3 Tips to Kick-Start Your Emotional Intelligence
“Emotional intelligence” seems like a big, vague term.
To put it in practical terms, it’s knowing your emotions and having a way to manage them for your best health and growth.
I don’t know about you, but I did not learn this basic skill when I was growing up. Rather, I learned to bottle up my emotions and pretend they didn’t exist or affect me.
I ended up with a nearly constant lump in my throat, the effort to repress all those unfelt and unprocessed feelings.
It took me a lot of heartache. and a lot of broken and painful and unhealthy relationships, to change that.
Through a process of self-discovery, I learned how to release the old feelings and a new way to identify, process, and let go of new feelings as they arose.
I love Jill Bolte Taylor‘s 90-second rule – that a feeling in a natural state arises and passes away in 90 seconds. It’s only when we shove them down, deny them, or otherwise turn away from them that they fester and follow us until we face them, if we ever do.
Watch a child – their feelings arise, are felt, expressed, and then pass through. Like a storm. Like a wave. If we could all follow this example. We’d be washed clean.
How do you start? Here are three simple suggestions.
- Pay Attention. Instead of turning away, turn toward. Become willing. Curious. Open to what your feelings are telling you. Feelings are data, information. They tell you how you are responding to life and people and events.
- Learn to Identify Your Feelings. Listen to the message. Identify what you’re feeling. Let yourself have the feelings instead of pushing them away. I thought my feelings would overwhelm me. I had to get help to process through a lifetime of unprocessed feelings. Sometimes we need help, and that’s a good thing.
- Be Kind to Yourself. Many of us learn to push down, deny, or ignore our feelings. It can take time and acceptance to begin to let our feelings back in. Give yourself the time and space you need to reacquaint yourself with your feelings. Listen to yourself, and be kind to yourself as you go through the process.
Today I love to talk about emotional intelligence. Even more, I love to help people become aware, learn about, accept, process, and let go of their feelings. Once we let go of the back log, we can learn how to get closer to that 90-second rule.
I believe that if more people had more emotional intelligence, we’d have a more peaceful world. Knowing our own feelings and having a way to process them is revolutionary. Because so few people actually have this skill.
It seems simple, and it seems unlikely, but I truly believe more emotional intelligence could change the world. So it’s my passion. It’s my burning interest. It’s my mission. And it’s the basis of my own health.
Owning my feelings, having a method for processing and managing them, supports my emotional health, but also my mental, physical, and spiritual health.
And I believe that if more people had these skills, they would feel better about themselves, about their relationships, and about their place in the world.
Working on our emotional intelligence is hard work, but it holds magical potential. It is the genie’s bottle, the magic wand, the pot at the end of the rainbow. Change your emotions, change your life, change your perspective, change the world.
Photo by Taylor Smith on Unsplash
