Emotional intelligence (EI) is the ability to identify, understand, and manage one’s own emotions and the emotions of others. It is a critical skill that can help individuals to navigate social interactions, manage stress, and build positive relationships.
There are several ways to develop emotional intelligence:
Self-awareness: Developing self-awareness is the first step towards improving emotional intelligence. This involves awareness of your emotions, understanding their triggers, and how they affect your behavior. Knowing how you will react to things and why is a strength that will allow you to be proactive and understanding in your life. Other people will not so easily be able to push your buttons.
Self-regulation: Once you know your emotions, you can learn to regulate them. This means managing your emotional reactions to situations and learning to control impulsive behavior. Rather than reacting to situations, your will be able to respond to people and situations with thought and steadiness of purpose.
Empathy: Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. This involves paying attention to nonverbal cues, listening actively, and showing genuine concern for others. Through concern and understanding of other people’s emotions, your wisdom will grow, and you will be able to help people manage themselves better.
Social skills: Developing social skills involves communicating effectively, building positive relationships, and constructively resolving conflicts. Through Emotional intelligence, you will be able to communicate in a more meaningful way. This strength will help you grow existing relationships and to establish powerful new ones.
Continuous learning: Emotional intelligence is not a fixed trait but a skill that can be developed over time. This involves being open to feedback, learning from your experiences, and seeking opportunities for growth and development. We all are growing every day, and each interaction and experience is a chance to grow into a better human.
Actively looking for ways to develop your emotional intelligence in your daily life will lead to personal growth. You need to try to add some strategies to your conscious thought. Some strategies for developing emotional intelligence include:
Practicing mindfulness and self-reflection
Seeking out feedback from others
Engaging in activities that promote empathy, such as volunteering or community service
Building positive relationships with others
Reading books or attending workshops on emotional intelligence
Practicing active listening and practical communication skills.
By developing emotional intelligence, individuals can improve their personal and professional relationships, increase their resilience in the face of stress, and enhance their overall well-being.
How one deals with trauma, disappointment, anger, and frustration is a part of everyone’s life experience. The emotions that naturally arrive with each of these events in life are often the cause of many problems we carry throughout our lives. Learning to express our emotional pain and distress positively and healthily can lead to everyone’s further enjoyment of life. The inability to process emotions we feel healthily may lead to a lifetime of trauma, disappointment, and confusion.
Learning to express our emotional pain and distress positively and healthily can lead to robust life enjoyment. The inability to process emotions we feel healthily may lead to a lifetime of trauma, unhappiness, and poor health. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Emotions As Enemies
In my youth, I learned that feelings were enemies. Not overtly, but subtly through my life experience. My male role models taught me that you should keep your
Our feelings can hurt us more than any foe if we don’t know how to deal with them.
Emotions in and not shown to the world. Since I never spoke of what I felt, I was left to guess for a reason, but as a young person, I believed it was because anger, sadness, shame, and frustration were terrible things that showed a person’s weakness. So I learned to put on a smile and keep my disappointments in life to myself. I was an expert at putting the uncomfortable things in a place where they couldn’t reach me, but I didn’t realize that they would always be a part of me until I learned to deal with them constructively.
Emotions are a natural result of life and work to help us determine what behaviors we resonate with through our actions. Painful emotions tell us something is wrong, but that “thing” was never us, just what happened to us. The lack of communication around our negative emotions and the events or thoughts that cause them leads to most of our problems in life.
Embracing all parts of ourselves, including the uncomfortable parts of emotions, is essential for health. Nobody lives without having a negative thought.
Learning to Deal with Emotions
Too often, it seems like people choose to either obsess over emotions or numb themselves through alcohol or drugs. The problem with these techniques is that the negative feeling is still.
Learning to deal with emotions and talk about them is one of the healthiest things we can do.
Waiting to be dealt with becomes a destructive part of your life. Being happy is hard when you carry so much anger, frustration, or shame.
There are many resources out there that can help you deal with your emotional baggage healthily, and links at the end of this article to help you. Here are a few that I think are effective for me.
Journaling or creating something artistic to help you express what is happening inside. Emotions can be difficult to communicate, and images or other artistic creations can allow for a healthy expression of things that bother us.
Learning to recognize unhealthy or harmful thought patterns or practices, accept them, and learn how to let them go gently out of your life, relieves emotional pain.
