Are you emotionally literate?

In my line of work as a coach of sustainability folks, I often witness how my clients struggle to go from thinking about their issues to feeling them. And real change happens only when we interpret and understand where our emotions come from. For example, if we procrastinate, it's not a time management issue, it's an emotional issue. We cannot think our way out of it.

But it's not my clients' fault: our emotional education is lacking and, as a society, we care more about feeding and developing our brains than our emotions. 

Last week I took my children to see Inside Out 2 at the cinema, and this issue came to the forefront of my mind: if you don't know about this brilliant animated movie, it's the story of a girl and her emotions growing up. It's funny and moving while being psychologically rigorous. It has been hugely helpful in our household to describe emotions and manage them accordingly.

In this second movie, new emotions emerge (adding to the initial happiness, sadness, fear, disgust and anger): ennui (boredom), envy, embarrassment and, the most troublesome of all, anxiety. 

These more complex emotions (those that are not the most primordial instincts that belong to the "lizard" brain, like "fight or flight" or reproducing) reside in our "mammal" brain, while we have evolved to prioritise our human, neocortex development (illustration below is from my forthcoming book The Good Communicator).