You might have heard the term emotional bucket floating around (excuse the pun), but what does it actually mean? And more importantly, how do you know if yours is overflowing?

Let’s break it down, because understanding your emotional bucket is more crucial than ever in 2025.

What is an Emotional Bucket?

Your emotional bucket is a simple but powerful way of visualising how we store feelings — especially the tricky, tough, or heavy ones.

We’re talking about everyday stress, anxiety, self-doubt, feelings of not being good enough, and even the more hidden emotions like shame or embarrassment. Add to that the pressure of rising living costs, job insecurity, digital overwhelm from 24/7 connectivity, and social comparison from endless social media scrolling… well, it’s no surprise that many people’s buckets are dangerously close to overflowing.

When these feelings build up (whether slowly over time or quickly after a tough week), they sit quietly in our emotional bucket. The problem? If we don’t learn how to release or manage them, the bucket eventually spills over. That’s when we start to feel like we’re at breaking point.

How Can You Tell If Your Emotional Bucket is Overflowing?

There are some pretty clear signs, if you know what to look for. You might notice:

• Feeling constantly overwhelmed or on edge
• Bursting into tears or snapping in frustration over small things
• Struggling to concentrate or make decisions
• Feeling anxious, irritable, or trapped in negative thinking loops
• Difficulty sleeping, or waking up already feeling exhausted
• An ongoing sense of “I just can’t cope anymore”

Sound familiar?

As a coach and hypnotherapist, I work with people every day who feel like this. The good news is, we can do something about it.

If you’re looking for help to manage the overflow of emotions then coaching and hypnotherapy can be really helpful to give tools to empty your bucket or rebalance your emotions. Get in touch here to book a call to discuss more.

What About an Empty Bucket?

Interestingly, a completely empty emotional bucket isn’t healthy either. If your bucket feels empty, you might experience:

• Emotional numbness
• Feeling fed up, bored, or detached from life
• Constant tiredness, even when you’re resting
• Low mood or signs of depression
• Struggling to find motivation or enjoyment in things you once loved

We’re aiming for balance — not an overflowing bucket, and not an empty one either.

How Coaching and Hypnotherapy Can Help Rebalance?

In 2025, many of us are juggling more demands than ever, and while self-help tools are brilliant, sometimes you need deeper support. That’s where coaching and hypnotherapy come in.

As a coach, I help you identify what’s filling your bucket in the first place. We work together to build resilience, set healthier boundaries, and create coping strategies tailored to your life. It’s not about adding more to your to-do list — it’s about clearing space for what truly matters.

Hypnotherapy goes a layer deeper. It helps you access your subconscious mind, where many of these emotional triggers and patterns live. Through hypnotherapy, we can gently release the emotional build-up, reduce anxiety, and develop a more positive, calm mindset. Many clients describe it as finally turning off the relentless mental noise.

Together, coaching and hypnotherapy create a powerful toolkit for maintaining emotional balance.

Everyday Tools to Lighten Your Emotional Load

Alongside professional support, there are plenty of small, daily actions that can help ease the strain and either empty your overflowing bucket or fill an empty one.

Here are some tried-and-tested favourites from my coaching clients (and from my own experience too!):

• Spend quality time with people who uplift you
• Limit doom-scrolling on social media (a big one for 2025!)
• Get outside — nature has an incredible way of grounding us
• Move your body in any way you enjoy — dancing, walking, yoga
• Nourish your body with healthy, satisfying food
• Try mindfulness or breathing exercises to calm your nervous system
• Get creative: painting, baking, gardening, or even doodling
• Take a tech break — let your brain recharge
• Listen to music that boosts your mood
• Explore alternative therapies like massage, reflexology, or aromatherapy
• Visualisation exercises — imagine your emotional weight floating away in a balloon or drifting out to sea (yes, this really works!)

Most importantly: give yourself permission to pause.

Start Balancing Your Bucket Today

This term isn’t just a nice metaphor — it’s a real way to understand your mental and emotional health. If yours feels unmanageable right now, please know that you’re not alone.

Through coaching and hypnotherapy, we can work together to create space, release what’s weighing you down, and build the emotional resilience you need to thrive in 2025 and beyond.

