Emotional Intelligence is all about differentiating and evaluating emotions. It is important to understand that neither all negative emotions can be bad for you nor all positive emotions resulting from bad deeds can be good for you.
Emotional Intelligence
- Recognize the existence of emotions in each interaction
- Understand our emotional strengths and shortcomings
- Use the core values to rewrite the emotion blueprint
- Communicate to convey a sense of balance
What is emotional awareness?
Knowing and understanding the feelings present in oneself and others.
Emotional Awareness and Emotional Intelligence
- Emotional awareness = knowing about feelings
- Emotional intelligence= manage the emotions or behaving appropriately to the environment.
Example
- Emotional awareness is sensing one’s or others’ anger.
- Emotional intelligence is calming oneself or reducing others’ anger.
Why is emotional awareness important?
- You can make yourself aware of the situation and become emotionally intelligent.
- Being emotionally aware and intelligent makes you feel: In control – Confident –Fearless -Relaxed
Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT)
- It is largely our thinking about events that lead to emotional and behavioral upset
- Identify self-defeating thoughts
- Challenge these feelings
- Replace them with productive beliefs
Thoughts Create Feelings – Feelings Create Behaviour – Behaviour Reinforces thoughts
What are my beliefs when –
- I fail a test…
- My mother scolds me..
- I am tensed for an exam..
- I am frustrated with loads of work..
- I am given household work that I don’t want to do..
Also, keep in mind –
- Each one of us have different beliefs
- They are based on our own life and the life and experience of the person we are interacting with, eg our Teacher, Our mother, Our elder sister or a neighbour
- We cannot change the speaker’s belief… only our reaction to them
Our ABC of emotions
Activating – Events – Beliefs – Consequence
What are beliefs?
- As deep-rooted as values, they are our opinions about society, life, and people:
‘Girls don’t have so much strength’ - ‘Girls are emotionally very weak’
- ‘Elders in the family should bot be questioned’
- ‘Boys should earn the living in the house’
- ‘Girls should not step out after dark’
- ‘Boys don’t cry’
- ‘I bring only shame to my family’
What do these beliefs trigger in us?
- Feeling of guilt
- Feeling of despair…all is lost
- Feeling of extreme anger
- Feeling of depression… I can do nothing right
- Feeling of extreme sadness… No one cares for me
- Feeling of hatred towards someone
- Feeling of helplessness
- General negativity
When we are thinking like this what are we doing –
We are reacting badly
Our behaviour and actions reflect it!
Shouting, Crying etc.. Reflect this
Change the ABC of emotions –
- Activating – Events – Beliefs – Consequence
- Activating – Events – Changed Beliefs – New Consequence
Handling emotions – Step by Step
- Step 1: Listen carefully. To the facts and the feelings
- Step 2: Take a deep breath. Be quiet.
- Step 3: Pinpoint the belief (in your mind)
- Step 4: How are you feeling about this belief?
- Step 5: Address concern for the speaker’s belief in an even tone of voice. Remember to breathe deep and be calm
“You may be right, but…” “I see how you feel…what I feel is..” “I am sorry you felt this way, but..” - Step 6: Outline your action: “Its tough when people think this way…What I will do now is…” “This is what I will do now..” “Let me do this”
What happens when we are emotionally intelligent? We gain a sense of balance and then others take us more seriously. But… is it always easy to think through when the situation comes up? Why not? What must we do to ensure that we remain emotionally intelligent most of the time?
- Keep Breathing…. Deep breathing
- Console our inner self- tell ourselves it’s OK, we will get over this
- Check our self talk. Are we creating negative beliefs that are not there at all?
- Change our self talk to be more empowering