Norlander reflects on emotion coaching CPD event

“My whole perspective on supporting children and their families has significantly changed after attending this training.”

During lockdown, I heard about children struggling with their emotions as, for many, their lives had been turned upside down. Their parents and carers were also struggling with their own emotions and the knock-on effect of seeing their children struggle. I realised how little support there is for families to help them recognise the importance of emotions. I wanted to change this and make a difference in their mental and physical health. I was recommended Emotion Coaching UK, co-founded by Norland Principal Dr Janet Rose with Dr Louise Gilbert and Licette Gus. I signed up and, so far, have attended the two-day core training, held over a weekend, and the first follow up workshop. The training has taught me that emotion coaching is so much more than simply stating that a child is having a bad day because they feel sad.

Emotion coaching is a successful, evidence-based strategy based on renowned psychologist John Gottman’s parenting and relational research. It helps children to understand the different emotions they experience, why they occur, that we can’t help feeling them and how to handle them. A child can so easily be branded by their behaviour, such as being naughty or troublesome, but what emotion coaching has taught me is to look at what is causing the behaviour. Dr Janet Rose gave an example of an iceberg. Think of behaviour at the top of the iceberg but underneath the water there are all the different emotions that can trigger a certain behaviour. It highlights that behaviour is a communication of our emotions as the brain registers emotions felt in the body through the nervous system. This really made me sit back and think about how we expect children to feel happy all the time, but actually they need to feel all emotions so they can learn with the help of emotion coaching to self-regulate, improve and take ownership of their behaviour and control their impulses in all situations. Award-winning author and trainer Dr Mine Conkbayir states that self-regulation is the greatest gift we can give to children.

The Emotion Coaching UK session was eye-opening and fascinating, and I especially found learning about the brain very interesting. It clarified why we react the way we do when our emotions are running high. When a person is experiencing an emotional moment, they ‘flip their lids’ or in other words, the brain reacts and we ‘flip’ from our upstairs brain, which is our thinking brain, to our downstairs brain and go into a fight or flight type mode, or even a freeze type mode Emotion coaching encourages us to re-establish the connection between our thinking brain and our emotions so we can calm down and look at a situation rationally. Another aspect I found very interesting was learning about meta-emotion philosophy, which is basically emotion coaching ourselves and having greater awareness of ourselves, our emotions, how we react to others’ emotions and how we regulate our own emotions. Our meta-emotion philosophy influences how we react and respond to emotions in others, which is really important for helping parents and carers to support their children.