Whether you are a parent wanting to be a better mother or father and improve your parenting style or you are coach or life coach like myself working with adult clients desiring to empower your clients with their emotional heritage and increase their Emotional Intelligence and be a person with great self mastery a la The Fifth Discipline, then this is a sweet and short book to help guide you succeed!
In my work as a Life Coach here in Orange County out of my Newport Beach office on Irvine, it’s not uncommon for clients to come for Personal Coaching sessions for themselves and for both childhood things for themselves and for their children and step-children (usually teens, really, because the majority of my clients are over 37 and in their 40s or 50s, Midlife folks) to surface that need educating more than therapy. I mean, what you don’t know yet, you don’t know, right?
Without needing deep therapy at this point, many of them have already done some work with a psychotherapist of some sort, they now find themselves confronted with their own absence of great frame-of-reference examples to rely on from their own childhoods for guidance. They are relearning now. And the point is now to go forward. This includes have household rules or Family Codes of Behavior. Many simply don’t have any.
Before we can start to build those, we must first connect with our feeling and emotions – the full range of them. Knowing our feelings and being equipped to identify them, connect with the, and actually feel and express them, albeit, in healthy and constructive ways, is the foundation work. It’s like going to the paint store first and shopping for paint swatches and purchasing painting materials before actually launching into painting the bedroom.
Gottman provides such a sage guide for reference for “the rest of us” who grew up without that. Sans blame or shame, equipping ourselves with positive mindset tools empowers us to be better Adults with greater Personal Mastery and better parents, understanding children thrive with rules, boundaries, and guidelines for safety and true liberty.
This booklet is a tremendous easy access resource from THE Relationship Expert penultimate, John Gottman, PhD.
Many adults were not raised by parents with an “Emotional Coaching” parenting style. This is not to blame our parents at this late age.
Rather instead, What Am I Feeling? empowers and equips adults to fulfill their own lives now to give them their emotional validation and identification which an ideal parent from 20+ years ago just didn’t have. It’s never too late to improve and equip yourself more fully as long as you still draw breath.
This is a marvelous tool to add to your Life Mastery toolkit, whatever your age!
Think of Gottman’sWhat Am I Feeling? as a really lovely illustrated short pamphlet which anyone can read at any time, complete with very practical “Real Life” applications with children. This is a very digestible book, not a massive tome. So, it works well in any therapists’ Waiting Room or family therapist’s Resource Shelf when working with children and families, as well as for anyone in a related family-helping profession such as a rabbi, pastor, or priest.
Gottman’sWhat Am I Feeling? is a quick tips reference manual to start to help you apply and distill the strategies and tips from the much lengthier John Gottman book, Raising An Emotionally Intelligent Child The Heart of Parenting. You can use it to serve as a conversation catalyst with your spouse, you kids, and your ex, and it could be used as a light couple’s devotional to establish common language for coupledom discussions.
Part of what I so adored and appreciated about Gottman’s book and the photographic illustrations from the marvelous Talaris Research Institute is how they just very sweetly without much fanfare managed to illustrate this quick guide with photographs of multiple races and ethnicities to empower and equip us all.
Emotions span the barriers. And Gottman clearly desires to help us either as a parent or an adult. It’s never too late to discover and empower yourself with identifying, What Am I Feeling?
Happy Dating and Relationships,
April Braswell