When thinking of Emotional Intelligence what comes to mind? How can the lack of it affect your life and the lives of those around you? Can it be taught and reinforced? How destructive can it be in a person’s life? All these questions come to mind when I think of Emotional Intelligence. Self-reflecting on my personal life especially at a younger age, I can see how my lack of emotional intelligence affected personal experiences that could have been managed differently.
Most of the world witnessed what happened with Will Smith on live TV with Chris Rock just a few weeks ago. For starters, I have always respected Will Smith and what he has stood for as a human being, not only as an extremely talented actor. It’s easy to look at the video and criticized and judge him for his actions or lack thereof. What would you have done? How would have you reacted? How did Chris Rock react? How would you react if you were Chris Rock?
The emotions that were running through his mind must have been overwhelming. His heart was racing and beating out of his chest, his blood pressure was bounding against the walls of his blood vessels, and his judgment was clouded and thus acted on internalized emotions with a physiological response.
I must admit that I had no recollection of what emotional intelligence was while growing up as a teenager. I was the person that lost complete control of my emotions and thus caused unnecessary heartache to my parents, sisters, girlfriends, family, and friends. Looking back in time, I can vividly remember the experiences and how I lost complete control of situations because of my lack of emotional intelligence. I was completely naive to its importance and how a person’s life could be held hostage by their own emotions. It's easy to test the concept of emotional intelligence on hypothetical’s and what-if scenarios, you might even engage a physiological response, but the truth of the matter is that even those with high emotional intelligence can fall victim too.
The best way to solve a problem is to break it down to its simplest form.
Let’s use an example, situation X happens to you. X can be defined as any situation that will elicit a psychological and physiological response. Everyone’s X could be different and unique to the individual. A person’s X could be humiliated in front of family and friends and another person’s situation X could be walking in on their partner cheating on them or getting slapped at the Grammys. Now that we have defined X for a situation, who are you, the person that situation X is happening to? For starters, you must be self-aware of who you are, self-aware to know and recognize your own emotions. The good emotions, the bad emotions, or the indifferent emotions. Being self-aware is critical to the process of your emotional intelligence. How are you going to know how to triage your emotions if you can’t differentiate between them? If you are self-aware of your emotions, what are you going to do in situation X? Your emotions are now running wild, your heart is racing, your blood pressure is bounding against your blood vessels, your hands and feet get clammy, you are now in a physiological fight or flight response. Back in the day, our ancestors were chased by lions and bears, you wanted to be in the fight or flight response to survive. Luckily for us today we aren’t chased by wild animals every time we leave our house. The flight or fight response is a psychological response that occurs in our brain that triggers a physiological body response. What are you going to do now? All these raw emotions are banging on the walls of your brain, your heart is about to beat out of your chest, what are you going to do next? Hopefully, you are capable of being self-aware of your emotions and able to differentiate between them, now it’s time to self-regulate. Self-regulation, controlling or redirecting your disruptive emotions and impulses by adapting rationally to the challenging X situation. This is where most, to include myself, have fallen short. Self-regulating yourself when your mind and body want to fight or flight is the truest test of your emotional intelligence.
We have evolved as humans with certain instinctual characteristics that have saved us as a civilization, but those responses do not all translate to our daily lives today. Learning how to be consciously self-aware of our emotions and being able to self-regulate ourselves is truly a superpower, one that anyone can practice daily.
