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“You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.”
— Maya Angelou
Clients will inevitably face setbacks. How they respond to them makes all the difference. Emotional resilience plays a critical role in helping them to keep moving forward.
Why does resilience need emotion?
It may be helpful first to define resilience. Oxford Dictionary has 2 points of definition:
- The capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.
- The ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity.
Emotional resilience integrates both of these points. Resilience is often confused with mental toughness, which suggests that we use logic, drive, and sheer willpower to achieve our goals and navigate our challenges. And while all those can be powerful tools, they don’t address all the elements we need for emotional resilience. Willpower may help us with toughness, drive may help us withstand difficulty, and logic may even allow us to recover quickly from difficulties (to a point). But emotional resilience isn’t just about enduring challenges. It’s about adapting to them. This need for adaptation is where the second part of the definition, elasticity, comes in.
Is resilience about toughness or flexibility?
Think of an elastic. When the band is pulled in different directions, it stretches as needed and returns to its original shape when released. If external pressure is applied to it, it bends or folds and can even be tied into a knot, but eventually, when released, it will return to its form. Good quality elastic won’t wear out easily, can withstand repeated tests (within its capacity to endure), and maintains its original integrity. Its ability to bend and stretch allows it to do all these things.
If achieving goals were merely a process of mental toughness, they would be easier to achieve. Set a plan (logic), keep to it (willpower) and move forward (drive). However, clients in coaching create (stretch) goals that already push them beyond their comfort zones. As they move forward, they will encounter unexpected detours, external and internal pressures, and moments of discomfort. They will need to navigate obstacles that challenge their original plan. The unexpectedness of these events may disrupt the strategy (logic), challenge the commitment (willpower), and shift the one-directional movement (drive) of the original plan. A critical choice point may arise before there is time to create a new plan. At that moment, elasticity will be required, and that is where emotional resilience will be needed.
When clients connect their goals to their purpose and values, their positive emotions serve as motivation. Even when goals aren’t connected so deeply, say the client is looking to avoid something they don’t want, there is still an emotional undercurrent at play. When obstacles come up, they, too, will bring up emotions, sometimes to degrees that may feel overwhelming. Emotional resilience helps us to navigate not just our external obstacles but our emotional reactions to them. That raises the next question: If emotional resilience helps us manage our emotional reactions, isn’t that just self-control?
Isn’t emotional resilience just self-control?
Put simply, control is not resilience. Suppressing emotions, rationalizing discomfort away, or pushing through at all costs can have consequences. When ignored, emotions often resurface in ways that disrupt progress—whether through giving up, procrastination, or burnout. The elastic hardens, breaks or loses its shape. At the same time, feeding our emotional response by ruminating on our fear, anger, worry, or need to be right, also prevents forward movement.
Emotional resilience involves:
- Recognizing emotions as they arise and accepting their presence.
- Understanding their role in providing us with deeper information than our conscious thought.
- Allowing ourselves to feel the discomfort of our emotions, trusting that we will eventually recover from them.
- Making choices on how to act from a conscious, aware space.
Now that we’ve explored what emotional resilience is—and what it isn’t—the next question is: How do we coach it when it isn’t part of the client’s stated goal?
What if emotional resilience is not part of the client’s agenda?
Even when a client hasn’t come into a session stating that they want to work on how they relate to their emotions, when coaches are fully present, there will still be opportunities to help clients build emotional resilience. Some readers may be wondering, Isn’t that against the client’s agenda? Well, it would be if the coach took it on themselves to make it a goal to help a client improve their emotions. But that isn’t required (and definitely not advisable).
Here’s the thing: Simply by being present with a client’s emotions without judgment, clients can explore and relate to them differently, even if that was never the client’s goal. ICF Core Competency 6.4 outlines a key coaching skill: Notices, acknowledges and explores the client’s emotions, energy shifts, non-verbal cues or other behaviors. If we, as coaches, aren’t noticing, acknowledging and exploring these things, then we are missing opportunities to help our clients build emotional resilience. How?
Research suggests that the ability to remain present with emotions, without suppressing or over-identifying with them, supports the development of greater adaptability and self-regulation. When we support clients in being present with their emotions, coaching may, over time, build emotional resilience by exploring clients’ energy shifts and emotions in a non-judgemental way; they, too, become more aware of their emotions.
A study published in Frontiers in Psychology found that people who engage in mindfullness or self awareness practices, such as paying attention to physical sensations, thoughts, and emotions without judgment, develop stronger emotional regulation skills. The study also suggests that those with higher emotional awareness experience lower stress levels and greater well-being over time.
There’s an important distinction to make here. There is a vast difference between focusing on the story behind whatever the client is feeling rather than the sensations, feelings, and thoughts the client is experiencing, even while telling the story.
Sensations vs stories
Emotions do not begin as thoughts. The first signal of an emotional experience is physical, and I like how the Stoics referred to that signal: as the ‘first movement.’ This first movement happens before conscious thought.
The word “emotion” originates from the Latin, meaning ‘to move.’ Before an emotion can be labeled or given a narrative, it presents as a physical movement or shift: a change in breath, a rise in temperature, or a contraction of muscles. Consider anger: before we recognize it as “anger,” it may appear as heat rising through the body, an intensity in the brow, a clenching of the jaw, and/or tension in the hands.
After that ‘first movement’ of physical sensations, emotions often take on a second layer: the narratives or stories we attach to them. This distinction is captured in an old Buddhist parable, The Second Arrow. The first arrow represents unavoidable suffering triggered by something external or internal that causes pain or discomfort. The second arrow, however, is self-inflicted, and it is the suffering that comes from the thoughts, interpretations, and judgments that follow the first event.
When coaches focus on the client’s narrative about whatever is troubling them rather than the sensations and feelings that the situation is triggering, they risk further embedding the suffering or resistance the client feels.
How do we coach emotional resilience?
When a client talks about their goal, we explore what is meaningful to them about what they want to achieve at a deep level. We notice the sparkle in their eye as they talk about it, the way their body language changes, and we comment on that and ask questions about that. Through that noticing, we also build trust with the client. They know we are seeing and hearing them and that it’s safe to feel.
And when they talk about their current situation, the situation that they do not want, instead of getting into all the nitty-gritty details of that situation, we pick up on the subtle cues that indicate how the client may be experiencing it. The words they use, such as feeling “stuck,” can be an entry point. Instead of asking, “What is keeping you stuck?” (which focuses on the story), maybe we ask them to describe the experience of being stuck. “You’ve said the word stuck a few times. Where, within you, do you feel the stuckness?” Or if they talk about being frustrated, we don’t need to ask them what is frustrating them—they already know! Asking about it further embeds them in that frustration. Instead, we can ask them, “When you experience frustration, how do you notice it?” Doing this helps clients become aware of the sensations of the experience, building the self-awareness that will start building resilience.
And finally, when we help clients plan their actions after the session, we can reference some of what they have shared to help them consider how to navigate these challenges as they go about their next steps. For example, “When you talk to so-and-so, how will you notice if the frustration we talked about earlier starts arising again?” From there, we can help clients identify the resources they will need to manage their frustrations.
Ready to deepen your coaching? Join Tracy and Cindy’s Level 2/ICF PCC program: Somatic Coaching and Personal Mastery, and build your own emotional resilience.
(Credit to Tracy Brown for her insightful piece, ‘Coaching Emotional Resilience,’ originally shared on LinkedIn.)
