How to choose your Emotions Tool

It is increasingly recognised how important our emotional state is to our wellbeing and our productivity.

Our selection of adult emotion cards and tools offer a range of contents. Selecting the right tool for the particular challenge you face, or work you undertake can be a challenge.

You can download this guide here

Here we look at four different tools for exploring emotions with teams or clients:

Positive Emotions Cards

Langley Emotion Cards

Intensity Cards

Feeling Magnets

In this guide we carefully explain the particular characteristics of each pack and give an indication of the kind of work for which they are best suited.

Whatever your interest in exploring emotions, we hope one of our tools will meet you need.

And remember, if you are a new customer then you can get a 10% discount off your first product purchase by signing up to our free newsletter, and if you are already a customer, we are now offering a 10% discount on orders over £100.

 

Positive Emotions Cards

These cards were designed by Sarah Lewis, shop owner, as a tool that would allow her to really focus on helping people understand the benefits of experiencing positive emotional states.

Unique Features and Content

  • The thirty emotion cards in this pack all identify a positive emotion
  • The emotions are classified into five different, colour-coded categories
    • Activating
    • Relational,
    • Restorative
    • Soothing
    • Transformative
  • Each card includes a succinct definition of the emotion
  • Every emotion card includes transformative coaching questions
  • Every emotion card includes suggestions for actions likely to produce the emotion, and sometimes a reminder of the mindset that is helpful to encourage the experience of the emotion
  • The pack includes both familiar emotions like hopeful or grateful and less familiar emotions such as transcendence and uplifted
  • Additional cards provide information about the benefit of each emotion for the workplace, and for the individual wellbeing
  • They have a colourful, modern design and feel
  • Ten ways to use the cards are explained in brief. And there are additional ideas in the Creative Workshop Exercises Blog

Best Used to

  • Help people understand the different families of positive emotions
  • Encourage greater emotional intelligence and literacy in the area specifically of positive emotions
  • Suggest actions to help your client experience more of the emotions they desire
  • Help people understand the attitude to life that encourages the experience of the particular emotions
  • Support you in creating a business case for investing in helping people feel better at work
  • Allow you to work with different clients on different areas of their wellbeing through their emotional experiences
  • Explore specific positive emotions in depth
  • Explore how positive emotions can help with life challenges, including times of difficult emotion

 

Langley Emotion Cards

This set of half cards is a fantastic general resource for exploring and boosting emotional intelligence and literacy

Unique Features and Content

  • 150 different emotion words
  • Colour-coded
    • Orange for Positive,
    • Purple for Neutral
    • Blue for Negative

Best Used to

  • Fully explore the emotions associated with a particular episode or experience or amongst a group of people
  • Help people explore differences between positive and negative emotions
  • Help people understand emotional shifts over a period of time 
  • Improve people’s ability to classify and name the emotions displayed by others
  • Improve people’s ability to ‘act’ different emotions
  • To quickly take the emotional temperature of a group
  • Help people name emotions they are experiencing

 

Intensity Cards

 

This pack of cards focusses right down on the core six emotions, facilitating detailed and in-depth exploration of them.

Unique Features and Content

  • This pack contains a set of eight cards for each of the six primary emotions
    • Fear,
    • Happiness,
    • Sadness,
    • Anger,
    • Disgust and
    • Contempt.
  • Each set is colour-coded
  • The eight words in each set identify a different level of intensity of that emotion 
  • The reverse of each card has either a coaching question or a likely 'emotional trigger'.
  • There is an additional card clearly showing the category and intensity placing of each card
  • There are two additional cards outlining ways to use the pack

Best Used to

  • Help people become more aware of the ‘build up’ to extreme emotional states
  • Help people identify emotional triggers
  • Explore particular common emotions through coaching questions
  • Help people distinguish between different families of emotion
  • Help people improve the accuracy of their self-report of their emotional state
  • Help people better understand the differing emotional states of others

 

Feeling Magnets

This unique tool offers a very different, creative way of exploring emotions

Unique Features and Content

  • 94 colourful magnets with carefully selected emotions
  • Grouped into 10 colour-coded categories, covering a range of positive and negative emotional states
  • The container is a metal magnet tin box that provides a surface for using the magnets
  • “I want to feel…” and 'I am feeling' magnets are included

Best Used to

  • As a visual check-in tool
  • Help people identify and express how they feel in a tactile way
  • Help people compose sentences containing multiple emotions
  • Easily move words around and substitute one for another in sentences or questions
  • See how different emotions relate to each other
  • Give the hands lots to do
  • Bring something different to the conversation
Sarah Jane Lewis