Coaching Tool: Mood Cards to Identify the Baseline Emotions
by Anindita Das (China)
Many a times clients have come to me with a shadow of their present reality hanging over the coaching session. In almost transference situation, the mood has then hindered me from focussing on the session or caused distractions or unnecessarily hampered progress in talking about clients’ future growth. This has not only caused frustration in me, but also hindered in serving valuably to the client by not being present enough, though the fault was neither mine nor the clients.
Client moods have tremendous effect on the outcome of the coaching session. Some clients might come to a session after a horrid day at work or are in the process of tough negotiation or often a looming presentation ahead of them that hampers them from fully and completely offering themselves to the coaching session. I took a leaf from therapists and counsellors books and offered to use mood cards to Investigate client’s mood in the initial minutes of the coaching dialogue. This sets the baseline of our coaching session.
Source: iCN Issue 23 (Coaching Tools, Tips & Techniques); pages 94-95
About Anindita Das
Anindita Das is a global executive coach and co-founder of Global Expats Coachworx. Born and raised in New Delhi, India and studied and worked in the UK, Germany, USA and Singapore, she has recently moved to China and dedicates herself to coaching global workforce, especially women executives, based in Beijing. Currently, she spends her time coaching, speaking at events, intercultural training, volunteering and learning Mandarin.
Anindita is a coaching scholar from University of Cambridge and group and team coaching alumni from Oxford University. She holds a specialisation in Global Coaching (MCC Philippe Rosinski, Belgium) and Emotional Intelligence (MDIS, Singapore) and is certified Cinema therapist (Zur Institute, CA). She is undergoing specialisation in somatic psychology.
Her work experience includes intercultural training (University of Jena, Germany) and flight attendant for Lufthansa based in Germany as well as Key Account manager based in India.
