Emotional Intelligence

Counting to five before you respond. Imagining how what you’re about to say will affect others.

These are good tricks to help you develop classic social skills, like not saying the words you know you’ll come to regret. Or: maybe you don’t know you’ll regret the words until after you say them.

What I’m touching on is often called emotional intelligence.

Interesting choice of phrasing there. From a certain perspective, emotions and intelligence seem unrelated, so calling someone emotionally intelligent seems like a strange way to put it. Yet, it’s obvious that you can’t get any real thinking done if your emotions are in the driver’s seat all the time.

What psychologists mean by emotional intelligence isn’t trying to suppress those emotions, though. It’s much more about not allowing the emotions to control your behavior, so you act rationally most of the time instead.

You need to feel the things you feel, and you need to understand that those feelings belong inside you! They’re useful signals telling you things about your situation, not dire anxiety-needles trying to kill you with cortisol.

Feeling those things is fine. Acting on a feeling before you think about what you’re about to do is the thing to avoid. This is where emotional intelligence steps in.

So, it’s being intelligent about your emotions. It’s having a productive relationship between your reasoning and your intuition.

I think it’s about even more, too.

Emotional intelligence means actually allowing yourself to experience that full range of emotions, even when things are a little dark. This means playing depression judo from time to time:

You need to ride with those dark emotions for a moment before trying to redirect your mindset. You almost have to be sneaky. Getting from the darker stuff to the more positive stuff can take some time, but I’ve learned not to rush the process, or it won’t work.

People aren’t intelligent about their emotions if they hide from them. These can be sad or dark feelings, or they can be knee-jerk emotions that make you respond to a situation foolishly.

Regardless, there’s a tightrope to walk, and a tug-of-war of opposing forces trying to mess you up all the time. One side pulls you toward burying or hiding from your emotions, while the other side yanks you toward acting instantly and rashly.

How do you, dear reader, balance these two forces?