Building Emotional Awareness: Learning to Understand What You Feel
- Tamara
- May 11
- 7 min read
Emotional awareness is often described as the foundation of emotional wellbeing. It is the ability to notice, identify, understand and response to emotions in ourselves and others. Many of us grew up being taught how to manage our behaviours. Yet for many of us the skills for recognising and managing the emotions underneath our own, and others, behaviours was not explored to the same extent. This leads many of us finding it difficult to recognise or understand what we are feeling. This lack of emotional awareness can lead to misunderstandings, unnecessary stress, and/or negatively impact our relationships with others. Emotions shape how we view the world, so understanding them helps us better understanding ourselves and others.
Psychologist John Gottman, and colleagues, developed the concept of emotion coaching. Emotion coaching is an evidenced based approach to assist parents to aid their children to develop emotional awareness, which in turn will likely assist to strengthen relationships, emotion regulation abilities, build resilience and improve psychological wellbeing. Although the model is typically discussed in parenting contexts, the principles apply broadly to adults in their own relationships, workplaces and within the context of self reflection.
Rather than seeing emotions as a problem to be fixed, avoided or gotten rid of, emotional awareness skills encourage us to view emotions as meaningful signals that deserve attention, curiosity and support.
This post will explore how we can build our emotional awareness skills using the emotion coaching model as a framework.
What Is Emotional Awareness and Why It Matters
Emotional awareness means recognising your feelings as they happen. It involves noticing subtle changes in your mood and understanding what triggers those feelings. People with strong emotional awareness can name their emotions accurately and see how these feelings influence their thoughts and actions.
Emotions are not weaknesses or inconveniences. They are part of our body and brain's communication network. Feelings such as sadness, anxiety, anger, joy, shame or excitement often carry important information about our needs, values, boundaries, and relationships.
Why does it matter?
When emotional awareness is limited, people may:
Feel overwhelmed by their emotional responses without understanding the underlying cause
Struggle to communicate needs clearly
React impulsively
Shut down emotionally
Experience disconnection in relationships
Find it difficult to self soothe during stressful periods
In contrast, emotional awareness helps people to be able to:
Regulate their emotional responses more effectively
Build healthier relationships
Build self compassion
Improve communication and conflict resolution skills
Develop and use more targeted coping strategies
Imagine:
You are in a conversation and someone keeps interrupting and talking over you. You feel unheard, dismissed and irritated. If we are unaware of these emotions we may lash out at the other person in an unhelpful way, e.g. by shutting down, snapping or making snide remarks. In contrast, if we recognise this emotional experience is happening, we can practice techniques to help ourself regulate, prior to then addressing the reason for the feeling as needed.
An Adapted Emotion Coaching Framework
According to John Gottman, this approach encourages curiosity and empathy toward emotions instead of avoidance or criticism. It helps to teach children that their feelings are valid and worth exploring.
In my own work with clients, I adapt John Gottman’s emotion coaching framework slightly to better support emotional awareness as an individual and with others, outside of the parenting framework. While grounded in Gottman’s original model, I find adjusting the order of the steps can help clients first recognise and validate their emotional experience before moving into deeper empathy and problem solving.
To see John Gottman's original model please see his website (link at bottom of post).
Below is the adapted sequence I use, inspired by John Gottman's emotion coaching principles.
Becoming Aware of Emotions
The first step is noticing emotions early, both in ourselves and others. This includes paying attention to our (and others) signs e.g. body sensations, tone of voice, facial expressions, thoughts, urges, and behavioural changes.
When we're first practicing, we can pause and ask ourself: "What am I noticing in my body right now?".
Things you might notice:
Tightness in chest
Muscle tension
Feeling like you may cry
Quickened breath and/or faster heartbeat
Restlessness
Fatigue
Racing thoughts
Self criticism
Urges e.g. to run away, to distract, to eat, to busy oneself etc
Developing awareness starts with slowing down enough to notice these cues. We can't figure out how to regulate and process our emotions until we know what we're working with.
Other questions to ask yourself:
What is my body trying to tell me?
Where do I notice physical signs in my body?
How do I want to behave right now?
Acknowledging Emotions & Recognising Opportunity to Connect
Once emotions are noticed, the next step is acknowledging them rather than dismissing, minimising or immediately trying to fix them. A lot of us will try to skip to step 5 at this point (or even before this point). It can be uncomfortable to recognise our emotions and it takes practice to become comfortable in that discomfit so don't give up on yourself!
This stage can help us focus on recognising emotions as opportunities for:
Self reflection
Self compassion
Connecting with yourself and others
Building emotional safety
Clearer communication
Often, people learn to judge or avoid their (and others) emotions. This is often particularly true for emotions perceived as uncomfortable or inconvenient.
Yet this can get in the way of us recognising the messages the emotions are trying to tell us e.g. anger may be pointing out unmet needs or boundary crossing.
Acknowledging emotions can reduce our shame of the emotions and help work towards creating a greater sense of safety.
