Emotion Naming Chart: 10 Evidence-Based Coaching Practices

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Emotion Naming Chart, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Practices that may help

1. 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.
2. Map your emotional landscape
   Identify which situations reliably produce which emotions for you — before you need to regulate them.
   Situation Selection, Made Practical
3. Locate the emotion in the body as well as naming it
   After naming an emotion on the Feeling Wheel, find where it lives in the body.
   The Feeling Wheel: Building Emotional Vocabulary
4. Labeling Emotions in Negotiation, Made Practical
   Labeling — naming what the other person seems to be feeling before any argument or ask — reduces the emotional intensity of the feeling and makes the other party feel understood, which lowers their defenses. Affect-labeling research (Lieberman et al., 2007) shows that putting feelings into words reduces amygdala activity; Chris Voss built this into FBI hostage-negotiation practice. The technique is most powerful when the label is accurate and delivered without judgment.
5. Name what the emotion is doing in your body
   Track the physical signs of the emotion as they move through — this alone reduces their intensity.
   The 90-Second Rule, Made Practical
6. 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
7. 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
8. Daily emotion naming with the Feeling Wheel
   Each day, use the Feeling Wheel to name your emotional state with at least one layer of precision beyond the core word.
   The Feeling Wheel: Building Emotional Vocabulary
9. Granular labeling: move from broad to specific emotion words
   Replace "stressed" or "bad" with the most specific emotion word you can find.
   Name It to Tame It: Affect Labeling in Practice
10. Simple affect label: say the emotion word aloud or in writing
    When emotionally activated, say or write one clear emotion word — "fear," "anger," "grief" — before doing anything else.
    Name It to Tame It: Affect Labeling in Practice

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• My moods seem to come out of nowhere→
• I can analyze my feelings all day long, but it stays in my head and never actually moves through me→
• When a feeling takes over I’m just lost inside it, like it’s the whole room→
• I’m realizing my whole emotional vocabulary is about five words, so everything that isn’t happy just gets dumped into "bad"→
• Something big happened and I feel two opposite things at once→

Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.