Coaching practices for Awe Broadening Emotion
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Awe Broadening Emotion, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- Everything has gone flat and routine
- I feel small and stuck inside my own head, looping on my own problems, and I want something vast enough
- When a big emotion hits, it becomes the whole world
- I think I’d need a grand vacation or some once-a-year spectacle to feel genuinely moved, so I just don’t
- I’m realizing my whole emotional vocabulary is about five words, so everything that isn’t happy just gets dumped into "bad"
Practices that may help
- Cultivate curiosity as a daily emotional practice
Curiosity is a broadening emotion that expands attentional scope and drives exploratory behavior — it can be deliberately triggered.
Broaden-and-Build, Made Practical - Seek out awe as a broadening and self-transcending emotion
Awe expands perceived time, reduces self-focused thought, and increases prosocial behavior — and it can be deliberately accessed.
Broaden-and-Build, Made Practical - Recognize aware presence within strong emotion
When a strong emotion arises, shift to noticing the awareness in which the emotion appears rather than being swept by it.
Non-Dual Awareness, Made Practical - Broaden-and-Build, Made Practical
Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory proposes that positive emotions — joy, curiosity, love, gratitude, awe — temporarily broaden thought-action repertoires (making thinking more flexible and creative) and, over time, build durable psychological resources including resilience, social connection, and cognitive flexibility. The theory is supported by experimental evidence for the broadening effect; the longer-term building effects are primarily observational. - Seek out awe
Regularly expose yourself to vast, complexity-expanding experiences — nature, art, music, ideas — that trigger awe.
Building Positive Emotions, Made Practical - The Feeling Wheel: Building Emotional Vocabulary
The Feeling Wheel, developed by counselor Gloria Willcox in 1982, is a visual tool that organizes emotions in concentric rings from six core emotions (glad, mad, sad, scared, disgusted, powerful) outward to increasingly specific nuanced feelings. It helps people name their emotional experience more precisely — a capacity research calls emotional granularity — which is associated with better emotional regulation and reduced distress. - Expand your emotional range by studying the outer rings
Spend 5 minutes with the outer ring of the Feeling Wheel weekly, learning the names of emotions you do not yet use.
The Feeling Wheel: Building Emotional Vocabulary - Attend to moral beauty as an everyday awe source
Notice and dwell on acts of extraordinary virtue, skill, or dedication — a common awe trigger that most people overlook.
Awe and Well-Being, Made Practical - Notice and name mixed or contradictory emotions simultaneously
When something significant happens, look for two or more emotions that coexist — even contradictory ones.
The Feeling Wheel: Building Emotional Vocabulary - Mindfulness of the current emotion
Observe the emotion as a wave passing through — without judging it, feeding it, or running from it.
DBT Emotion Regulation Skills, Made Practical
Related concerns
- Awe Emotion Wellbeing
Awe — the emotion triggered by encountering something vast that challenges your current mental frameworks — reliably reduces self-focused thinking, lowers inflammatory markers in some studies, increases prosocial behavior, and expands the perceived sense of time available. Dacher Keltner’s research shows awe is more accessible than people think and can be deliberately cultivated without waiting for once-in-a-decade peak experiences.
- Emotion As Wave
When a strong emotion hits, track it through its full arc — notice it peak and fall without fleeing or amplifying.
Riding the emotion wave with anicca awareness
- Where Do You Feel Emotions
After naming an emotion on the Feeling Wheel, find where it lives in the body.
Locate the emotion in the body as well as naming it
- Awe Emotion Psychology
Every emotion evolved because it does something useful — learn what yours is trying to do.
Understand the function of the emotion
- Awe Experience Wellbeing
Awe — the emotion triggered by encountering something vast that challenges your current mental frameworks — reliably reduces self-focused thinking, lowers inflammatory markers in some studies, increases prosocial behavior, and expands the perceived sense of time available. Dacher Keltner’s research shows awe is more accessible than people think and can be deliberately cultivated without waiting for once-in-a-decade peak experiences.
- Awe Inducing Content
Watch content that conveys genuine vastness — deep space, ecosystems, historical scale — with full attention rather than as background.
Use documentary and large-scale art to trigger awe
Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.