Emotionally Intelligent
The subtle art of being a master and not a slave to your emotions.
The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray.
Emotional Intelligence:
The subtle art of being a master and not a slave to your emotions, where every feeling is acknowledged, every impulse is questioned, and every reaction is a conscious choice.
Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize, understand, and manage one’s own emotions and, to an extent, identify and work effectively with the emotions of others. This is, in a sense, a superpower.
Take some inventory of those around you. Look at your family, your friends, acquaintances, colleagues etc. How many of them are enslaved to their own emotions? How many of them are impulsive or act on feeling more than they act based on a logical best course?
You cannot live in logic alone. You will be miserable and logic will betray you. Reason can become consuming and life doesn’t work on logic and reason alone. Feelings, emotions, the irrational, they are all pivotal for life. There are many things we do not know.
There’s even more we don’t know that we don’t know. This means we have no conceivable way to ration through everything we encounter without mistake. Sometimes intuition or gut feelings are the way to go. That’s fine, go ahead.
Take control of your consistent emotions and begin to consciously and deliberately reshape your daily experience of life.
Avoid relying solely on feelings. Avoid allowing your feelings to cause you to say something you will regret or do something you will regret. Feelings are wonderful and they are torturous.
They are a source of all that is good and a source of the deepest and darkest pits imaginable. I think you’ll be happy to hear there is a trick to living with these feelings. A trick that will provide you comfort and keep you from being afraid to feel altogether.
Pay attention. Neat trick, right? That’s all you have to do. Pay attention to yourself. That is the first step. Consider all you know so far.
You know when you’re feeling sad. You also know when you’re feeling happy. You know when you’re bored, when you’re content, when you’re agitated and when you’re exhausted. You are already in a position to start practicing this trick.
Identify what you’re feeling when you notice you’re feeling it. This will require you to be intentional. You will have to say to yourself beforehand that this is something you endeavor to do.
In the egoic state, your sense of self, your identity, is derived from your thinking mind - in other words, what your mind tells you about yourself: the storyline of you, the memories, the expectations, all the thoughts that go through your head continuously and the emotions that reflect those thoughts. All those things make up your sense of self.
As you practice, it will get easier. As you practice, you will start noticing these feelings earlier on. And, as you practice, you will start doing it automatically. This is especially true if you focus on certain emotions.
For instance, I am a crank. I am more than proficient in the art of ruining a good time. This hasn’t paid dividends and has cost many family outings their joy. It took me a while, but I started working on it.
Once I got into a groove a warning bell started going off each time I felt myself slipping down that slope. I do not enjoy being grumpy and neither does anyone around me. It turns out identifying when it’s beginning led to an easy time making sure it didn’t progress.
That brings me to the next part of the trick. The first step is self-awareness. Now we must do something with this information. We have to learn to regulate our emotions. The easiest ones I have found are happiness and excitement.
Those can be useful for practice but they also have practical uses as well. If you want to keep someone from guessing you’re leading them to a surprise party, this is a useful skill. The good news is self-regulation can be quicker to cultivate than self-awareness.
I've never heard my dad say a bad word about anybody. He always keeps his emotions in check and is a true gentleman. I was taught that losing it was indulgent, a selfish act.
There are three more elements to emotional intelligence. They each come with time, much like the previous two, but the ability to foster them effectively will only come once you work on the self-awareness and self-regulation.
Don't worry about motivation. Motivation is fickle. It comes and goes. It is unreliable - and when you are counting on motivation to get your goals accomplished, you will likely fall short.
Motivation is nice to have but you cannot rely on it. You must have discipline first and it must be the foundation of you and how you go about life. Relying on motivation is a mistake and one that will slow you down and keep you from completing what you need to.
That being said, foster this too. It’s wonderful if available and allows you to accomplish things you never thought possible. It can appear out of place on a list of traits for emotional intelligence, but it fits, I promise. Motivation is odd and can come and go seemingly at will. Not your will, mind you, its own will. A fickle mistress, this motivation.
Much like a stubborn donkey, motivation can be coaxed into cooperating from time to time. Understanding yourself and your moods, feelings, wants, needs, and world view can help you get that donkey to move when you need it to.
Utilize what you know about yourself, utilize your ability to regulate yourself and your emotions, and coax that stubborn ass to get to work. That’s why this is included. Motivation relies on the first two traits to utilize. Sure, many that have no emotional intelligence have motivation, but it’s fleeting and sparse.
To love our neighbor as ourselves is such a truth for regulating human society, that by that alone one might determine all the cases in social morality.
Empathy is next. Don’t get it twisted, empathy is not a virtue. At least, endless or unlimited empathy isn’t. It’s horrible and destructive. Tread lightly here, you cannot help everyone and you should not feel everything they feel. It’s a trap and a harsh one at that.
Empathy is the ability to understand and to share the feelings of others. It helps one become compassionate, supportive and understanding. There are wonderful if kept in check.
I’m not saying don’t be compassionate. I’m not saying don’t practice empathy. I’m saying don’t let it consume you and lead you to cause more harm than good. The goal here is to ameliorate suffering, not blindly stumble around and treat everyone as infants.
Empathy is important to emotional intelligence due to being the next logical step to self-awareness. It’s the awareness of others. It takes what you know about yourself and effectively applies it to those around you. It’s powerful, it’s wonderful, it’s dangerous. Just be careful with this one.
People may hear your words, but they feel your attitude.
Finally we have social skills. Let’s be honest, it should not have needed to be included. It had to be, however, or some smart-ass would have pointed out “Hey, whomever you are, obviously everything that has been added to emotional intelligence will incur an accrual of social skills if extrapolated temporally.”
I assume that’s how know-it-alls speak (considering I am one at times). It’s true though. You will garner valuable social skills practicing any portion of emotional intelligence. You have to pay attention to do any of this, so start right now. Your social life will thank you.
Understanding, noticing, practicing and utilizing emotional intelligence will improve your communication, collaboration and ability to build and foster relationships. It will even help you distinguish between beneficial ones and harmful ones. That applies to both relationships and people.
Ever wanted a superpower? Emotional intelligence is the easiest one to attain. It’s not easy, but I don’t imagine invisibility is easy either and paying attention is at least realistic. Maybe you could attempt to talk to animals instead, we all have our interests.
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This is one of those things that, while important, takes a lot of time, effort and self reflection. Even with those things, it is easy for me to come up short!