What is Emotion Coaching?

Mindful Emotion Coaching is about building emotional resilience and mental wellbeing by enabling conversations about emotions behind behaviours and building understanding of the neuroscience of brain development, human interactions and mindful awareness. Some people would say we are working with the neurobiological, emotional and social aspects of human interactions, others might use the term interpersonal neurobiology.

Emotion Coaching provides an evidence-based model for helping children, young people and adults to understand and interpret emotions as a way of enhancing social interactions with others and is based on the work of Jack Shonkoff, Dan Siegel and John Gottman.

The core principles of emotion coaching look at how:

• responsive relationships and positive experiences build sturdy brain architecture and promote healthy development, starting before birth and during infancy
• toxic stress disrupts the developing brain and other biological systems with lifelong consequences for learning, behaviour and health (e.g. mental and emotional health difficulties, susceptibility to addiction, heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes)
• the foundations of resilience can be strengthened in young children through reciprocal 'serve and return' interactions that scaffold life skills of self regulation, emotion regulation and executive function.

Emotion Coaching Training in Somerset

Somerset Public Health first commissioned Bath Spa University and EHCAP (a Somerset based social enterprise) to provide Emotion Coaching Training to the children and young people’s workforce in Somerset in 2015. Since then, Somerset teachers and practitioners have benefited from a variety of training and development. Emotion Coaching is now widely used within schools, families and by frontline practitioners. 

Emotion Coaching skills and workshops may be available through your MHST (Mental Health Support Teams) and training can be accessed as part of Trauma Informed Somerset.