Emotional Intelligence

I was raised to suppress negative emotions, not to acknowledge them, much less understand them. This severely hampered me in my personal and proffessional lives.

Goleman's book popularized the findings of Peter Salovey. Goleman includes 5 areas into his definition: Self-awareness; Managing emotions; Self Motivation; Empathy; Handling Relationships. To these I would add Understanding what Creates the emotions.

Research has shown, over and over again, that IQ, Intelligence Quotient, has little or no bearing on how successful a person is in life. Those with high IQ often flounder in real life while those with moderate IQ flourish. The difference is in their Emotional Intelligence.

I have struggled with this myself. As a child I was taught that negative emotions were bad. We were sent to our room whenever we displayed emotions that my parents didn't want to deal with. So emotions were never explained. I learned to suppress emotions, not to understand them.

Whenever I experienced disappointment or frustration, I was expected to just 'get over it'. This severely inhibited my ability to interact with others. When I was married, I often felt strong negative emotions, but didn't know what I was feeling, much less be able to convey those feelings to my husband. If I had, I might have been able to resolve some of the differences between us.

The cost of low Emotional Intelligence ranges from an inability to get along with people to poor physical health. It can ruin careers and sabotage logic and reason. Stress from chronic emotional pressure can be as bad as chain smoking for physical health. Emotional pressure can from a variety of emotions, extending from anger to anxiety, from greed to fear.

Emotional Intelligence is not fixed at birth. It can be changed, learned. In fact it mostly is learned. Empathy has been shown to be a natural talent, but it too can be learned. Just as someone without a natural talent for sports can learn to be an acceptable athlete, so can someone without 'natural' empathy be taught to use it.

Emotions are a natural, built-in aspect of life. Every year new discoveries in biology, neurology, and brain architecture bring greater understanding of the physiology behind emotions. What is still under debate is whether emotions cause the physical changes or if the physical changes cause the emotions.

It is more important than ever to manage your emotions. The old fight or flight response was extremely important in early human history. As we grew and reduced the immediate threats of being eaten, this instinctive reaction is less needed. What is more needed is social deftness. This is the core of emotional intelligence.

Social deftness includes impulse control, persistence, recognizing emotions in others and responding to those emotions in productive manners.

We could make a list of emotions and explore each one. But there are more emotions than we have names for. There are said to be 7 root emotions of which all the others are a mixture of.

The next step is to recognize our own emotions and their origins. By origins, I mean the interpretations we give events after the automatic reaction. The automatic reaction is instantaneous, but dissipates quickly. Think of when you've been startled when you come around a corner ran into someone unexpectedly. Your muscles tense, you jump back, your heart thumps hard. After you realize that there is no threat, your body quickly returns to normal, your emotions go according to how you interpret the event. You can get mad or laugh it off depending on how you interpret things. And this interpretation comes from a combination of beliefs, habits and current state of mind.

This last aspect of Emotional Intelligence, interpretation, is what determines your emotional health, including emotional eating and anger management.