EEC Alumni inaugurated the new academic year last Monday with an online session dedicated to «Emotions in the service of the coaching relationship», provided by Ana Escobar, ICF-accredited PCC coach, mentor coach and expert in emotional awareness and neuroscience applied to coaching.
The event brought together more than 100 professionals from various countries and focused on a central idea: holding space for emotion is holding space for change.
During the session, Ana invited the participants to look at the emotion not as an accessory element of the process, but as a key source of information for both the coachee and the coach themselves.
Trust, empathy, vulnerability and the professional's ability to regulate their own emotions emerged as fundamental conditions for creating a safe space for exploration.
The session left a particularly relevant reflection for professional practice: often the coachee already knows what they should do; what they need to transform is the emotion from which they face the change.
Therefore, before rushing into action, the coach needs to understand at what stage of the process the person is and which emotion can help them move forward.
One of the most interesting axes of «Emotions at the service of the coaching relationship» was the connection between coaching and neuroscience. Ana shared some recent insights on how we construct emotions from bodily sensations, context and our previous experience.
From this perspective, paying attention to the body, naming what we feel and expanding our emotional vocabulary can help us better regulate emotion and open up new possibilities for response.
The meeting ended with questions from the attendees on how to sustain emotions intense, the coach's own emotional involvement and how to support without invading the coachee's space.
A conversation that reinforced the spirit of EEC Alumni: continuing to learn, sharing practice and delving deeper into that which enables higher quality and more conscious coaching.
