What is Emotional Intelligence? It is the state of having control of all your emotions. On the contrary, if your emotions are controlling you, you will act irrationally. However, we can master all our negative emotions by learning how they serve us rather than enslave us and become emotionally intelligent.
To understand this better, let us look into a situation when we feel hurt. How many of us have experienced a form of hurt? How did we deal with it? When we are hurt, we need to look deeper into why we are hurt. Benjamin Franklin said, “Those things that hurt, instruct.” The hidden message behind hurt is simple, it is when something of someone hasn’t met your expectations and thus you are hurt. Being emotionally intelligent in this case would be by realizing you haven’t lost anything. Maybe the other person didn’t even realize the impact of their actions and they might never unless you take a step and communicate it to them. Being emotionally intelligent also means that when someone is explaining their actions, you would understand their perspective and explain accordingly.
The thing is, our individual expectations are different and we get hurt based on that. However, if we try and understand each other through communication, our expectations would be understood too. This doesn’t mean any one person needs to change, but rather we all will be more acknowledging towards our actions and their impact towards others.
Another case is when we feel anger. Anger stimulates the production of adrenaline in our bodies and we then experience frustration and irritability. Anger is nothing but a shield, we feel angry when certain standards aren’t being meant. Most of our anger comes with a ‘drama mind’ that will do stuff to make the problem bigger than it really is. To overcome this, we need to wait so as to enlarge the interval between stimulus and response. Give it time before responding when something made you angry, go for a walk, do anything to think and reflect. By doing this our mind will no longer be the ‘drama mind which is the impulsive mind and thus our response would be more intentional. Remember to become more flexible and change your viewpoint towards things. Change your approach, take care of your frustrations using a sensible approach.
Guilt is another complicated emotion that tells you to rise above your expectations and do something about it. However, when guilt is not handled well can turn into resentment. Resentment is a toxic emotion and can do much greater harm to those not willing to forgive. Forgiveness is essential, for you to get that emotional closure. It is a liberating experience that sets you free. Take a second to analyze this. So if you’re still holding a grudge, you’ve not fully accepted the reality and are still holding on to negative energy towards something or someone.
Every single one of us has weaknesses and we do our best we can do based on where we at in our level of consciousness and humanity. So when someone has hurt you please remember that maybe they were doing their best that they knew how to do based on where they are in their journey through life. Forgiving them is a gift you give yourself. Anger and blame are the biggest obstacles to peace of mind. In order to eliminate them, we need to learn how to forgive. Forgive our parents, forgive people from your relationships, forgive everyone else and most importantly forgive yourself.
Know your emotions, analyses them from different perspectives, and learn how to control them. When we intelligently respond to our emotions we can find the hidden messages about what that emotion is trying to communicate with us.
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