What on earth is emotional intelligence?

Daniel Goldman, psychologist and best-selling author of the masterpiece Emotional Intelligence, defines emotional intelligence as the ability to read our own and others’ emotions and use this to our advantage. 

The statistics on the importance of cultivating emotional intelligence are compelling: studies show that emotional intelligence far surpasses the importance of IQ and experience and has been proven to be 85% responsible for financial success.

But do we know, in a practical sense, how to harness its power?

I know I did not!

The environment I grew up in (albeit my norm) was often fueled with contradictions, alternating highs and lows, and frequent “emotional hi-jacks.” Sometimes it was others that would lose their ability to act in an emotionally-intelligent way and, often, it was me. In the old country Greek household that I grew up in, little was known about consciousness, or healthy expression of emotions and needs. My beautiful, charismatic, “salt of the earth” parents grew up in the aftermath of the Second World War, and concepts like self-awareness and emotional intelligence were foreign concepts not aligned with their survival needs.

Hence, I too, adopted their approach. Whenever negative feelings would surface, I would handle them with a dose of confrontation, an ounce of criticism, two pounds of defensiveness, and several door slams and silent treatments.

Emotional intelligence, although part of popular culture today, remains a foreign concept to many of us. However, I finally recognized the impact of not being able to make intelligent use of my own emotions. When I became a mother, I invested quite a bit of time in understanding emotional intelligence and how I could cultivate it, in order to improve my relationships and, hence, my life.

Here are the biggest ideas I dissected from the experts on the topic and from my humble personal experience.

1. What drives our emotions is often hidden deep in the unconscious part of ourselves, until we choose to bring to the surface experiences we have swept under the rug into the light. Until then, we will act on impulse, without quite knowing why we sometimes “put our foot in our mouth!”
2. When an experience in the present moment touches a “raw spot” from a past experience (although often outside of the realm of our awareness) it will trigger a cascade of events, wherein our nervous system will work with several other body systems to protect us from the perceived threat. This is our fight or flight response at work, known as “an emotional hi-jack.”
3. When our fight or flight response gets triggered, the executive-functioning part of our brain switches off, and we operate from a temporary cognitive and perceptual impairment.
4. Our behavior is driven by our emotions. It does not matter how high our IQ is, how many degrees we have, how well we have done in life, or how successful we are. Our behavior will not be effective unless we figure out what we feel, why we feel the way we do, and then actively use our resources to intercept the cataclysmic impact of negative feelings. The great thing is that we have the power to do this!

The next time you find yourself in a situation when you feel that your emotions are getting the best of you, you can ask yourself my favorite step-by-step list of questions to ensure you are making intelligent use of your emotions:

1. Ask yourself, “What am I feeling?”

The key here is to make sure you use feelings only. When we are emotionally charged because a situation has triggered a negative experience from our implicit memory, we tend to attach the words “I feel” to what is really a story. For example, “I feel that my spouse is lying,” or “I feel that I do not deserve this.” Stories keep us and our nervous system hostage and use our valuable resources for defense and not for healthy growth and restoration. There are four basic emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, and fear. Understanding which descriptive feelings are triggered in us is extremely valuable in our ability to choose our own state and, therefore, our chosen behavior, like our ability to make a connection with another in spite of our differences.

2. Then ask yourself, “What about this situation makes me feel this way?”

I find that in order to answer this question, I need data that only the executive part of my brain, (the pre-frontal cortex,) has access to.

When we get emotionally hi-jacked, our metabolic energy gets redirected from our thinking brain to the large muscle groups which shut down essential functions. Therefore, by asking this question, we are able to turn our executive brain back on, redirecting our metabolic energy to where we really need it to be.

Whatever negative data our brain has dug up relating to the experience we are having in the present moment, this negative experience is not in the here and now.

But it is important to honor and bring to light whatever past experiences are still showing up for us in our present as a positive step towards letting them go.

3. The next question is: “How much of this is the truth and how much of it is a story?”

Most of the time, our pain and suffering come from the narrative we lend to life situations and not the situations themselves. Has a friend or significant other ever stood you up? In such instances, most of the time there is a legitimate reason why someone was not able to keep their commitment to us. What gets us upset and unable to process the event in a way that keeps us in the state we need to be in to make good decisions is when we translate an event such as this into the idea that “we are obviously not important to that person.” Deciphering truths from stories is a powerful technique to regain control of our emotions so we can make an intelligent decision on how we want to handle the situation.

4. The next question is: “What is within my control to do about this situation?”

Instead of waiting for the other shoe to drop when someone does something that rubs us the wrong way, we have the option of focusing on where our power can be found, which is in what is within our control.

Knowing what we feel, why, and what we need from the other person and explaining that in a calm and factual manner allows us to move in a positive trajectory in any important relationship in our life.

5. Finally, we need to ask ourselves, “What have I learned about myself because of this situation and what will I do differently in the future?”

For energy conservation, most of our responses to life situations are automatic. Negative emotions are just part of life. Pausing, assessing the reason why we got triggered in the first place, and choosing the pearls of wisdom any challenging experience gave us, actually helps us cut out weeds from experiences of the past and cultivate new flowers in the garden we call our life experience.

A fellow Greek by the name of Plato said it best: “The first and greatest victory is to conquer yourself.”

We have no control over how and where we were raised, what tools we garnered from our early years, or how our brain was sculpted by our experiences up until this moment.

The greatest part about emotional intelligence is that cultivating it is 100% within our control.

All it takes is a commitment to the diligent practice of seeing our emotions for what they are and taking the powerful stance of befriending them as a potent antidote to the toxic impact of fear and pain that is the biggest obstacle to the complete well-being of our species.