Journey of Emotional Intelligence and Compassion
Perhaps, one of the most important realization I had during COVID is that Mental Health is a thing! Having been through different phases during the pandemic from being lazy to exercising a lot, over sleeping to sleeping difficulties, working long hours to lack of motivation, loneliness, restlessness, anxiety etc., I developed an interest to understand the importance of Emotional Intelligence and the role it plays not just in coping difficult situations, but also to get the best out of us in terms of personal effectiveness and inter-personal skills.
In the book Emotional Intelligence, Daniel explains why we face the emotional problems the way we do today. It was fascinating to learn how the roots of anxiety goes back to the times of hunter-gatherers and how essential it was for them to keep them safe from the threats that surrounded them in the jungle. So, Anxiety is actually an important survival mechanism and is needed to keep ourselves safe. The issue comes with whether we are feeling anxious about real threats (or) perceived threats where it triggers unnecessary worry. In comparison with our ancestors, we are living in a place with greater safety for life, but we also new problems like information overload. As we progress, we adapt to these changes and they become biological part of our species. Emotional Intelligence is relevant to every part of our life from personal & inter-personal effectiveness. In the long run, EQ plays an exponentially bigger role in success & happiness than IQ. While IQ allows you to be smarter, EQ empowers us to know our emotions, manage them, know other’s emotions and navigate through them in order to achieve personal effectiveness and build effective relationships.
Being aware of our emotions in the moment is crucial to handle them more effectively. By being mindful about our thoughts as they happen, we can empower ourselves with the ability to transform our actions. By knowing that you are feeling negative, naming the feeling & articulating what’s going on, we will be able to think more rationally and counter those negative emotions. These negative emotional like Anger, Worry are better handled in their early stages. The more we ruminate, the stronger they get and the harder it will be for us to handle. In their primitive stages, countering them with positive outlooks would help and if it gets to a later stage, distracting from them by indulging in self-care would be the best to deescalate slowly. When not actively dealing with negative emotions, its important to nourish our positive emotions (like motivation, hope & optimism) to continue to grow. To hold motivation all the way through our journey of accomplishing the task, Its important to be mindful about what we are signing up for, validating that there is a strong motivation behind it & to internalize it. Hope comes from a feeling that we will be able to accomplish the task and often boosts our confidence. However, its important to be realistic in our expectations to ensure we don’t loose hope in our journey. Optimism is approaching life with a positive outlook, be more future-looking, believing that we are moving towards a better tomorrow & everything will be alright at the end.
From an Interpersonal Standpoint, Emotional Intelligence plays in the form of Empathy. Empathy by definition is being able to understand and reciprocate the feelings of the other person. The feeling of Emotional Attunement, similar to one of emotionally oscillating in sync, gives a very connected feeling to the person sharing their emotions. This also contributes to inspiring people & building stronger & more meaningful relationships. The feeling of empathy also plays a role in keeping up our morality. Knowing what the other person might feel when we do something might stop us from doing something inappropriate like pulling jokes on character that might hurt the other person’s self-confidence. Even in a less emotional setup, Empathy can still be a very relevant tool in a interpersonal setup. Imagine a team designing a phone or a computer and how much they need to think of it from the consumer’s shoes to be able to build a useful product that appeals to them. Think about a report we are generating for our Boss and how effective it would be if we spend few seconds on looking at that request from their lens, understanding where they are coming from, what view would be most helpful, ask clarifying questions before jumping into the work. More broadly, Empathy is also a building block for Compassion. While Empathy empowers us with understanding what the other person is going through, its Compassion that brings action to those feelings to alleviate the other person’s suffering. Jeff Weiner articulates it very elegantly saying “Compassion = Empathy + Action“.
The world needs a lot of compassion and it presents us with opportunities to show compassion all the time. Can we conduct our lives mindfully so we can capture & create opportunities to show Compassion? Also, given its generally easier to build these into character at an early age, can we all champion for a better schooling on Emotional Intelligence for our children?