Understand the role that pain has in a healthy life. It can be a catalyst for growth and teaches resilience. Minor health issues provide the experience to deal with more significant difficulties later in life.
Seek the help of others. Find someone who can guide your emotional health if you don’t know how to deal with what you are experiencing. Speak about your pain to someone, which will help you release it. A professional counselor or therapist is a great option. Never be afraid to ask for help; it isn’t a sign of weakness; it is a tool to allow you to live a fulfilling life.
Practice forgiveness- learn to forgive yourself and forgive others for anything they did that hurt you. Carrying around pain and anger will only weigh you down and, from my experience, stop you from becoming happy in life.
Talk about it. Tell someone you trust how you are feeling. It is a simple but effective way of dealing with things.
Suppose our challenges today stem from some emotional issues that haven’t been dealt with appropriately. Shouldn’t our educational system teach kids how to manage youth’s emotional roller coaster rides?
Learning to accept emotions and deal with emotional issues more healthily allows for many of the blocks in life to be eliminated, allowing a healthy expression of yourself and providing your gift to the world. That is a good thing.
Feelings and emotions are a huge part of the human experience. How well we learn to manage our souls will determine how well we live and what we can create in our lives, yet, we have created a system of education that teaches all people who participate in the basics of math, science, reading, and writing, etc.
We are not teaching how to deal with our emotions and what they mean in our lives as our thoughts run through our minds and bring with them connected emotions. Anger, love, sadness, joy, happiness, disappointment, or any other emotion you experience will be a part of life at some point. As a society, we ignore our feelings and assume they will pass on their own. Emotions are the messages we have from our soul, telling us what it needs. Listen.
Call To Action
It has been my experience; trying to live your life with as little emotion as possible is easier. I would try to keep myself in situations where I could control the emotional needs I might have and never allow my feelings to become too much for me. Doing this kept people at a distance and never let anyone into my life in a way where they could harm me. Unfortunately, I found this sort of life was not very satisfying in the long run, and denying the opportunity to develop emotions causes harm to you as well.
Each of us is made of three parts, 1. body, 2. mind, and 3. spirit. It is number 3 we are concerned with here because just as your body loves to exercise and your brain likes to learn and develop thought, your soul also yearns for new experiences and growth. If you deny it through a perceived pattern of control, your soul will see things change and give you a chance to grow. That has meant I have been thrust into situations I feel inadequate to handle emotionally. This call to action has been a painful way to learn, and it has been effective.
How to Listen
It is easy to let your thoughts carry you away. They roll through your mind, this way and that. Feelings are deceiving, though. They are confusing and contradictory. We get confused, overthink things, and listen to many of the same ideas repeatedly. It is like a recording playing on a continuous loop. Our soul and emotional language are much more subtle and difficult to hear and understand. I hope as I practice thinking, I can master the process. The trick is to see past your mind and realize it is a powerful tool you can use, but it isn’t you, and it isn’t who you are.
Look into yourself, and you will see something deeper existing there. Something on the inside you have known is there but has ignored. This entity is your soul, and it is the force inside you uniquely you and allows your song to enter the world. Astonishingly, we don’t work harder to enable and help more people find this part of themselves. We live in a society trying to provide cookie-cutter lives to wildly creative souls. No wonder many people feel they don’t fit in and have to turn to any vice they can find to feel good. We use drugs, food, sex, shopping, alcohol, or anything else to bring a little feeling of “good” into our lives. The joke is there is a well of powerful emotions lying just below the surface of our lives, and with the direction, I think it can come out helpfully and creatively.
Fear is the Thing
The villain in life is always going to be fear. It is fear that stops us from trying to be celebrated in anything we attempt. Fear of failure. Fear of what someone else may think. Fear of success. Fear of being alone. Fear of death. Fear of being hurt. Fear of looking weak. There are a lot of ways to experience anxiety. Everyone must deal with stress continually throughout life, no matter what they do. If you conquer your old fears, new ones will come into your life and bring a new direction to your life. So it would make sense to understand where fear comes from and how you can manage it because it is the positive management of fear that will determine how successful you will be.
