emotional rhythm.
There are 7 of these basic rhythms, named by Manfred Clynes in Sentic States, which have been widely studied. They exist across cultures and appear to be shared by everyone. Peter Hawkins of the Bath Consultancy Group uses the model in training and has linked it to the different energy chakras. Sentic States can have a positive or a negative aspect:
Each of us tends to develop one or two dominant modes of expression whilst having other rhythms we find harder to access and express. To work more effectively with our Sentic States, we need to: expand our range of emotional expression; use each emotional rhythm more cleanly and incisively (ie be able to express each emotion without suffering or enjoying the emotion - as actors are able to); and increase our awareness of the non-verbal emotional expression of others.
Ask yourself:
- What strengths do I have?
- What will these enable me to achieve?
- What are my weaker areas?
- What would these make difficult?
- How can I broaden my understanding and expression of emotions?
- How will an increased ability with feelings help me motivate, plan and achieve more success in life?