Everyone wants to be loved. Everyone. Especially when they say they don’t.
That’s why in coaching we acknowledge and champion our clients when we see their essence shining through. When you build your appreciator, you build your team. Even the toughest customers hear you when you show them that you see their beauty.
To open up to the goodness in everyone else, most of us need to create an emotional reserve within ourselves. When I am around others, I absorb their emotions in order to meet them where they are. This empathy allows me to easily connect with most people.
But if I do not carefully protect my own positive or neutral emotions during my interactions with others, my empathy can cause me to take on other people’s emotional volatility, responding to them with the emotion they project. If they are snippy, I find myself snipping back. If they are anxious, I feel my stomach cramp and my arms tingle with stress.
When I am able to preserve and project my own energy throughout my interactions with someone, I can sense where they are emotionally, but use my own emotional resilience to engage with them. From here, I can respond to their emotional state more constructively, from an empathetic, but unattached place.
Before meetings and coaching sessions, or other potentially emotionally fraught interactions, I spend a couple of minutes in a loving kindness mediation. I do a quick check in with my body, asking where am I right now? Then, I mentally embrace these people, accepting them wherever they might show up when we meet, and send them love. As woodgie-woodgie or hippy-dippy as this approach sounds, this time is well spent. It allows me to inflate a little emotional bubble that conserves my own emotions and energy so that other people do not swipe it when they share their energy with me.
What space do you need to give yourself to open up to the goodness that every person wants the world to appreciate in them?