Naming Emotions
Many people were never taught emotional language growing up. As a result, emotional experiences are broadly labelled as "fine", "upset", "meh", "bad" or "stressed". If we can only label the emotion broadly, that's ok, it is still a great start to name and identify any kind of emotional experience.
However, by expanding our emotional vocabulary we can improve our emotional regulation skills because emotions are often more manageable when they are identified with more specificity.
For example, underneath the label of "anger" there could actually be:
Hurt
Vulnerability
Disappointment
Rejection
Loneliness
Shame
Fear
Powerlessness
If I broadly label vulnerability or rejection as "anger", I am less likely to understand my own thoughts, sensations and behaviours related to the experience than if I can get to the specifics of how I am feeling.
Naming emotions, especially with nuance, can help people better understand their internal experience and leads them to having a better chance of communicating their needs more clearly.
Practicing and Using Empathy
For many of us, this is the hardest step. So if it feels uncomfortable or unimaginable to provide yourself (or maybe others) empathy, it is ok, you are not alone. Empathy is a skill, it can be a difficult skill, but it is a skill that can be learnt.
According to Dr. Teresa Wiseman, empathy has 4 main attributes:
Recognising someone else's perspective (or in case of yourself connecting with/identifying your own perspective)
Being non-judgemental (try to put away assumptions and biases)
Recognising emotions involved and reflecting them back
Validating emotional experience
Empathy does not mean letting yourself/others "off the hook" or agreeing with every perspective or behaviour. It is about trying to understand yourself (and others) and recognise the emotions as your/their truth in that moment.
Empathy is a powerful part of developing emotional awareness and increasing our wellbeing. Allowing our emotions to be truly seen helps us to connect with ourself and others and to process emotions that might otherwise be dismissed or diminished.
If you want a great summary of empathy check out this great short video by Brené Brown at link below.
Problem Solving (if needed)
Once emotions are acknowledged, named, and connected with through empathy, we are ready to problem solve if needed....finally!
Useful problem solving may involve:
Setting boundaries
Asking for support
Conflict resolution
Using situation appropriate coping strategies
Practicing self care
Making decisions that are emotionally supportive
This is the step that most people like to skip to but it's important to wait because problem solving tends to be most effective and appropriate after emotional validation has occurred. Often our solutions to emotional experiences aren't necessarily "bad" but without emotional awareness they can sometimes be misjudged for the what we need in the moment.
Imagine:
You get home from work and you are feeling something "bad" and out of sorts but you're not sure why so you:
Skip to problem solving and you decide that what you should definitely do is go for a run. That is healthy and good for you what could be wrong with that?
OR
You take a moment and you notice how you are feeling. You identify you're feeling run down, stressed and exhausted. You recognise you're having an urge to run away from your problems. You acknowledge these emotions and practice labelling them. You identify you're feeling stressed, overwhelmed and exhausted. You practice empathy and say to yourself "your emotional experience makes sense, you've had a massive week". Then you feel the emotions shift a little and now you have space to problem solve. Having provided yourself the space to process a little you recognise going for a run would not actually be helpful right now. You decide what your body is telling you is you need to rest and unwind so you run yourself a bath.
Our chance of a useful and appropriate solution is much greater once we have practiced the emotional awareness steps.
Practical Ways to Build Emotional Awareness
Building emotional awareness is a skill that develops gradually. Small, consistent practices can make a significant difference.
Pause and Check In
Take brief moments throughout the day to ask:
What am I feeling right now?
What do I need right now?
Expand Emotional Vocabulary
Use emotion wheels to identify and explore more specific emotional experiences.
(see link to emotion wheel below)
Notice Physical Sensations
Pay attention to how emotions show up in your body:
Butterflies in the stomach
Racing thoughts
Tight jaw
Journal without Judgement
Writing about emotions improves clarity and self understanding.
Practice Validation
Whether with yourself or others, try responding with curiosity instead of criticism.
For example:
"This feeling is understandable" rather than "why would you be feeling that?"
"You have a right to be feeling sad" rather than "sadness is weakness"
Final Thoughts on Building Emotional Awareness
Emotional awareness allows us to recognise and understand our emotions with less fear, shame or tendency to avoid. Learning to understand what you feel is a powerful skill.
John Gottman’s Emotion Coaching framework reminds us that emotions are not obstacles to connection rather they are often the pathway toward it. By noticing your emotions, acknowledging them, naming them, and responding empathetically, you build emotional awareness step by step.
Start small by checking in with yourself daily. If uncomfortable emotions feel too intimidating, start with lower intensity emotions.
You can use the Emotion Coaching steps as a guide to explore your feelings without judgment. Over time, you will find it easier to do with a larger range of emotions. Emotional awareness and regulation is an important part of the journey towards greater self-reflective capacity, self compassion and building deeper and more meaningful connections with others.
Links mentioned in blog:
John Gottman - Introduction to Emotion Coaching:
Brené Brown empathy video:
Emotion Wheel:
