Emotional literacy

Emotional literacy is a person's being able to notice the feelings they experience and name them accurately. Most people move with rough categories like 'I'm fine' or 'I'm bad'; yet disappointment and anger, or anxiety and excitement, ask for very different things. Giving an emotion its right name is the first condition of working with it; a named feeling turns into something one can attend to. The neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman's work shows that naming an emotion somewhat reduces its intensity. The coach helps the client come to know their feelings with a more detailed vocabulary.