If this resonates with you, please do go to my contact page and drop me an email or book a call to discuss how coaching and hypnotherapy can benefit you to keep your emotions balanced so that you have fantastic yet simple ways to control your emotions.

Emma Langton has over 13 years experience in supporting leaders to enhance engagement, performance and wellbeing. Her coaching, training and speaking is valued by individuals and organisations across the UK for getting results quickly with her straight talking Yorkshire style.

Often referred to by her clients as the boundary queen and the resilience goddess, she shares her passion for progress with practical tips and advice so that her clients improve leadership skills, reduce stress and pressure and elevate wellbeing. She regularly provides insights for BBC, Forbes, Metro and also has a podcast called Lessons for Leaders with 100 episodes.

I’ve just finished working with an organisation that is celebrating improving retention.

They had three senior leaders who were missing strategic goals, repeatedly slipping deadlines and there was high absence and poor retention (this isn’t what they are celebrating… obviously).

The HR Director and CEO had a conversation with me and said they weren’t sure if it was a performance or capability issue.

For many leaders and managers, it can be challenging to distinguish between capability issues and performance-related concerns.

In order to explore further and support the struggles the leaders were having, we booked some executive coaching sessions.

Having an external executive coach means there is an independent person who will provide an objective, structured approach. It can help in determining whether a leader is struggling due to performance issues (such as motivation, mindset, stress) or a capability gap (lack of skills, experience or training).

Through our confidential coaching conversations, these three leaders were able to get clarity on their challenges, uncover blind spots and explore tailored strategies to address them.

With one leader, there was frustration at processes, causing a lack of boundaries, no clear expectations and poor time management.

Another leader had lost all confidence in himself due to the excessive workload, poor teamwork and feeling overwhelmed and this was also showing up with a need to work on improving retention.

The third leader needed help on communication and target setting, so he could develop strategies for himself and the team. This meant they were more included, had clear direction and didn’t miss deadlines.

Although each leader had ‘executive coaching’ sessions, the focus was tailored to their needs to ensure that support and development was targeted, fair and commercially impactful rather than reactive.

After coaching? Those leaders had good reasons to celebrate:

• They changed their approach to leadership.
• The teams felt empowered, included and valued because there was more responsibility, better delegation and clear direction setting.

They saw improving retention by 25% in the three months we worked together and also had people return from sick leave.

This simple way of improving retention meant they avoided the high cost of replacing key employees and saw a direct impact on productivity.

➡ My calendar is open for bookings – book a call to explore how leadership coaching can boost retention and performance.

Book a Call Here ➡

The Cost of Losing Great People

For many organisations I work with, February is the time that businesses start to feel the impact of those January resignations. The teams are stretched and there are gaps in skill sets which creates a growing need to recruit (often without the budget to do so).

But what if you could stop the cycle and see results on improving retention?

Hiring is expensive! I know I don’t need to tell you that.

Estimates suggest replacing an employee costs six to nine months of their salary in lost productivity and recruitment fees. And that doesn’t include the impact on morale, engagement and your remaining teams’ workloads.

improving retention plans these days are needing to focus on more than just perks or pay rises. People want development. Investing in leadership coaching doesn’t just benefit the individual leaders, it drives commercial success too.

By setting boundaries like a pro and getting clear buy-in from team members, those departments implement actions and projects quickly so that operational targets are met on time and delivered well across all levels of your organisation.

➡ Let’s talk now about the specifics of what’s needed to help you with improving retention before hiring costs spiral – book a free call to discuss how leadership coaching can strengthen your talent pipeline.

Top Tip

Companies with strong learning and development cultures experience 30-50% higher retention rates than those without (according to LinkedIn’s Workplace Learning Report).

When you are proactively building leadership skills, you’re also improving retention and creating stronger talent pools for both leaders and teams. It also makes sure you’re reducing knowledge gaps and improving succession planning.

And Finally…

When senior leaders are stretched thin, it creates a domino effect of less delegation, more reactive decision-making and disengaged teams.

Executive coaching helps leaders:

• Prioritise strategically, reducing burnout and increasing productivity.
• Develop and engage their teams, preventing costly turnover.
• Build a stronger talent pipeline, reducing last-minute recruitment needs.

