Emotional Intelligence

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

What is emotional intelligence?

Emotional intelligence is essentially the ability to recognize, manage, and use your emotions in positive and constructive ways. It’s also about recognizing the emotional states of others and engaging them in ways that feel good to all and create mutual safety, trust, and confidence.

Emotional intelligence (EQ) vs. Intellectual intelligence (IQ)

Research shows that intellectual intelligence (IQ) has less to do with success in life than emotional intelligence (EQ). Our IQ helps us understand and navigate the world on one level, but we also need EQ, or emotional smarts, in order to succeed. We all know people who are academically brilliant and yet are socially inept and unsuccessful. What they are missing is emotional intelligence.

Emotional intelligence is directly linked to self-esteem, self-awareness, compassion, empathy, and adaptability—important predictors of success in life. Emotional intelligence is what helps you communicate clearly, lead others, and build powerful relationships at work and in your personal life. Emotional intelligence also helps you motivate yourself, solve problems, and achieve your goals.

Emotional intelligence consists of four fundamental capabilities:

• Self-awareness – the ability to be conscious of your emotions and recognize their impact while using gut feelings to guide your decisions.
• Self-management – the ability to control your emotions and behavior and adapt to changing circumstances.
• Social awareness – the ability to sense, understand, and react to the emotions of others and feel comfortable socially.
• Relationship management – the ability to inspire, influence, and connect to others while managing conflict.   

Emotional intelligence is the key to success and resilience

In studying people with strokes, brain tumors, and other types of brain damage, scientists have made some fascinating discoveries about intelligence. When the parts of our brains that enable us to feel emotions are damaged, our intellects remain intact. We can still talk, analyze, perform excellently on IQ tests, and even predict how we should act in social situations. But under these tragic circumstances, we are unable to make decisions in the real world—to interact successfully and appropriately with other people, to plan for the immediate or long-term future, to creatively solve problems, and ultimately, to succeed.

The difference between success and failure in life is less a product of what happens to you than how you react to unexpected, unpleasant, and threatening experiences. Those who can go with the flow survive and prosper.

Emotional intelligence isn’t a safety net that protects you from life’s tragedies, frustrations, or disappointments. Emotionally-intelligent individuals go through bad times and experience sadness, anger, and fear—just like everyone else. But they respond differently than less healthy people to these experiences. Emotional intelligence gives you the ability to cope and bounce back from stress, adversity, trauma, and loss. In other words, emotional intelligence makes you resilient.

Resilience gives you the ability to:

• Stay focused in a frightening or challenging situation
• Experience moments of joy in the face of sadness and loss
• Ask for and get support when needed 
• Quickly rebound from frustration and disappointment
• Remain hopeful during challenging and difficult times 

Emotional intelligence is the hidden factor in relationships and communication

For decades, we have viewed relationship obstacles through a flawed lens—one that fails to capture the real sources of connection and disconnection between people. When we look at communication from a moment-to-moment perspective, as new brain imaging technologies now enable us to do, we can see that what really keeps people connected lies beneath the surface.

Our emotions connect us to others

Emotions are the building blocks of every relationship in your life, and the power of those emotions cannot be overlooked. Emotions influence the way you relate and react to others—often without your awareness. If you are not keenly aware of the emotions you are experiencing internally and how you are communicating this externally—and similarly aware of the other person—you are apt to:

• Think that you are communicating one thing, while actually communicating something else
• Create confusion, insecurity, and mistrust
• Feel helpless and vulnerable when faced with conflict
• Use humor in a way that is off-putting or distances you from others
• Misinterpret what the other person really wants and needs  
• Appear unattractive to others because of the negative effect you have on them

Most relationship advice misses the real emotional issues

Many people seek relationship advice to find answers to problems they believe are responsible for their conflicts, without realizing there are more fundamental emotional issues at the core of those problems. They are attempting to heal the surface symptoms of their dysfunctional relationships, without examining the real emotional issues that are simmering beneath. But until those fundamental issues are addressed, the problems and conflicts will continue. 

Strong relationships are based on emotional intelligence

The more we learn about the brain, the more certain we are that humans are highly social creatures with strong needs for relationships and positive connections to others. We’re not meant to survive, let alone thrive, in isolation. Our social brains crave companionship—even when experience has made us shy and distrustful of others.

