The Power of Naming

Utterance is magic. Words do have power. Names have power. Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer.

Ursula K. Le Guin

As an executive coach, I typically work with clients who are dealing with complex challenges that don’t lend themselves to easy answers or solutions. Most of the time, by the end of a session (or a couple of sessions) they are able to see a path forward. This is typical of what many good coaches would do. We support our clients in finding the language to name what is happening around them—building a richer vocabulary to describe their experiences. We also support them in naming what is happening within them—their emotions and, more granularly, their sensations. There is often a sense of relief at simply having the words to describe and to process an experience. At one level, nothing changes. It doesn’t go away. Difficult people don’t get easier. The complex doesn’t become simple. What does happen is that when we can name what is happening we are no longer as tightly in its grip. We are able to begin to create distance, to take actions that are not reactions, to better manage ourselves and the challenges we face. We regain choice and agency.

In the words of Tony Schwartz, founder and CEO of the Energy Project:

Emotions are just a form of energy, forever seeking expression. Paradoxically, sharing what we’re feeling in simple terms helps us to better contain and manage even the most difficult emotions. By naming them out loud, we are effectively taking responsibility for them, making it less likely that they will spill out at the expense of others over the course of a day.

Sometimes the names and the feelings are easy to find, sometimes this requires digging deep and having a partner who can support you. In this post I look more deeply at why naming is so powerful and why this is such an important capacity to develop as one grows as a leader.  Since many of us were raised to believe that not talking (or even thinking) about something was the best way to make it go away—this is not necessarily obvious or natural. We weren’t trained to name what was happening to us—our vocabularies, especially our emotional vocabularies, are often not as rich and nuanced as we need them to be. And we certainly weren’t trained to name or be attuned to sensation.

The Science Behind Naming Emotions

I was introduced to the work of Matthew Lieberman and his colleagues at UCLA over 15 years ago. I heard Matt speak at one of the first NeuroLeadership Institute Conferences. FMRI technology was relatively new at the time and our understanding of the brain was exploding. The Institute played a pioneering role in bringing together leadership theorists and neuroscientists—and my then employer was working closely with the Institute and looking at how to apply the research we were being exposed to in our work in training and development. It was an exciting moment!

Lieberman shared that “affective labeling”—i.e., naming an emotion using words, resulted in the limbic system becoming less active while the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex or RVLPFC became more active. The RVLPFC is a part of our pre-frontal cortex and, when activated, helps serve as a break on an overactive threat response. This part of the brain was not activated when the subjects in the study did what he called “affect matching”—a non-linguistic strategy of matching pictures with similar emotions. Putting feelings into words was a uniquely powerful tool for emotion regulation. (You can find the study that he was describing in his talk here.)

Another study, conducted six years later in Lieberman’s lab examined fear of spiders and different strategies for addressing those fears. Eighty-eight people with a fear of spiders approached a large tarantula in an open container. They were asked to walk closer and closer to the spider and touch it if they could. At that point they were divided into four groups and each group was given a different set of directions—each representing a unique strategy for emotion regulation.

These strategies included affect labeling, reappraisal or reframing, distraction, and non-verbal exposure. Affect labeling, giving words to one’s fear and anxiety, turned out to be the most effective strategy for reducing the fear response. And, the more a person verbally named their fear and anxiety, the less fear they displayed when re-exposed to a spider one week later.

While our gut reaction might be to run away, not talk about it, avoid or distract ourselves—these studies prove that they are the least helpful responses. Even reframing, an effective and potentially harder to activate emotion regulation strategy, was not as powerful as naming. The authors of the study, in an interview published at the time, shared that they were genuinely surprised by these findings—they had expected exposure therapy or reappraisal to work equally well. They also were surprised that the stronger the emotion words, the more the subjects were able to regulate their emotions.

"When spider-phobics say, 'I'm terrified of that nasty spider,' they're not learning something new; that's exactly what they were feeling — but now instead of just feeling it, they're saying it. For some reason that we don't fully understand, that transition is enough to make a difference."

The scientists also analyzed the words the subjects used. Those who used a larger number of negative words did better, in terms of both how close they were willing to get to the tarantula and their skin-sweat response. In other words, describing the tarantula as terrifying actually proved beneficial in ultimately reducing the fear of it.

"Doing more affect labeling seemed to be better," Lieberman said.

Naming using strong feeling words is not an intuitive response—in Matt Lieberman’s words:

"We've published a series of studies where we asked people, 'Which do you think would make you feel worse: looking at a disturbing image or looking at that disturbing image and choosing a negative emotional word to describe it,'" Lieberman said. "Almost everyone said it would be worse to have to look at that image and focus on the negative by picking a negative word. People think that makes our negative emotions more intense. Well, that is exactly what we asked people to do here. In fact, it's a little better to have people label their emotions — multiple studies now show this. Our intuitions here are wrong."

Giving Names to Sensations

Naming sensations is related, but different, than naming emotions. It allows us to intervene even earlier and powerfully shift our biological responses. In her book Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain,  the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barret writes that:

“In every moment—like right now, as you read these words—your hormones, organs, and immune system are producing a storm of sense data, and you’re barely aware of it… Your brain, however, makes meaning from this data storm continuously to predict your body’s next action and meet its metabolic needs before they arise.”

When I ask a client to name their sensations, I’m not asking them for emotion words or moods, I’m asking for them to notice and name the places where they experience tension, where they feel lightness, where it’s warm, where it’s cold, where there’s tingling, etc. By intervening in this “storm of sense data” both noticing and naming sensation, we can release the energy of an emotion (recall Tony Schwartz’ description of emotion as a form of energy) and, again, release the grip that that emotion has on us. When we do this, we create the space for making intentional and thoughtful, rather than reactive choices. As Amanda Blake writes in her book Your Body is Your Brain: “When you can feel your strong sensations without compulsively reacting to them, all of a sudden options open up for you.”

Naming Our Experiences

In addition to naming our emotions and sensations, another practice is naming our experiences—pausing in the midst of what we are experiencing and giving language to things that elude our current understanding. Sandra Hilton, in an article entitled The Naming of Things: How Words Have Power, quotes the fairytale scholar Jack Zipes who writes that we must “seek the power to name the forces acting upon us if we want to be free and autonomous”.  She also shares the work of botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, who, in her book on the diversity of the world’s mosses, writes that “finding the words is another step in learning to see”. Kimmerer considers naming as a way of seeing the true essence of each plant. Naming gives us power and is part of learning to see and create finer distinctions.

I recently listened to Brené Brown’s Atlas of the Heart. In it, she describes 87 different emotions and experiences and gives language to fine distinctions. For example, she explores the difference between envy and jealousy and the difference between awe and wonder. She gives us access to a more nuanced vocabulary than most of us have acquired for naming both our experiences and our emotions. Similarly, in my work as a coach and facilitator, my intention is to help my clients to unpack concepts and experience and get more granular in their understanding of them. For example, we might unpack the concept of trust and be able to identify, with greater precision, what dimension of trust has been violated. (More on this in another post.) We can then translate a concept into action, resulting in a more skillful and less reactive response.

Practice, Practice, Practice

So, where to begin? The answer is one word—practice. Choose several moments each day when you stop and ask yourself—what is happening now? What am I sensing? What am I feeling? How am I? When you practice this when the stakes aren’t high, you’ll eventually build the muscle to pause and check in with yourself when the stakes are high, when you’re triggered, when your emotions are activated. In the words of Amanda Blake: "Awareness creates choice, Practice creates capacity."  Enjoy the practice!!