Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence means the capacity to reflect on and understand your emotional life. Because the clearer you can be about your emotions — what they are and how they work — the better you’ll be able to manage the most difficult and painful ones. What follows are four simple questions you can ask yourself anytime you’re about to make an action. They’re good practice for increasing your emotional intelligence in the long-term. 1. What are the facts? When emotions run high, we tend to gloss over important factual details of our situation and environment because we’re so consumed with how we feel. As a result, we tend to miss some fairly obvious causes of our distress. Recognizing the important role that time-of-day, for example, plays in our mood helps us be more empathetic and compassionate with ourselves when we’re upset. 2. What’s my emotional dashboard telling me? Many people don’t understand their emotions very well because their model for emotions — their beliefs about what emotions are and how they work — is faulty. Learn to see your emotions like lights on your car’s dashboard. When it comes to both your emotions and your car dashboard, the feeling isn’t the problem; in fact, it’s just trying to help. And simply avoiding it (or “fixing” it) just sets you up for more trouble down the road. The next time you’re feeling anxious or sad or guilty or any other painful feeling, try to see these emotions as lights on your dashboard. 3. What do I really want? The fundamental emotional formula of our lives: Event + Story = Emotion. If we’re honest, nobody’s vision for the good life is simply the absence of pain. We all know, deep down, that happiness doesn’t come from the mere absence of suffering. The good life is about growth and learning and exploration. It’s about figuring out the most important things and going after them with everything we’ve got. In a word, it’s about values. In the long-run, emotional intelligence acknowledges that life is about much, much more than how we happen to feel in a given moment. All the complexity and nuance of our mental habits and emotional range are meant to live in service to our values, our aspirations, the things we really want. The next time you’re upset, take a breath, hit the pause button, and ask yourself four questions: What are the facts? What’s my emotional dashboard telling me? What do I really want?