DISTINGUISHING FEELINGS AND EMOTIONS

When you learned NLP, you learned this distinction. You learned that “feelings” or literally kinesthetics sensations are one of the fundamental sensory representation systems, and that it is not the same thing as emotions. To have an emotion, you have to have two things—a cognition and a kinesthetic (or feeling). Now while you may have learned this in your NLP studies, everyday language confuses these by using them interchangeably. This is one example of how everyday language is so inadequate for coaching and therapy and the need to construct more precise language.

Yet even Meta-Coaches get tricked by this one. It happens when they start with the Well-Formed Outcome questions. They stumble on question #2: “What does your outcome look like, sound like, feel like?” The stumble here involves confusing the word feeling with the idea of an emotion. The question is asking for the sensory representations of a tangible outcome. It is not asking for the person’s emotions regarding the outcome.