Fear will not harm you. It never does. Danger can harm you; being aware of that danger is a proper survival technique. But fear is just a thought in your mind, which has as much power as you give it with your thoughts and behaviors. Recognize and be honest about the fear in your life and how it is limiting you. The cure for all anxiety is action. Even though things will not always happen as you plan or would like them to be, they do work out. Once you know the answer, there is nothing left to fear in that situation. Take action and overcome the feelings of fear. Life will continually provide you with opportunities to do just that.
Embrace Your Emotions
This advice is complex for me to follow because I have had such a rocky relationship with my own emotions. But repressing them because of perceived weakness is a stop-gap and, at worst, a detriment to allowing the best version of yourself to come forward. I am trying not to look at my emotions as anything negative. They are not a sign of weakness or a detriment to accomplishment. They are a part of the human experience, which are valuable communications from your soul telling you what you need in life and how close your current actions and decisions are moving you toward the place you should be.
Take some time today to understand what your emotions are guiding you to do. This path can appear through finding a way to still the mind and let your inner voice rise through the veil of emotions you feel. One great way to do this is to immerse yourself in an activity of creativity. Drawing, painting, carving, writing, or whatever creative outlet consumes you will allow you to occupy your conscious mind and bring your subliminal messages to rise to the surface. It is in these messages your guidance will come to you. Meditation is another practice that our society has a well-established fear of experiencing. It is merely a way to calm your mind and allow you to hear the messages of your heart. That is all it is. Anyone against it is operating from a platform of ignorance or fear. Don’t be ignorant or fearful, and give meditation of some sort a try.
Start to practice ways to listen to your emotions and follow the guidance they are giving you. Move away from the messages of your mind and see the path that was always there in your soul.
“The living soul of man, once conscious of its power, cannot be quelled.” –Horace Mann
“A beautiful woman delights the eye; a wise woman, the understanding; a pure one, the soul.” —Minna Antrim
“The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it – basically because you feel good, very good when you are near or with them.” —Charles Bukowski
“Go to the people and the places that set a spark in your soul.” —Anonymous
“If only our eyes saw souls instead of bodies, how different our ideals of beauty would be.”
“Beauty attracts heart, but character attracts the soul.” –Sindhu Vishnu
“Always trust your instincts; they are messages from your soul; they are that inner part of you That strives to make you whole.” — Anonymous
“Love is the beauty of the soul.” —Saint Augustine
“Follow your soul. It knows the way.” —- Anonymous
“Whatever’s good for your soul, do that.” —-Anonymous
One of the things I am trying to improve in my life is my understanding of emotions. Most people can improve themselves and their relationships by recognizing what they feel and how these emotions affect us. There was no actual instruction in life about what your feelings are, where they come from, and how to deal with negative emotions in a way that won’t hurt you or someone else. My favorite definition of emotional intelligence is the capacity to be aware of and handle interpersonal relationships judiciously and empathetically. All that means that the “stuff” that comes up interacting with others, you can cope with a constructive and healthy way — the ability to understand your emotions. Emotions are not something to fear. They are to be understood.
The Emotional Reaction
It seems like our emotions come to us in waves of almost uncontrollable waves. One minute we feel just fine, and then like a hurricane, a feeling of fear, guilt, jealousy washes over us, almost without our consent. But we do consent. Emotions often rise from our subconscious through a cycle of thought we have created and followed through our lives. We take in stimulus information, and immediately we assign meaning to it. Whatever that meaning is will almost simultaneously bring emotion to the surface, which determines a person’s action.
This little cycle is playing out over and over in our lives. The emotions that arise are based on our history and programming. Two people could have the same experience but have it move them in an entirely different direction. Start looking at your thoughts and emotional reactions and their sources. See the patterns and the responses you have, their origins, and you will be on the way to understanding your emotional self.
Problems of Emotions
No matter who you are, if you are a healthy and functioning human being, emotions are a part of your daily life. One of the biggest problems is that most don’t understand what brings on feelings, and when they hit you, it can be overwhelming. Emotions are the alerts our brain sends to the body to avoid suffering and to lead you toward pleasure. The problem is that without a conscious understanding of your emotions, they can run your life, and usually not in a positive way.
Our minds remember all the situations we experience in life. When you face a problem today that reminds us of something that happened in the past, those similar emotions rise to the surface to protect us. Anger is a clear warning of fear. It tells everyone around you that you are afraid you are in danger of being hurt. A need you have will be ignored or overlooked. This fear can lead to actions and words of hate, meanness, and just a general insensitivity for the emotional states of others. Like sensitive babies, we cry out without concern for anyone but ourselves.
