What is The Feelings Wheel?
The Feelings Wheel is a useful tool that we often reference within 1:1 coaching sessions and in our Energy Map workshops.
First created by psychotherapist Dr. Gloria Wilcox, The Feelings Wheel is used to help individuals differentiate between their emotions and get more detailed in describing how they’re feeling, in an effort to give them a better understanding of their current situation and more agency over how they wish to respond.
The wheel is broken up into three sections involving a primary, secondary, and tertiary layer. In the first section, Wilcox details six central emotions – sad, angry, scared, powerful, peaceful, and joyful – and assigns each a primary colour. These primary emotions then branch out into secondary and tertiary emotions designed to help you decipher exactly what it is you are feeling.
Accompanied by two outer layers, the feelings wheel is designed to demonstrate the ways in which our emotions feed into one another.
For example, you may identify as feeling angry. Branching out from the primary emotion of anger you could actually be feeling anything from annoyance through to white-hot rage. See how they differ?
Take a look at The Feelings Wheel now for yourself and see if you can identify what you might be feeling right now - starting from the primary layer, through to the tertiary layer.
Source: Calm.com
Calm.com offer a black and white downloadable print-out of The Feelings Wheel above that lets you colour in the wheel as a mindful exercise to familiarise yourself with all of the sections.
Why is The Feelings Wheel helpful?
Feelings can be a difficult thing to navigate. With over 34,000 distinguishable emotions, many of us find it hard to properly verbalise or sit with our emotions, especially the less-desirable or more difficult ones.g.
The Feelings Wheel is there to help expand your emotional vocabulary so that you can gain a better understanding of your current mindset.
Naming your emotions in a more detailed way, broadens your emotional vocabulary, helps you to better understand your feelings and allows you to be more nuanced in your behavioural response.
Our emotional response to a situation often determines our behavioural response. Having more “names” at your disposal to describe how you’re feeling, gives you a broader range of behavioural responses.
As Lisa Feldman Barrett says, being able to distinguish finer meanings within what you’re feeling, allows you to “predict and categorise your sensations more efficiently and better suit your actions to your environment”.
Feldman Barrett cites research that says: “people who [can] distinguish finely among their unpleasant feelings — those “50 shades of feeling crappy” — were 30 percent more flexible when regulating their emotions, less likely to drink excessively when stressed, and less likely to retaliate aggressively against someone who has hurt them.”
Through the use of devices like The Feelings Wheel, you can learn how to identify exactly what you’re feeling, enabling you to better communicate your feelings with others and even with yourself. The Feelings Wheel helps improve our emotional intelligence, giving us the ability to explore how our emotions can drive our behaviours, leading to positive or negative outcomes for ourselves and others.
When might The Feelings Wheel help you as a leader?
The Feelings Wheel gives you a framework for navigating the broad spectrum of your emotions in the future. Instead of being entangled in our thoughts, this method can give you the tools necessary to ‘name and tame’ the feelings that are coming up for you at that moment as a leader.
It is important to sit with and get curious about our emotions. Research shows that unpleasant feelings are every bit as crucial as enjoyable ones in helping us make sense of life's ups and downs, these emotions allow us to properly evaluate our situation and encourage healthy decision making.
This is why it is important to look beneath the surface – to go beyond the obvious and aim to identify exactly what it is we are feeling. The Feelings Wheel is the perfect tool for learning how to access our full range of emotions, in order to become a better leader for our teams.
Here at HUSTLE + hush, we are big proponents for finding ways to strengthen your emotional muscle.
For example, as part of ‘The Art of Receiving Feedback’ online course you’ll explore how to get granular with the emotions you experience when you receive feedback, to help you go from being overwhelmed and defensive to open and decisive in the workplace. Enrol now in our free trial option and get started on your journey toward greater emotional literacy.
Our Energy Map workshops give you as a leader (and your team) the opportunity to explore questions like “how are you feeling right now” and “how do you feel at your best”.
While, a 1:1 coaching program gives you all the space you need to explore, at your own pace what might be coming up for you right now as you navigate leadership growth challenges, career pivots and more. Our coaching team would love to connect with you to explore this further - book in for an exploratory alignment call here.
Written by Lauren Grimes.
Image credits to Finn, Arif Riyanto and Fauxels.