Emotional Coaching

In this section, we explore how and why to coach young people through their emotions. The ‘emotion management’ skill is defined as the ability “to be aware of and constructively handle both positive and challenging emotions.” 

This involves young people: experiencing a range of positive and negative emotions in a safe context; and having opportunities to practice and develop healthy and functional emotion skills. 

This module will support you to: 

  • Deepen your understanding of the framework for SEL generally, and where Emotion Coaching fits within this; 

  • Recognise the ways in which culture, social identities, and personal histories impact the ways emotions are understood and interpreted; 

  • Explain the value that incorporating and modelling emotion management and emotion coaching brings to your work with young people; 

  • Identify and practice the basic components of emotion coaching; and 

  • Plan next steps for incorporating concepts learned about emotion coaching within your work with young people. 

The key staff and volunteer practices that support this skill area are:  

  • Providing and adjusting the structure of activities to accommodate young people’s processing of emotions; 

  • Modelling healthy strategies for dealing with emotion within the context of caring, mutually respectful relationships with young people; and 

  • Coaching young people about handling and learning from their ongoing emotional experiences. 

In addition, adults can practice emotion coaching that is respectful of young people’s emotional autonomy by: 

  • Using deep understanding of young people and their emotional styles to monitor, appraise, and respond in the moment to their ongoing emotions; 

  • Fostering emotional awareness and reflection; 

  • Helping young people to frame the situation and emotion; and 

  • Encouraging problem solving in response to challenging emotions and the situations creating them--suggesting strategies for dealing with them. 

We will explore and practice these approaches in the training. You can find more detail in your participant notebook (see below) as well as on page 35 of the Thrive Guide. 

Resources

A series of resources to support your understanding of emotional coaching. 

Emotion Coaching: participant notebook

In this workbook, you will find the following activities: 

  • What’s Our Lens? 

Use this worksheet to capture your responses to a series of videos that we will watch in the training. Think about what sensations you felt in your body, what the running commentary in your mind was saying, what emotion(s) you think the people in the video were experiencing, and which emotions you felt more or less comfortable with. 

  • Try LUVE Out 

One way to support Emotion Management is by using the acronym LUVE, which stands for Label, Understand, Validate, and Express. Rewrite each of the staff responses on this worksheet to be a more LUVEing response. 

  • Share the LUVE: Emotion Coaching Role-Play Scenarios 

Use these scenarios to role play and practice using LUVE in your practice. 

  • Reflection Questions 

Three questions to help you consolidate and capture key take-aways from this section. 

  • Taking It Back 

Use this worksheet to think about how you might develop the key staff practices and key youth experiences for emotion coaching and emotion management in your work with young people. This will help you to develop a goal for the next activity. 

  • Emotion Management/Emotion Coaching Goal Form 

Start creating a plan for your specific goal(s) here! 

See more

Further Reading

A selection of articles, books and websites offering additional resources designed to deepen your understanding. 

SESD Resource Hub: Developing Socio-Emotional Skills

For more tools and resources, check out the ‘Developing Socio-Emotional Skills’ section of the SESD Resource Hub. 

Explore here