Name the Emotions Game: 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 Name the Emotions Game, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Practices that may help

1. 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
2. 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
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. R — Recognize what is happening
   Pause and name what is actually present: "Fear is here," "Anger is here," "Shame is here."
   RAIN Meditation: Tara Brach’s Four-Step Practice
6. 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
7. Dual labeling: name both the emotion word and its body location
   Follow an emotion word with its body location: "Anxiety — tight chest and held breath."
   Name It to Tame It: Affect Labeling in Practice
8. Expand your feelings vocabulary
   Deliberately learn and use a wider range of emotion words than "good" and "bad".
   Emotional Granularity: Precision as a Regulation Skill
9. Labeling emotions
   Name the emotion you sense — “It seems like you’re frustrated” — instead of denying or ignoring it.
   Never Split the Difference, In Practice
10. 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

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

• Everything just comes out as "stressed" or "I feel bad," and that catch-all blob never tells me what to actually do→
• I’m realizing my whole emotional vocabulary is about five words, so everything that isn’t happy just gets dumped into "bad"→
• I can tell I’m off — short with people, tight, reactive — but if you asked me what I’m actually feeling I couldn’t say, and I want to slow down enough to even know what’s going on in me.→
• When a feeling takes over I’m just lost inside it, like it’s the whole room→
• I can name what I’m feeling but it still has me by the throat→

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