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Emotions are the most powerful tool. They assist us in determining our outlook towards life. But there’s one common thread that all of us are struggling with, it is how to deal with them from a space of emotional stability. Now, the question is how could we as coaches help people deal with those emotions? What are those effective ways that could help our clients to deal with their emotions, so that they can show up effectively so that they can perform better and produce better results? This time on coaching matters, we are going to unwrap how can we actually assist our clients to deal with their emotions with Christine Gallaire. 

Here is a transcripted version of the conversation that followed.

Defining Emotional Intelligence

Some say that emotional intelligence is bringing your souls and emotions together to make optimal decisions. For me, it’s really being smarter with emotions, using them as a strategic resource.

Fathers of emotional intelligence, Salavoy and Mayer, Six Seconds, which is a big worldwide organization dealing with emotional intelligence have all defined emotional intelligence. Actually, for me, it’s simply being clever with our emotions. I have to say that it has to be with listening to our emotions in order to take them as the messages they send to us and consider them as rational data, for us to make good intentional decisions.

So, how to help our clients deal with anxiety.

How to Help our Clients Dealing with Anxiety?

The very first step is to get them to say and to state how they feel. What do I mean here? “How they feel.” It means that they really need to name their emotions. Why that, because we know from research that by naming their emotions, people start to automatically calm down and I will share with you a very useful tools that can help you with it.

The second step is helping them give their feelings a slight evolution. What I mean here is that reformulating, that emotion. Instead of saying, oh, I’m really, really feeling anxious, get them to see how they could transform that slightly. Could that be telling exciting, for instance, and by doing that, you know, by just trying to name that emotion differently, what happened to them is that they changed that focus.

So, the point is to help our clients first explore how to actively listen. And what you need to do is actively listen. So the second one is helping him to activate his empathy. I mean asking him questions about how the other person is going to feel and what is the situation? What is the context? Why this person can have that kind of very strong emotion. All kinds of questions that you could use as coaches. Such that getting our client to ask open questions to understand better others’ points of view.

Another point here now is to understand how to deal with stress. And the question is to you guys, can stress be positive? 

How to Deal with Stress? 

In a way, stress can be positive. Let’s see what we’re saying. Yes, it can motivate. Yes. It’s a driver. Yes, exactly. What we can do is first, I think that a certain level of stress indicates something. It attracts our attention to something which is important for us. That can be in something which is unsafe for use or potential threat or something that just needs a very immediate action.

So the first thing we can do for our clients is to help them first to understand what stress does for us. I’ve seen people that were really stressed, denying the fact that they were stressed and the first step I use in that case is getting them to tell me in that situation when they think about that specific situation they are in and what are the physical signals that are coming to them.

Our body senses some physical signals and it’s up to you to really, pay attention and connect them to the current situation we’re in. So on your side, where are the kind of, physical signals you feel when you’re stressed. For me, I know that at least that’s three, actually. So one is headaches. The second one is pain in stomach and the third have to do with difficulty in eating. And sometimes to speak actually. We have a lot of physical signals that if we do not ignore them as just messages and we just can then, focus our attention on what’s going on. 

The second step is getting our clients to name the stresses. And then by stresses here, I mean, that can be fast. But not only those could be activities, that could be relationships. This could be the attitude. And difficulties at work, unclear situations, risk, sometimes stakeholders, but also kind of limiting beliefs. So here again, what we can do is really, check with our clients.The number of stresses that are around and the ones that have the strongest impact on them. 

The third one is to identify some coping strategies, and certain tactics, that are going to help our clients to minimize the impact of these stresses. And this one thing for this stuff, which is quite useful and works usually quite well.

Helping Clients Identify Their Emotion

Sometimes people find it extremely difficult to identify the emotion that they are going through, where there’s a tendency to get confused in identifying that emotion. I’m sure you would have come across those situations as well. In those situations, what is the way out for a coach? 

The way out of this is to get them really exploring the variety of emotions they have. It happens to all of us to feel happy about something that has happened, but at the same time, sad for the next thing that we lost and in sometimes as well, angry about something, but really feeling grateful for something else. All of this exactly at the same time.

What we should do is try to name all of this. And I start by giving sometimes as myself, a small example like I just did right now, and if I see that I’m blocked because I absolutely do not choose to talk about them, I used the Wheel of Emotions, the one of Plutchik, and by looking at those, we look at the combinations that can exist. We see that often the combination of two or three emotions brings to something else and we try to name it all together. And we talk about, so the consequences of the emotions, the kind of messages that those emotions are giving us. 

Getting Over Resignation

Often there is a tendency in the country to get into that resignation mode which might stem from the trigger that they have at this moment or from the past patterns that they’ve been operating from. How could we assist coaches to get over those resentments where there is the inability to trust people?

First, get them first to identify it. It is about trying to understand what is behind that resentment. What is behind the resignation? What does it mean in terms of the people? How about the people that are involved, the kind of emotions that they felt at the moment, why did they feel this way? And if it has to do with the trust pattern, sometimes people believe that the other people do not trust them actually is them not trusting those people. So trying to get them to weigh in how much do they trust them and how do they show that trust and how much the others are also showing trust. And is there something which is within the signals of trust, which is not, which is misread actually? So, I would push them really to look at the signals and say, “well, is there another way to interpret them? What would someone else say about it?” 

So it’s not just about our coachee, our clients, it’s about the world system around that, the beliefs the relational kind of dynamics that among them, that affects the person. So trying to help the person understand what is, their own part of it. And also the scene he, or she could influence. But what is the responsibility of all others? Yeah, I get him or her, understanding what is then the impact of his change, or her change from the world system. 

About Christine Gallaire

Christine Gallaire is a cornerstone coach based in Milan. She gives Executives with dynamic mentoring based on the concept of “making positive change visible.” She seeks to generate powerful and practical solutions to produce meaningful results as a Master Certified Coach, Facilitator, Trainer, and Assessor. Christine has extensive commercial and marketing management expertise across Europe. Christine worked in the sector for a number of years in European Marketing and Communication before starting her consultancy career. She has developed a multicultural perspective after working with over 20 different ethnicities. She teaches cross-cultural management in the Bologna Business School’s “International Business Strategy” programme. Christine is a French woman who lives in Northern Italy and speaks Italian, French, and English proficiently. Her credentials include an Executive Master’s degree in Business Strategies Development at Il Sole 24 Ore Business School, a Master Certified Coach certification from ICF, the course Coaching for Leadership at INSEAD, a diploma of Corporate Coaching at CoachU Italy, the Marshall Goldsmith Centered Coaching certification, a certified training of Mentor-Coaching, the EQ Practitioner and EQ Facilitator Training, systemic team coaching.

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