Emotional Release and Understanding
The outlook is not bleak, though. Once you realize your emotions result from the thoughts on which you focus, you can change that focus. All thinking leads to a corresponding emotional state. That is how we work. The human mind can only focus on one thought at a time, so changing the focus will change the emotional outlook. It starts with noticing what your emotions are and not just reacting to them. Look at them and see what they are telling you. If you are feeling jealousy, where does it come from? Our emotional reactions develop from experience; most of our dominant negative emotions come from our personal history. Take a moment and follow that emotion; most often, the current situation doesn’t warrant a powerful emotional outburst.
Noticing and identifying our emotions is something that most people never do. They allow their feelings to move them from one place to another. The secret is that we are not our emotions. When you feel sad, you are a person feeling low, not the sadness itself. The same premise exists for anger, frustration, fear, jealousy, happiness, joy, and love. Emotions are tools to help understand life, not life itself. We are humans with emotions biased toward our past. Knowing this can give you the key to a higher level of emotional intelligence, bringing you a genuine ability to understand your emotions.
Emotional Deconstruction
The beginning of understanding is knowing your emotional arena. You have to be able to look at yourself and your history honestly. It is easy to gloss over wounds from our lives and to say it wasn’t any problem. But those are the problems! They can’t be swept under the rug because they are always looking for a way to express themselves. It is difficult to admit that we are not perfect, and our lives aren’t still perfect. But here is a secret, nobody’s life is perfect. Look honestly at all the things you can remember hurting you or where you felt negative emotions of any kind. Accept them for what they are and let them go.
Acceptance of your issues is difficult to overcome because it makes you admit you were hurt, frustrated, embarrassed, jealous, lost, angry, afraid, or whatever emotional experience has haunted you. To do anything else is to let emotional distress from our childhood run our lives today. Shine a light on it, allow yourself to feel it, and then release it for what it was, a human learning experience that caused us to suffer in some way.
Emotions and Me
Emotional work is not something that I look forward to doing because emotions can be sticky, uncomfortable, and a little scary sometimes. To honestly look at your situations and thoughts and identify the feelings they bring to the surface is never a comfortable and easy process. I never learned about emotions and healthy ways to deal with them. I know that not expressing them and pushing them down inside of yourself, and pretending they don’t exist is an unhealthy practice.
I know that I would have emotional reactions to situations in the past and not know why responding with an automatic response. The emotional response would beat the logical, well-thought-out result. But now, I hope to look at the emotions I feel and evaluate what they are trying to tell me. Then make a rational decision. Also, I think that I had a bad habit of meditating on negative emotions and that practice creates a severe downward cycle. Changing your focus for a short time to something more positive will allow you to get out of those doldrums.
I think that emotional education should focus on our educational system so that all people have the tools to deal with failure, love, success, heartbreak, judgment, acceptance, or anything else they face in life. Having emotions is a part of being human. Developing the ability to understand your emotional responses will make you a successful and happy human.
“If your emotional abilities aren’t in hand if you don’t have self-awareness if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions if you can’t have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.” -Daniel Goleman
“75 percent of careers are derailed for reasons related to emotional competencies, including an inability to handle interpersonal problems, unsatisfactory team leadership during times of difficulty or conflict; or inability to adapt to change or elicit trust.” -Center for Creative Leadership
“When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures of emotion.” -Dale Carnegie
“When our emotional health is in a bad state, so is our level of self-esteem. We have to slow down and deal with what is troubling us so that we can enjoy the simple joy of being happy and at peace with ourselves.” -Jess C. Scott
“The only way to change someone’s mind is to connect with them from the heart.” -Rasheed Ogunlaru
“No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.” -Theodore Roosevelt
“Unleash in the right time and place before you explode at the wrong time and place.” -Oli Anderson
“The greatest ability in business is to get along with others and influence their actions.” -John Hancock
“In a high-IQ job pool, soft skills like discipline, drive, and empathy mark those who emerge as outstanding.” -Daniel Goleman
Emotional intelligence (EI) is the ability to identify, understand, and manage one’s own emotions and the emotions of others. It is a critical skill that can help individuals to navigate social interactions, manage stress, and build positive relationships.