You know, and I know, that great leaders don’t just manage work; they influence culture, strategy, and engagement. All of which works to be improving retention.

Do your senior leaders know how to influence this?

➡ If improving retention of your best people is a priority this quarter, let’s chat.

We can explore how coaching can make a difference across your entire organisation and be happening before the leaders are on their summer holiday!

Talk soon – and let’s give you a reason to celebrate!

Emma Langton has over 13 years experience in supporting leaders to enhance engagement, performance and wellbeing. Her coaching, training and speaking is valued by organisations across the UK for getting results quickly with her straight talking Yorkshire style.

Often referred to by her clients as the boundary queen and the resilience goddess, she shares her passion for progress with practical tips and advice so that her clients improve leadership skills, reduce stress and pressure and elevate wellbeing. She regularly provides insights for BBC, Forbes, Metro and also has a podcast called Lessons for Leaders with 100 episodes.

Founder of Red Dog Glass Design, Sally is currently on her 11th career! 

We talk about:

• Why you need to surround yourself with people who are better than you
• Why you should ask for what you really want
• How to cope with failure and managing change
• Why good communication is important

Listen in as she talks about how she’s using her art and skills to create extraordinary spaces in the world and the one key thing that she says is important for a leader and any business.

Sally explains that she gets bored quite quickly and runs us through all her career changes, from midwife to scientist to research and development consultancy and then on to transformation and managing change.  

She then went to art school and needed to think about what she could do to earn some money and used her business brain to develop Red Dog Glass Design and look at getting into households.

We talk about how empowering it can be for listeners to hear of the many career changes, giving them confidence that careers can change and evolve.

We talk about how Sally feels it’s important to surround yourself with people who are better than you.  You can’t be an expert at everything.  Have confidence in yourself, that you’re good at what you do and have confidence in others too.

By surrounding yourself with people who are good at what they do, you surround yourself with more quality.

Sally also shares how sometimes these feel like a big jump but it’s great once it’s done.

Do work that you find exciting.

Get in touch with Sally at:

sally@reddogglassdesign.com

https://www.reddogglassdesign.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sally-coulden

Please do make sure you hit ‘subscribe’ so that don’t miss an episode.  

If you haven’t yet  left a review, please do go and find the little button to leave a review and let me know your thoughts, key take-aways and what you value from the podcast.

Join my corporate leadership and wellbeing newsletter HERE 

If you want to be increasing your performance so that you’re more resilient in these current times, so that you can focus easily, use tools and techniques to deal with all the current and unknown challenges then make sure that you either drop me an email to emma@emmalangton.com.

When morale is low, it’s really hard to get people involved and motivated and can feel like pushing boulders uphill. So how do you go about boosting morale in your team without it costing a fortune?

Listen into the episode where I share about:

• Spotting the signs and circumstances
• What you can do about low morale
• An example of a client I worked with
• Why you need to find out what’s really going on, rather than guessing
• Several ways you can boost morale in your teams without it costing a fortune

Differing schedules could hamper projects and delay work because colleagues may struggle to meet and communicate plans.

Listen to the varied list of things you might be able to spot or identify in your team or workplace so you can begin to look at the levels of morale.

“When we listen (and really listen) to what’s going on in the workplace, we can then get to the root of the problems rather than just guessing.”

“You (or whoever is doing this) needs to listen and be like a detective. They’re looking for clues and info that will lead them to the solution.”

Let people know that you hear them is the next stage to boosting morale.  All this takes is time and feedback.  I share on the podcast words and phrases you can use that help with this.

Then encourage engagement so that you raise productivity levels.

Listen in for a little exercise you can do that demonstrates how our mood can lift us or drag us down.  

“Mood is contagious and it can have a ripple effect if people are fed up and miserable.”

Celebrate Achievements!

This doesn’t have to be a big award ceremony!  Small, regular things like peoples’ birthdays, successes, and individual efforts go a long way to boosting morale.

I talk too about how corridor coaching and building trust by small, powerful conversations help boost morale as well as enhancing performance and deepening knowledge.

Many organisations I work with already have a great wellbeing plan, but bringing in someone like me to deliver training that is needed, supported, informative and helpful is a great way to help them to help themselves. That way you show you care, they see that you care and, as long as you’re walking your talk, there’s a universal message coming across.

