The Language We Never Learned
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Dear First name / curious mind
You’ve been communicating all your life. But most of us were never taught the layer of communication that actually enables you to express what truly matters to you, determines whether team members trust each other, and increases the quality of your relationships at work and home. That part of communication enables you to recognize what you’re feeling, name it precisely, and express it in a way another person can receive.
That’s what BE IN SYNC is: a six-week challenge your team goes through together, one core emotion at a time, delivered entirely through the app, a couple of minutes a day.
How It Works
Each week centers on one emotion, not to make work more emotional, but because each emotion carries specific information, shows up in the body in specific ways, and asks for a specific relational skill. Inside the app you’ll get, day by day:
What the emotion is actually telling you — the science, briefly
How to recognize it in your body before it runs the conversation
One concrete practice for emotionally charged conversations, with example phrases you can use the same day
A skill for regulating the emotion — moving from noticing to choosing.
Nothing requires more than a few minutes. Everything is designed to be used in real conversations, that week, with the people you actually work with.
The 6-Week Roadmap
- Week 1 — Anger: Naming intensity — moving from reaction to expression
- Week 2 — Joy: Sharing positive emotions — building relational warmth
- Week 3 — Sadness: Vulnerability as a relational bridge — empathy and being seen
- Week 4 — Fear: Psychological safety — creating space to take interpersonal risks
- Week 5 — Disgust: Values alignment — noticing what you cannot tolerate, and why
- Week 6 — Surprise: Curiosity and openness — integration and new ways of seeing
Before Week 1: Your EQ Assessment
The first time you open the app, you’ll complete a short EQ assessment. Takes about 10 minutes. It gives you a personal baseline: where your emotional vocabulary is already strong, and where the next six weeks will stretch you. You’ll revisit it at the end of the challenge to see what changed.
Your Daily Mood Check-In
Each day, you’ll also log a quick check-in on how you’re feeling. It takes about 10 seconds. This isn’t a test and there’s nothing to get “right.” It’s what turns the six weeks into something personal: your own patterns, visible to you, over time.
Weekly Monday Sessions
Each week, we’ll also host a session on Mondays to go deeper into that week’s emotion together as a team. These sessions are voluntary — join if you can, skip if you can’t. More detailed information (time, format, and how to join) will follow soon.
Fully Anonymous
Everything you enter in the app is anonymous. Your check-ins are stored under a random code, never linked to your name, email, or account. No one can trace a response back to you. Responses are only ever reviewed in its sum, to improve the challenge and support the research behind it.
Important: Same Device Throughout
Be In Sync is a web-based app. Once you start the challenge on a device, please stick with that same device for all six weeks. Don’t switch partway through. We recommend using your phone and bookmarking the page, since it’s the easiest and most convenient way to check in daily. Whichever device you choose, the important thing is staying consistent with it for the full challenge.
Set a Daily Reminder
As the app is web-based for now, it doesn’t send you any notifications or reminders, so it’s on you to build the habit. On the first day of the challenge, set up a daily reminder on your phone to complete that day’s activity and log your mood. Daily activities are done Monday through Friday, but your mood should be tracked every day. It works best when it’s at the same time each day, so pick a time that realistically fits your routine.
Going on Holiday?
Life happens. If you’re off for a week or longer during the challenge, no problem. Just pick the app back up when you return and continue right where you left off. There’s no reset and no penalty for pausing.
One More Thing
Because your whole team is doing this together, something shifts that no individual course can produce: shared language. When everyone knows the difference between irritation and resentment, between disappointment and grief, conversations that used to go sideways start going somewhere.
This is not about being more emotional at work. It’s about being more precise, more connected, and more effective because the research consistently shows these are the same thing.
Should you have any questions throughout the challenge please feel free to reach out to me or Ivana.
Warm regards,
Six emotions. Six weeks. A shared vocabulary for the conversations that matter most.
Dr. Kinga
Social Psychologist · Organizational Development Consultant · Executive Coach · Author of Be In Sync
PS: You can read more about identity on my website and in my upcoming article on positivepsychology.com