Our society teaches that emotions are bad. Any emotion that is expressed that isn't anger is generally thought of as weakness, a deficiency, makes you out of control, is hormonal, makes you "a girl", or any other derogatory term that can be inserted here.
Well... science says otherwise. This post is about showing that all of these terms are not only inaccurate, but are blindly and bullishly insisting that charging the red flag of the matador is worthwhile and the pinnacle of evolution. Wrong. That mentality is completely against science and how the human brain is designed. Turns out "being a girl" is what we should all aspire to be, at least in regards to honoring and valuing our emotions. Turns out the real bitches are the people that can't tolerate their own emotions, much less the emotions of others.
According to Dr. Travis Bradberry, the author of Emotional Intelligence 2.0, only 36% of people can identify their emotions as they happen. Not a great statistic considering how important emotions are to humanity as a whole.
One of my favorite books is called The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion. It's a very famous book and for good reason. The author of the book, Jonathan Haidt, is a professor that studies whether people operate from a place of reason or emotion both on initial response and when confronted with evidence against their instinctive, or "logical", reaction. Want to guess what he finds? He shows from multiple studies comprised of tens of thousands of participants that people not only operate from a place of emotion, but that the vast majority actively refuse to change their opinion when definitively proven to be wrong. Humans are not logical beings, they are emotional beings.
Here are a couple choice quotes from his book:
"Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second."
“Our moral thinking is much more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth.”
“Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.”
“Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.”
He even argues that college debate classes are not places dedicated to finding truth, but teaches people to reason out their emotional biases in a way that convinces others. In other words, people just get better at backing up their own emotional biases with logic, they don't get better at changing perspectives based on logic alone.
It's estimated in a study by Stanford University that 95% of information that the brain processes is emotionally based or influenced. Here is a meta-analysis from Harvard on the role of emotions on decision making. The authors conclude that "emotions are, for better or worse, the dominant driver of most meaningful decisions in life."
Humans. Are. Emotional. Beings.
In graduate school to become a therapist, the role of emotions is heavily emphasized as a critical factor in good psychological health. Most of therapy, in my opinion, is dedicated to helping people learn to coexist with their emotions rather than run from them. All I do is help people process their emotions instead of ignore them, sweep them under the rug, or compartmentalize them.
One of my favorite quotes by Sigmund Freud, often credited as the founder of modern psychology, states:
"Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways."
Anyone who has overreacted to something relatively minor, the proverbial straw that broke the camels back, understands this statement. Unprocessed emotions are pressure mounting in a system that will eventually explode. Healthy emotional processing is an indispensable aspect of good psychological health. Which brings us to emotional intelligence, the topic of this post.
Emotional intelligence (EQ) is the degree to which you understand your own emotions, motivations, and values, how well you are able to handle and work through your emotions, and how well you understand and respond to other people’s emotions and behaviors. Emotional intelligence is the foundation of healthy emotional regulation. According to Travis Bradberry emotional intelligence is made up of four different categories:
Self-Awareness: Your ability to accurately perceive your emotions and stay aware of them as they happen.
Self-Management: Your ability to use awareness of your emotions to stay flexible and positively direct your behavior.
Social Awareness: Your ability to accurately pick up on emotions in other people and understand what is really going on.
Relationship Management: Your ability to use awareness of your emotions and the others’ emotions to manage interactions successfully.
The first two categories deal with your ability to understand your own emotions and the second two about your ability to deal with others' emotions. Your emotional intelligence has tangible, real-world consequences. Here are some of Bradberry's findings:
People with average IQ’s outperform those with the highest IQ’s 70% of the time. This is due to emotional intelligence.
In a study comparing 33 workplace skills, emotional intelligence was the strongest predictor of performance, explaining a full 58% of success in all types of jobs. 58/100% possible percent. In other words, emotional intelligence is responsible for almost 60% of success on its own and the other 32 skills combined are responsible for the other 40% of workplace success.
90% of top job performers are also high in emotional intelligence. On the flip side, just 20% of bottom performers are high in emotional intelligence. In other words, it's incredibly rare to get to a top tier job without emotional intelligence.
People with high emotional intelligence make, on average, $29,000 more a year than people with low emotional intelligence. Every point increase on a scale of emotional intelligence, created by Bradberry, roughly translates to $1,300 more a year to an annual salary. This finding holds true for people in all industries, at all levels, in every region of the world. For context, the average salary in the U.S. is barely less than $60,000 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics found here. Not bad emotional intelligence, not bad at all.
No job has been found in which performance and pay aren’t tied to emotional intelligence.