There’s no point saying ‘organise this and that’, and then sending emails at ridiculous times of night or expecting people to be in on their day off; or

There’s no point working all through your holiday and telling them to take time off when you’ve given them massive targets and things to achieve.

That’s where training for healthy boundaries or resilience is important right now… To help them cope with hybrid working and getting back to whatever the state of play is for now.

Please do make sure you hit ‘subscribe’ so that don’t miss an episode.

If you haven’t yet left a review, please do go and find the little button to leave a review and let me know your thoughts, key take-aways and what you value from the podcast.

Join my corporate leadership and wellbeing newsletter HERE

If you want to be increasing your performance so you’re more resilient in these current times, so you can focus easily, and use tools and techniques to deal with all the current and unknown challenges, then make sure that you either drop an email to me at emma@emmalangton.com. Or head over to my contact page and either send me a email from there or book an appointment straight into my diary – saving all the to-ing and fro-ing you get when we try to get space in people’s diary.

This week, I talk to Jay Unwin about how habits and routines prevent stress. Jay is a mental and physical fitness coach, speaker and author of Fit Body Fit Mind. He delivers seminars and workshops to companies who are looking to improve the fitness and wellbeing of their people. Jay specialises in habit and lifestyle change, rather than the typical ‘diets and workouts’ approach of much of the fitness industry.

Jay and I discuss the idea of adapting to the current lifestyle. How does it relate to being strong, or tough? Using the ideas of Charles Darwin, Jay relates the idea of adaptability in our changing environment to how we can support ourselves during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our stress levels in relation to the pandemic are an important thing to think about at the moment, with that feeling of ‘fight or flight’ becoming a general concern on our everyday life. We also talk about identity, the ideas we have about ourselves, and how we can perceive ourselves in a different way.

Jay shares his beliefs in positivity during this difficult time. “Being positive is going, ‘Stuff is really hard sometimes, but that’s okay, we can deal with it as it comes’”. There may be plenty of doom and gloom to go about during this time, but what we do with ourselves is important in how we can feel – “It’s the small habits that are most likely to hold up against adversity” – and it could not be better said.

You can find Jay Unwin at:

Website: www.fitbodyfitmind.online

Twitter: @TheRealJayUnwin

LinkedIn:  jayunwin

Instagram: therealjayunwin

Email: Jay@fitbodyfitmind.online

You can find Jay’s book, Fit Body Fit Mind, here:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08QLY97WD

And take a listen to his podcast:

https://Anchor.fm/therealjayunwin

Make sure you hit ‘subscribe’ so that don’t miss an episode.  

If you haven’t yet left a review, please do go and find the little button to leave a review and let me know your thoughts, key take-aways and what you value from the podcast.

Join my corporate leadership and wellbeing newsletter HERE 

If you want to be increasing your performance so you’re more resilient in these current times, can focus easily, and use tools and techniques to deal with all the current and unknown challenges, then make sure you either drop me an email to emma@emmalangton.com. Or head over to my contact page and either send me an email from there or book an appointment straight into my diary – saving all the to-ing and fro-ing you get when we try to get space in people’s diary.

The Mental Health Foundation discovered that in 2019, 74% of adults felt so stressed that they were overwhelmed and unable to cope (and that was before the current challenges that we’re facing!)

April is always a busy month for me, helping individuals to manage stress through coaching as well as delivering stress awareness workshops, webinars and lunch and learn sessions to organisations who want to support their employees and give them coping strategies for the year ahead.

With this year looking so different, I’m now running all these online to companies who are still open or looking to support the wellbeing and mental health of furloughed employees. 

It’s important, more than ever that we know how to manage stress during this strange lockdown period, how we can recognise stress, what we can do about it for the adjustment period too. There are podcast episodes HERE that are useful or read on for some insights.

Changing the Way We Think

Sometimes getting information and changing the way we think about things is a key part to coping with stressful situations.

My answer to the question everyone is asking — “When will this be over?” — apart from “who knows” is going to be the same answer I used to give adoptive parents when they were dealing with traumatised children.

It might be never completely be over.

Sorry to burst your bubble

To answer the other common question … “when can we get back to normal”. I usually respond with

What does normal usually look like?