The ability to be aware of your own emotions and the feelings of others is the key to relationships that are engaging, exciting, fulfilling, creative, and productive. Emotional intelligence keeps your relationships strong and healthy. Without it, your relationships will always stall and break down. Fortunately, emotional intelligence is based on set of skills that you can learn at any time.

The skills of emotional intelligence help you:

• Build safety and trust
• Capture the attention and interest of others
• Respond to others with empathy and compassion
• Send and receive appropriate nonverbal signals
• Be more playful and creative
• Resolve conflict and repair wounded feelings

Developing your emotional intelligence: The five essential tools

While every relationship is unique, there are five emotional intelligence skills that are of vital importance to building and maintaining healthy relationships. With these tools in hand, you will be on your way to speaking the language of emotional intelligence—a language that will improve all your relationships—including your relationship with yourself. 

EQ Tool 1: The Elastic helps you reduce stress and avoid emotional overload

Out-of-controlstress triggers knee-jerk “fight or flight” responses that make us feel like running or fighting, but limit our capacity to think and communicate clearly, solve problems, and behave in a productive way. Stress can also make our emotions and the emotions of others seem threatening and overwhelming. So the first step in raising your emotional intelligence is learning how to very rapidly and dependably calm down under pressure.

Imagine your nervous system stretched like a piece of elastic to a point of breaking that will leave you feeling out of control. Now imagine that you have learned how to relieve the pressure so that the elastic eases back into a relaxed shape. The first tool of emotional intelligence, The Elastic, gives you the ability to recognize when your stress levels are out of control and return to a calm and energized state of awareness.

EQ Tool 2: The Glue helps you stay emotionally connected to yourself and others

Emotion points us in the direction of what we really need and serves as our primary source of motivation. Remove the emotional parts of the brain, and people lose their desire to do much of anything. Emotions are also the glue that holds the communication process together. Being able to recognize and manage core emotions—such as anger, sadness, fear, joy, and disgust—is essential for communication that engages and moves others.

We use glue to bring things together and to keep them together. Imagine the second tool of emotional intelligence as a warm, flowing means of connection to ourselves and others. The Glue helps you understand yourself, “read” what others are feeling, and communicate you true needs.

EQ Tool 3: The Pulley helps you attract and hold the attention of others

Nonverbal communication is the lifelong pulley that, consciously or unconsciously, sends either positive or negative signals to others. Nothing reveals more about us, or attracts the attention of others, than wordless communication. Nonverbal communication is expressed through body language, the way your words sound when you speak, the appropriateness of your touch, and most of all, the emotion that comes across when you communicate.

Imagine the third tool of emotional intelligence as a pulley, always moving in two directions at once—receiving and giving, giving and receiving. The Pulley helps you keep relationships on track through the use of nonverbal signals that show your care and interest.

EQ Tool 4: The Ladder helps you rise above life’s difficulties

All emotional sharing strengthens relationships, but sharing humor and the delight of play adds a unique restorative and healing element. Laughter and play fill you with joy and delight the nervous system, relaxing the body and relieving fatigue. Mutual playfulness reduces stress, defuses anger, mends fences, and lifts spirits.

A ladder allows you to get to more places than you normally can. Imagine the fourth tool of mutual humor and playfulness as giving you many more options for easing and overcoming frustrations and differences. The Ladder helps you get through tough times, stay positive, and keep your relationships spontaneous, creative, and fulfilling.  

EQ Tool 5: The Velvet Hammer helps you handle conflict in a positive way

Conflicts and disagreements are an unavoidable part of life. But conflict resolved in a respectful and positive way strengthens the bonds between people. When conflict isn’t perceived as threatening or punishing, it fosters freedom, creativity, trust, and safety in relationships.

The head of a hammer is always hard, but in the hands of a skilled craftsman, it creates opportunities for new beginnings. Imagine the fifth tool as a velvet hammer, a source of growth, rather than destruction­ — an opportunity that can be at once difficult and rewarding. Softened and empowered by the skills of emotional intelligence, the Velvet Hammer enables you to gracefully overcome relationship challenges, without resorting to criticism, contempt, or defensiveness.

 Mastering the tools of emotional intelligence

Practicing the tools of emotional intelligence will help you break old, unhealthy emotional habits and replace them with more powerful and effective ways of thinking, feeling, behaving, and relating to others. The more you practice, the better you’ll get at using the tools, but any time you put in will make a positive difference.

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