Manage Your Emotions with the 1-2-3 Self-Coaching Process

June 22, 2022

As a 5PATH Hypnotherapist, I often use a tool to help people better understand their own emotions and how to manage them—rather than the emotions and feelings having the upper hand in our subconscious responses. The 1-2-3 Self-Coaching process is simple but extremely effective. Plus, like any other mental health tool, the more you use it, the easier and easier it becomes to resolve unwanted emotions and feelings. 

To explain, emotions are what we label the thing we are feeling. For instance, you might say: “I am sad today” or “I am lonely.” In these cases, “sad” and “lonely” are the emotions that you are experiencing. However, the feeling is where you physically feel it in your body.

For sadness, you might feel it in your throat or your heart. It can be a heavy feeling or a pain in the heart area. For loneliness, it might be an ache deep in your chest or a pain in your mind. Although it isn’t crucial to separate the two in your everyday life, it is worth defining for the purpose of our discussion about the 1-2-3 Self-Coaching process. 

Step 1: Define What it Is that You Are Feeling

When dealing with an emotion or a feeling that is overwhelming and uncomfortable, we want to start with Step 1 and try to define what it is we are feeling. With awareness comes the ability to start heading in the right direction. 

So many times as humans, we have been told to hide our feelings or to tuck them away because they make others feel uncomfortable and/or they are not convenient. However, when we use dissociated or numbing coping skills to not address our emotions, we end up doing things that, over time, become bad habits or responses to what would otherwise be healthy responses and learning opportunities. So the next time you are feeling an emotion, pay attention to what it is that you are noticing. 

Step 2: Discover What Is Causing the Feeling

The next step is to try to determine, if you can, what is causing the emotion or feeling. For instance, did someone say something mean or untruthful about you? Did your partner ignore something you said? Or are you simply hurt by someone’s lies? If that is the case, it is pretty easy to see and understand why you might be feeling unheard or unseen.

Step 3: Decide How You Will Overcome the Feeling

Once you know the culprit of your emotion or feeling, then you can move to step 3, which is deciding how you will overcome the emotion or feeling. Sometimes, it requires a conversation with someone to say, “Hey, when you said that thing about me the other day, it was very hurtful and also not true.” Or with a partner or loved one: “When you don’t listen or engage in my conversations, I feel unheard or unseen.”

Once you have had this conversation, you might notice that the feeling you had before dissipates or goes away entirely. Why? Because you have addressed that feeling and “IT” feels heard and seen. Sometimes, it might take an extra step of saying to yourself that you forgive the person who said or did the thing to you because they didn’t know what they were talking about. They heard a rumor and spread it without thinking about the consequences, for example.

And other times, we must take the high road and do the right thing so that we can put the situation to rest and feel better. Remember you NEVER have control over what other people say, do, or feel, but you ALWAYS have control over your own responses.

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Once you learn to use this process over and over again for even the smallest of infractions, you will find that what used to take a month to get over, might now only take a week, a day, or even an hour. Think about how much time you will have by not allowing your emotions and feelings to get the better of you. You can learn to work with yourself to achieve a greater sense of peace, acceptance, and happiness in your life.