What will normal look like in the future? We don’t know, but I’m sure it won’t be the same.

One things we can be sure about is that this Coronavirus crisis is going to bring about change. There’s going to be change in how we work – maybe more companies, having been forced to accept working from home, will see that it’s possible and people / staff / workforce DO still get stuff done, so they don’t need to worry about presenteeism.

There’s going to be a bigger need for looking after mental health.

There’s going to be changes in how we connect and keep in touch

There’s going to be changes in all sorts of things that we haven’t even thought of yet – NHS, health, shopping, schooling – surely?

We can’t possible go back to ‘how it was’ – people have died, people have lost jobs, companies have closed, some might never survive, companies and people have changed and adapted. This is how it is. We change and adapt, but rarely go back.

How Do We Cope?

Whilst we’re in this crisis situation, how do we cope? How do we get through when there is so much unknown, pressure and change?

It’s important that you recognise what’s going on with you so that you can manage your stress during lockdown.

Some people are outwardly active and like to keep busy when they’re stressed and anxious.

Others stop, freeze, struggle to do anything.

It’s all normal. However you manage stress, any response is fine – just know what yours is and don’t try to keep up with others who have a different response!

What do common stress responses look like?

When you’re able to recognise common physical and mental stress responses, you’re better able to manage stress during lockdown and beyond. Some commons stress responses are:

• A tight feeling in your chest 
• Poor memory or struggling to remember everyday things
• Difficulty sleeping or waking up through the night or early mornings
• Aches and pains for seemingly no particular reason – tight shoulders, clenched jaw, stiff back

or perhaps you’re eating chocolate, crisps, carbs and rubbish .. oh and alcohol too!

The survival aspect creates the stress response, so our bodies release cortisol (the stress chemical) that makes us crave CRAP (Carbs, Refined food, Additives and Processed food).

The stress response is supposed to keep us going whilst we run from the tiger (so to speak) – the only thing is, in modern day, we’re sat at our desk, on our sofas, in our houses, so we don’t burn it off!!!

Instead, we need to find other ways to calm the internal system.

What Do We Need to Do To Manage Stress During Lockdown?

Whilst the responses to manage stress are totally normal, they can also very hard to live with.

To calm our internal system we need some deep breathing. This is the easiest and most effective way to begin to bring about calm. Deep belly breathing activates the parasympathetic nervous system which then automatically send signals to your brain that there’s a false alarm, that you can calm down. 

I talk about all this in more detail on my Managing Stress trainings and webinars (contact me if you want to know more). Recently, I’ve also provide a guided relaxation because they’ve been so helpful for people in the recent weeks.

The stress is happening because of the build up of pressure / change / emotions. It’s really important to be able to own and admit the difficulties.

Remember it’s ok not to be ok.

Just as long as you don’t stay in that place for long.

Know that you are not failing. Let go of all of the ideas you have about what you should be doing right now. Instead, focus on your physical and psychological feelings and what you can do about them to manage stress levels down.

The Adjustment Period to Manage Stress

No-one really feels good during a stressful situation and that’s OK.

When you’ve calmed your internal system, with deep breathing, rest, or working off cortisol, the stress chemical, then you can look at what adjustments still need to be made to manage stress better. In time your brain can re-set – it will begin to look for opportunities / things to do / different ways to respond.

• Give yourself what you need. Is it time alone or with others?
• Find ways to stay connected.
• Pick up the phone – don’t just text or email or message
• Use video calling because eye contact is incredibly connecting, more than we realise.
• Allowing time for a good moan / offload / cry is helpful then it creates space to smile, laugh and do the the positive uplifting things.
• Switch off the ‘keep smiling’ and ‘power through’ stuff on social media of if it’s not helpful to you.
• Ignore the neighbour who has re-decorated his whole house already!! You’re not them.

Do what YOU need to do, WHEN you need to do it.

Your mental shift and adjustment will happen when it’s right for you – the more pressure you put on yourself, the more stressed you’ll make yourself and then you’ll need to go back to point 1

There WILL be a range of emotions that you go through.

But it’s OK to cry, get upset, be pissed off. Allow the emotions to be there, it’s part of the process – the adjustment, healing, acceptance.

We might be on week 4 of lockdown, but this is just the beginning.

