What does the chart show

The Reflector is designed to let you to think about your emotions within the Ring of Emotions, outlined in Knowing and Growing (Mclean 2017). The ring formed by our ‘self-worth preferences’ provides a big picture framework to consider your emotions and what they are all about. The ring of emotions is divided into quadrants and the quadrants are divided into zones, with each zone covering emotions with similar functions.

What is the Reflector?

The Reflector tool invites you to consider the feelings you currently have in a context of your choice, or your life in general. It invites you to use a 4 point rating scale to capture how much you feel each of forty carefully selected and defined emotions. Responses are collated and displayed in a chart.

The Reflector has been designed for insight and discussion. It is not a psychometric instrument. You are completing it for yourself. You will get the most out of it if you can discuss it with a colleague or friend.

What is the Value of Emotional Reflection

• we can recognise discrete emotions rather than a mix of emotions or general feelings
• our emotions provide richer information and deeper meaning
• we can identify the causes of our emotions and so make a sensible response
• we can experience difficult emotions with more perspective and less toxicity
• we can evaluate what difficult emotions are telling us to do rather than dwell on why we feel so badly.

Using the Reflector with students

The Reflector, when completed by young people and shared with adults, will help adults better understand how students are feeling in school or college and so get to know them better. It facilitates a non-judgemental conversation between adults and young people about the emotions they experience that affect their wellbeing and learning.

When students have finished their ratings it will be helpful to invite them to quickly review their ratings to check they are what they intended?

Follow up Questions

• Does the chart reflect how you are feeling?
• Does anything surprise you?
• What do your big feel good and feel bad emotions tell you?
• What triggers these emotions? What are they about?
• Thinking about your most troubling emotions - What do you tell yourself about these emotions?
• Would you say the same things to someone else who was having these feelings? Are there more useful messages to take from these emotions?
• Could any of your top feel good emotions be used to combat your most unwanted emotions?
• How have your emotions changed over time?

What is the thinking behind the chart?

Emotions help us to evaluate what is happening to us. They signal our needs and how well we are meeting these needs. Emotions are closely linked to our motives because they drive us to meet our needs.

Autonomy, or self-direction, is our super-motive. However, self-direction is always in relation to others; we have to balance our own needs with the needs of others. This conundrum lies at the heart of human relationships. Unsurprisingly, most of our emotions are mainly about our self-direction in relation to our goals and other people.

The ring model illuminates two preferences, namely making our mark and being part of things. We are driven by both, to a greater or lesser extent although most of us will have a preference for one or the other. The preferences are represented as spirals. Each spiral has an optimal mid-point and two extremes, one showing too much of the given quality and the other too little.

Figure 1 The Preferences

When put together the spirals form a ring. The upper half of the ring shows the spirals in balance, where the preferences are of similar weight. As we progress around the ring in either direction we can chart the increasing imbalance between the spirals. In the upper half the effect is bright and emotionally uplifting, below it spirals downwards into the dark side of the Ring.

Figure 2 The Ring of Preferences and the Emotion Quadrants

The ring is divided into quadrants. The chart gives us a picture of our current emotional state. It is best used to discuss what is enriching us and what is potentially draining or distracting us. The model helps us to make sense of what's happening to us and how we can best respond. It can aid us to better understand the purpose of each emotion and how emotions can get us into trouble as well as help us. It can also help us discover our own emotional recipe for our wellbeing.

You can collate a number of individual profiles to discover:

• the overall positivity of a group
• the most commonly experienced emotions within a group

Please contact us to discuss how you can purchase the Assembly programme that enables this.