Search

Emotional Literacy - Feelings Wheel

Nadine Jones
Jan 20, 2017
2 min read

Inquisitive, proactive and confident.

These are the feelings word I picked to resonate with today.

Sometimes it's hard to explain exactly how you feel. If your childhood was anything like mine feeling where not something we talked about, aside from the more general feelings of happy, sad, mad. These more general feeling often don’t resonate with what our true emotional state is, leaving us feeling not fully understood or heard. Developing my emotional literacy has been a journey in and of it self, and one I’m still on.

What we don’t know, we don’t know.

What we are not taught we cannot expect to learn easily. For example if you were given a book as an infant but never read to or taught that those funny squiggly lines where letters and letter put together where words, how would you ever learn to read. Emotional Literacy can be look at in much the same way. Developing the Skill of emotional literacy takes patience and practice the same as any skill one chooses to learn.

How the feeling wheel works for me.

I first look at the in circle the more general basic feelings of fear, disgust, sad, happy, surprise, fear, anger. I pick one that feels like it fits at that moment right now, for me today happy. Then in the middle ring next happy you will see several other feeling/emotions, pick which one (sometime more) fit best in the now. For me one was powerful. Next too powerful or whatever fit for you, you’ll find to more words, try them on see which fit best for you in that moment. If neither fits maybe you stay in the middle ring or try again.

Please note that you can have many different feelings going on all at once (think of Joy in the Disney movie Inside Out), some that you may say are positive and some that you my say are negative, in my opinion all feelings are good with the exception of hopelessness.

Finding what resonates for you is a learning process, it takes time and work. For each of us to feel really understood and heard we first must be clear with ourselves on what emotions are coming up for us in that moment, then we can express those feelings to others, if we feel safe enough.

We are emotional beings, and our emotional state is often in consent flux throughout the day.