As The Queen said, we’ll meet again. And we will.

Give it time.

We must give ourselves time to accept, react and adjust. Then we create a new normal, for a while and hopefully not too long!

This is available on the Lessons for Leaders podcast along with other helpful episodes about coping during the Coronavirus crisis.

Email me or book a call using this link if you want to talk about working with me on 1:1 basis or how I can help your workforce.

#stressawarenessmonth

This article was previously published on LinkedIn

Are you someone who thinks they can’t do change?

Perhaps you know someone else who is like this? This is something I hear about quite a lot in my work. It’s always good to re-assess our thoughts and see if we can begin to think about things differently.
So this week, I popped onto Facebook to talk about this subject of change in a live video. If you missed it you can watch the recording below.

In this video I have you think about:

• The changes you might already make without even noticing!
• The language you use when you talk about change.
• How to adjust so that changes can be comfortable and can happen for you.

Watch the video and let me know what you think in the comments box below or pop over to my Facebook page or YouTube channel and let me know there too!

Do you listen to yourself?  Do you ever stop and listen to how you talk to yourself? Did you know that the way we talk to ourselves can have a massive impact on the way we think, feel and view ourselves?  All this affects our emotional health and general wellbeing.  So many times I hear people with negative self talk.

“I’m no good at …”

“I can’t do ….”

“I’m so silly”

“I’m fat”

“I don’t deserve ……”

and often an awful lot worse!  Anything sound familiar?

Would you talk this way to your best friend, partner, child? (Gosh I hope not!!!!) What would you do if you heard them talking in this way?

So stop just for a moment and ask yourself, is this OK?  Really?  Is it OK that I use so much negative self talk to myself?

OK I know you’ll have some early beliefs in there too.  Possibly a little voice saying “don’t show off” or “stop boasting” however there’s probably also a little voice saying “be kind” and “talk nicely”.   Remember, you’re all grown up now and you do know how to relate and interact!!  We need to apply some of this to ourselves now.

You know, there are plenty of people in the world who will have something negative to say about you.  You don’t have to join in with them!  Negativity drags you down, drains your energy, increases stress, puts pressure on yourself and knocks your confidence.

So how do we change this self talk?

Listen to Yourself

Maybe as you read this you already know some of the things you say about yourself, or maybe you need to take a little time to actually listen to the words you use, the phrases you say and the way you talk to yourself and even about yourself.  What do you hear?  Negative phrases and comments can become embedded in your subconscious mind so that you repeat them without realising.  Once you start listening to yourself you’ll be surprised at what you hear.

Be Your Own Best Friend

If you want to make improvements in your own self talk and improve the way you think and feel about yourself then you need to be your own best friend.  Think about how you might guide and advise your best friend and then turn that phrasing, positivity and praise towards yourself.  It might not be easy for you to hear – initially.  It will get better and easier the more you do it.

Be Kind

Yes, be kind!  Be kind to yourself and be kind to others around you too.  Although we’re working on self talk, all talk is important.  It’s much easier to have complete positive thoughts and language rather than kind words for yourself and forgetting to be positive and kind to others around you!  If you see someone with great hair or gorgeous shoes, say so!  If your child shows nice manners, say “hey nice manners”.  You will feel good, but you know what?  They will too and so it improves the attitude of everyone around you that you interact with.  That in itself reduces the negativity.

Complement Yourself

We are rubbish at this.  Particularly us with the good British stiff-upper -lip / don’t-show-our-feelings malarkey.  When we don’t show our feelings to others, we don’t show them to ourselves.  So, start to complement yourself.  Start with 3 parts of your body to begin with, if it’s tough.  Look in the mirror and compliment one of those body parts, say what you like about it, then move to the next.  Do this regularly and see if you notice a difference in the way you feel about yourself.

Talking more positively to ourselves will have a great impact on the way we view ourselves.  You start to embed more positive comments and phrases in your subconscious mind, so they become more automatic and then progress and positivity gets easier and easier.  So go on, start today, change the way you talk to yourself.  You deserve it!

If you’d like the tips I give to my face to face clients, then sign up in the box below.

I’d love to know if there are things that you do or how you get on if you try this. Use the comments box below or email me or pop over to share on my Facebook Page.