When attending the Coaching Agile Teams class with Lyssa Adkins and Michael Spayd earlier in the year, one of the new concepts (at least I don’t remember it from the previous class I did back in 2013) was the idea of “impact feedback”. Simply put, impact feedback is a mechanism to give feedback to someone with a focussing on how that action impacted you. It is also a great mechanism to ensure that your are not leading the person to the solution, rather helping them see the outcome from a different perspective.

The template for impact feedback is:

When you did / said ……… the impact on me was ………

However, one of the difficulties with this technique is often knowing the right word to say. One of my colleagues from my Agile Coaching Competence Cohort program, Jessica Katz, shared this great little tool for knowing the right word to say to describe your impact emotion.

It is called the Wheel of Words, it’s exact origin is not clear, although I found it in an article about emotional copywriting as well as an article about vocabularly expansion of English.

Obviously there are other uses for this tool in coaching conversations as well as discussions, presentations, training and general writing,