Coaching is dealing with emotions; understanding, feeling, defining emotions and their triggers are key moments of coaching sessions. What makes you feel like that? How do you feel? What energizes you? We can find a lot of coaching questions related to emotions. Emotions trigger and drive behaviors so it is coaching raw material. However, we can have difficulties naming our emotions, to feel them consciously. Like a lot of coaches, I use Plutchik' s wheel to support my coachees to identify their emotions. It opens our minds to the fact that there are much more emotions than we thought. But it is not enough, we know an extended list of emotions but often we still do not really feel them.

There comes acting. I encourage most of my coachees to make role-play during our sessions. When they agree to play themselves or someone else, paying attention to their emotions, to what is happening in their mind they usually make big steps in self-understanding or in understanding others.

Furthermore, I encourage you to act regularly, alone with yourself using the “what if “ question or with your friends or families; playing to be another you or someone else will help you to feel more, to touch and understand emotions you don’t feel every day.

As an occasional actor (as the poster below shows) I act time to tome in some shows. It really helps me to understand personalities and emotions, triggers and sub-personnalities. To act well I must feel my character’s emotions, if not, I perform badly on the stage. Discussions with the director and other fellow actors about our characters also make me grow in my understanding of human behaviors. So to understand yourself and others, acting is worth a try. If you don’t want to try it with a drama group, ask your coach; role playing is always an interesting experience.