Here are some quotes about emotional intelligence from some other leaders in the field:
"Emotional intelligence is a way of recognizing, understanding, and choosing how we think, feel, and act. It shapes our interactions with others and our understanding of ourselves. It defines how and what we learn; it allows us to set priorities; it determines the majority of our daily actions. Research suggests it is responsible for as much as 80 percent of the 'success' in our lives."
- Joshua Freedman, Specialist on Emotional Intelligence
"In the last decade or so, science has discovered a tremendous amount about the role emotions play in our lives. Researchers have found that even more than IQ, your emotional awareness and abilities to handle feelings will determine your success and happiness in all walks of life, including family relationships."
- John Gottman, Founder of Gottman Relationship Institute
Your emotional intelligence dictates your success in ALL relationships in your life whether it be in your family, with your friends, or at work. Neglecting building your emotional intelligence, deeming it to be negligible, harmful, irrelevant, or even undesirable is choosing ignorance and the degradation of relationships in your life. In other words, if you are choosing to ignore your emotions, or the emotions of others, your relationships will pay the price of your intentional naivety and lack of responsibility. And so will you.
So how can you develop your emotional intelligence?
Bradberry's book suggests some ways to develop emotional intelligence for each category which I will expound upon.
Self Awareness Categories:
Quit treating your feelings as good or bad.
Feeling are neutral. You only create more distress for yourself when you judge feelings as good or bad. Think of them as 0's and 1's in binary code. They are just information. Learn from them.
Observe the ripple effect of your emotions.
Are the results positive or negative for the people around you?
Lean into your discomfort.
Get comfortable with discomfort. There is a principle of therapy called "the window of tolerance" which basically states that you have to be uncomfortable in order to change. Your discomfort is your best teacher.
Feel your emotions physically.
Your body is your greatest ally and the best way to get in touch with your emotions. Learn to recognize how your body speaks to you by noticing changes in sensations and linking them to emotional states.
Know who and what pushes your buttons.
Watch yourself like a hawk.
Metacognition. Learn to be an impartial observer to your own experience.
Keep a journal about your emotions.
Don't be fooled by a bad mood.
It will pass. Choose to learn from it rather than be bogged down by it.
Don't be fooled by a good mood, either.
Acting without thinking in a good mood can be detrimental as well. Learn to make decisions in a state of peace.
Stop and ask yourself why you do the things you do.
Develop self awareness.
Visit your values.
One of my favorite activities as a therapist is called the core values assignment. Core values drive your behavior and create meaning for you. They can be a roadmap to what you find meaningful and therefore what makes you happy. Here's the assignment so you can do it yourself. Go to this website and write down all of the values that are most important to you. Most important! All values are important, ignore that and write down what is MOST important. After you have a list of values, 20+ most likely, try to narrow them down into sub categories based on your intuitive groupings of what's similar. These groups will be your core values. Try not to have more than 6.
Check yourself.
Be aware of your current emotional state and how you present yourself.
Spot your emotions in books, movies, and music.
Learn to identify your own emotions in the arts.
Seek feedback.
We are blind to our own blind spots. I've learned that most of people's critiques of me have turned out to be accurate. If you want to learn about yourself, ask other people.
Get to know yourself under stress.
Self-awareness is awesome. Just do it.
Self Management Strategies:
Breathe right.
Breathing is cool. Deep breathing activates the parasympathetic nervous system which helps you calm down. Hurray science!
Create an emotion vs. reason list.
Not super helpful honestly unless you work through the emotions behind it, for most people anyway. I recommend EMDR or other bilateral stimulation techniques to work through your emotions so that you don't wage war with yourself.
Make your goals public.
Have other people hold you accountable! For optimum effect, make sure the consequences motivate you. The book gives an example of paying a friend $100 each time you don't keep to your goals. That would motivate most people for sure. Create your own.
Count to ten.
Debatable but try it anyway.
Sleep on it.
Actually super helpful. We process our emotions in sleep.
Talk to a skilled self-manager.
Therapist!
Smile and laugh more.
Even forced smiling or laughing is found to create genuine differences in mood oddly enough.
Set aside some time in your day for problem solving.
Take control of your self talk.
Challenge negative thoughts as they happen.
Visualize yourself succeeding.
Visualization is powerful technique both psychologically and spiritually.
Clean up your sleep hygiene.
Sleep deficit is a real thing. Sleep is integral to emotional regulation. As is exercise actually.
Focus your attention on your freedoms, rather than your limitations.
Gratitude is one of the most powerful emotions. Focusing on your blessings rather than your restrictions can have an enormous impact on mood.
