Where do our emotions come from?

Today in my Facebook group I have a guest speaker talking about her My Mood Stars which are used my parents and teachers to encourage emotional literacy in children from the youngest age. We are used to using emoticons in our messages and social media posts and these small squidgy faces are brilliant for children because without having to use words, they can recognise the emotion and show mummy and daddy what they are feeling. Many takes Sleepy star to bed with them or snuggle up with Sad Star. You can play games with them, hiding them or asking children to name the emotion and Wendy has written lovely books to accompany the Mood Stars.

But how do we get our mood in the first place?

Here's a diagram showing the NLP Communication model.

Let's start with the 'external event' this is something you see , hear or feel, touch, taste or smell.

That experience has to be filtered otherwise we'd be in 'overdrive' all the time trying to figure out how we feel about it. So we 'generalise' by comp…