Even though emotional intelligence is becoming more accepted as a valuable capability in the modern workplace, our language around emotion is often about “managing” or “controlling.” This implies that emotions are inherently problematic, and if we could only get them out of the way, the thinking brain could get on with the "real work." However, the picture emerging from modern neuroscience tells us a different story. It places emotion at the center of our decision-making, motivation, and meaning-making processes.

Lisa Feldman Barrett’s research suggests that emotions are not hardwired or universal, as was previously believed. Instead, emotions are constructed in the moment, as your brain makes sense of sensory inputs, bodily signals, and past experiences in order to balance your body budget and keep you alive. 

Every thought, memory, emotion, or perception that you construct in your life includes something about the state of your body. Your interoceptive network, which regulates your body budget, is launching these cascades. Every prediction you make, and every categorisation your brain completes, is always in relation to the activity of your heart amd lungs, your metabolism, your immune function, and the other systems that contribute to your body budget.

The concept of a body budget refers to how your brain allocates and manages resources such as energy, nutrients, and hormones to maintain physiological balance. Just like a financial budget, your body budget can be in surplus or deficit depending on how well resources are managed. When your body budget is in deficit—perhaps due to lack of sleep, poor nutrition, or chronic stress—you are more likely to experience negative affective states such as irritability, fatigue, or anxiety. On the other hand, when your body budget is well-maintained, you are more likely to feel calm, positive, and capable of tackling challenges.

The brain builds a model of the world as it will be in the next moment, developed from past experience, and your experiences and actions are the product of this predictive and constructive process. These predictions are influenced by context, prior knowledge, and the cultural or social environment.

Affect, the general sense of feeling good or bad, arises from changes in your body budget and shapes the brain's predictions. When your body budget is balanced, your brain predicts positively, which influences the actions you take and how you perceive the world around you. This constant back-and-forth interaction between predictions and affect means that emotions and thought are deeply intertwined. It is not that thought and emotion are separate processes; instead, they are both part of an integrated prediction system that aims to keep you alive and well. By managing your body budget effectively, you can create a foundation for more adaptive emotions and better decision-making.

Thus it is a mistake to see rational thought and emotions as separate, your thinking is just your predictions, your concepts drive your predictions, predictions regulate your body budget, and your body budget determines how you feel. The process is a continual dynamic dance as your feelings then influence your predictions.

From one standpoint this makes experience seem like we are living in our own private matrix, there is no perception of objective reality, instead we live in our own simulation, built from our previous experience through the development of our conceptual system. However, I choose to see it another way: we are more architects of our own experience than we now and this model of predictive processing and constructed experience and emotion opens up some wiggle room in which we can create more positive and adaptive experiences.

"Emotional intelligence is better characterised in terms of concepts. Suppose you knew only two emotion concepts, "Feeling awesome" and "Feeling Crappy". Whenever you experiences emotion or perceived someone else as emotional, you could categorise only with this broad brush. Such a person cannot be very emotionally intelligent. In contrast, if you could distinguish finer meaning within "Awesome" (happy, content, thrilled, relaxed, joyful, hopeful, inspired, prideful, adoring, grateful, blissful...), and fifty shades of "Crappy" (angry, aggravated, alarmed, spiteful, grumpy, remorseful, gloomy, mortified, uneasy, dread-ridden, resentful, afraid, envious, woeful, melancholy...), your brain would have many more options for predicting, categorising, and perceiving emotion, providing you with the tools for more flexible and functional responses. You could predict and categorise your sensations more efficiently, and better tailor your actions to your environment."

So to improve your experience and get better outcomes you need to work on having a richer emotional vocabulary. Your conceptual system shapes your experience, so improving the richness of that conceptual system leads to more functional emotional responses in the future. With a greater array of concepts at your disposal you can also recategorise your affective sensations in a manner that allows you to better regulate your behaviour.

Not only do these constructed emotions shape our thinking and behaviour. They also form an essential part of the meaning of the experience; events only have significance for us to the extent that they have emotions and feelings woven into their experiencing. The stronger the feelings, the more meaning they have, and the more potential for action. However, memories are not set in stone, they are not movies or photographs. Whenever we retrieve a memory, it is re-encoded, the context is now weaved into the new version of the memory. If you are angry or sad and then recall something, your current emotions can “stick” to the memory and get integrated into it. Emotion not only plays a role in initial meaning making, but continues to impact it over time. This might seem odd, and it does explain why we can be unreliable witnesses, but it is also a feature that enables us to integrate current experiences into a broader context.

As your brain’s primary mission is to keep you alive, it is understandable that the most powerful and common emotion is fear. Evolutionary pressure ensures that our brains err on the side of caution, and so if in doubt better to trigger a fear response: fight, flight or freeze. I think it is the survival-based dominance of these escape/avoidance emotions that leads us into the view that emotions are problematic, but this ignores the full range of emotions and so we miss their potential.

The survival emotions engage the sympathetic nervous system, increasing heart rate, dilating pupils, releasing cortisol, and redirecting blood flow to essential muscles, enabling rapid reactions to perceived threats. When these emotions are triggered, energy will be diverted into self-preservation. Energy will not be available for action unless it serves the survival interests of the individual. This is expressed in the corporate world through low engagement, absenteeism, or a blame culture. People try to make themselves look good, and they don’t say what they think.

However,  when our body budgets are balanced and we experience positive affect, we construct more positive experiences and the energy flows outwards. In a work context this opens up creativity and engagement with the strategic objectives of the organisation. The parasympathetic nervous system is activated, promoting "rest and digest" activities by slowing heart rate, constricting pupils, and stimulating digestion, facilitating relaxation.

Neuroscience tells us that emotional energy will be flowing through your system whether you are aware of it or not. That energy shapes your thoughts and actions. There is no getting rid of emotion, but we can also see why that would actually be counterproductive. The thrive emotions, and positive affect, are necessary to anything we want to achieve in life. If there was no excitement or joy in the pursuit of our goals we simply wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning.

These insights lead us to think of our coaching work as being to help our clients gain awareness of where their emotional energy is currently, and to provide a supportive environment in which they can redirect their energies towards their goals. This is the energetic shift that can occur in the crucible of the coaching relationship.

How Do We Work With Your Energy?

How do we do this? First and foremost, we create a calm environment, with generative listening and silence, where there is no fear of interruption, a sense of space. These conditions allow us to help regulate your body budget, creating the conditions in which you can do your best thinking.

We then work with our clients to help them develop self-awareness of their current emotional energy, using embodied techniques. Bodily sensations are a crucial component of emotions and paying attention to them can provide vital clues to what is going on below the conscious level with your body budget, ensuring adaptive categorisation or recategorisation of the sensations.

We use the observer perspective and compassionate mindset of mindfulness to encourage clients to notice the stories their brains are telling them, helping them to write a better story.