Stay synchronized.
Don't agree with this one. He argues that you should control your body language by controlling your emotions and making them synchronized. I would argue that most people in the world can't do this. I've met a lot of people who think they are good at hiding their emotions. They aren't. And most likely neither are you. Instead of approaching controlling your body language this way, you should instead work through your emotions so that your body language is naturally congruent. Way easier and more effective.
Speak to someone who is not emotionally invested in your problem.
Therapist!
Learn a valuable lesson from everyone you encounter.
Fuck yes! Embody this and you will grow at exponential rates.
Put a mental recharge in your schedule.
Breaks are important!
Accept that change is just around the corner.
“Change is the only constant in life” - Heraclitus. Flow with change instead of fighting against the current of the river.
Social Awareness Strategies:
Greet people by name.
People like their name being said (but not a weird amount). Plus it helps with memory.
Watch body language.
Watch for synchronicity. Body language is subconscious and the best indicator for how someone is feeling. Many studies say it accounts for up to 50-70% of communication.
Make timing everything.
Timing. Is. Everything. Even the best intentioned action, when mistimed, will go badly.
Develop a back-pocket question.
Have engaging conversation starters on hand.
Don't take notes at meetings.
Bradberry argues that you can miss body language if you're too engaged in note taking. You do you.
Plan ahead for social gatherings.
OR work through your shit so you don't have to plan around your social anxiety...
Clear away the clutter.
Be engaged in the conversation.
Live in the moment.
Be present.
Go on a 15-minute tour.
Bradberry argues that this will help you notice others' emotions. Or you could just do that regardless.
Watch EQ at the movies.
Practice the art of listening.
Harder than it sounds. My therapist once told me I was a bad listener (in nicer words). He was right. True listening means that you need to work through your issues so that you don't have judgment or barriers to actually hearing the other person.
Go people watching.
Understand the rules of the culture game.
Test for accuracy.
If you ask a question and the person's response and their body language is at odds, ask another question to verify. This gives them space to answer truthfully if they want to. Beware of being pushy and respect their boundaries if they don't want to talk.
Step into their shoes.
Seek the whole picture.
Catch the mood of the room.
Relationship Management Strategies:
Be open and be curious.
A motto for life.
Enhance your natural communication style.
Or work through your issues that prevent you from communicating effectively.
Avoid giving mixed signals.
People can tell when you aren't being completely honest. Might as well be honest. But be nice about it too.
Remember the little things that pack a punch.
Don't forget shit that matters! Relationships are built off of micro interactions, not occasional large ones. John Gottman, a famous couples therapist, says that good relationships are built off of a 5:1 positive to negative interaction ratio. Hopefully it's even more than that.
Take feedback well.
You aren't perfect. Surprise! So learn to take feedback and not be offended.
Build trust.
Have an "open-door" policy.
Increased accessibility helps relationships but don't sacrifice your own well-being for it.
Only get mad on purpose.
Or work through your anger so that it doesn't exist. Very, very few people respond well to anger. Possibly no one.
Don't avoid the inevitable.
Don't avoid hard conversations either. They will just get harder.
Acknowledge the other person's feelings.
And honor them! Their feelings are their reality. It doesn't mean that you have to agree with them, but don't be a dick either. You can validate and accept their emotions even if they don't match your perspective.
Complement the other person's emotions or situations.
Validate, validate, validate.
When you care, show it.
Duh. If you have issues showing you care, work through that shit. Your relationships won't go well if you keep that up. The degree to which you are vulnerable is the degree to which you can be close to another human being. And to yourself.
Explain your decisions, don't just make them.
Transparency and openness build healthy relationships.
Make your feedback direct and constructive.
Align your intention with your impact.
SO important! If your impact doesn't match your intentions, then you need to check yourself. Intentions aren't everything unfortunately. Know your audience and know yourself and why you might be coming across badly.
Offer a "fix-it" statement during a broken conversation.
Focus on collaborative solutions, not playing the blame game. Work as a team, not as enemies.
Tackle a tough conversation.
Don't avoid tough conversations! They only get harder with larger scale impacts. Address them immediately.
Not bad suggestions overall. Better suggestion? Work through your shit so you don't get triggered at all and are in a state of constant peace. Take everything as information. Learn from everything. Don't get down on yourself but instead choose to learn and change for the better from each mistake. Choose who you become and become the person you want to be, a person who you can be proud of every moment of every day. Don't accept anything interrupting your peace as only you can choose to interrupt your peace, no matter what anyone else says or does. Make your peace immutable.
Good info!