What if I told you that a lot of the things, you’re feeling are not exactly what you think they are? In many cases, you’re jumping to conclusions in terms of identifying your own emotions.
I know this sound crazy because after all everybody is feels emotions and their entitled to them, right? Well, you are confusing two things. You’re confusing the fact that everybody is entitled to their own emotions. Nobody can argue this.
If you’re feeling certain things or you’re experiencing a rush of different emotions, you are entitled to that because you are equal like everybody else.
Everybody’s looking at the same set of stimuli and everybody's welcome to process that information and walk away with different emotions. That’s okay. That’s natural, that’s parts of the game.
What you’re not entitled to is to absorb yourself of the responsibility of dealing with your emotions. This is where a lot of people fail. I really can’t blame them because 9 times out of 10 when confronted with any kind of toxic emotions, people would rather do things the exact same way they’ve done things before.
You’ve grown accustomed to intercepting certain signals a certain way. You become mentally lazy. Sure, in the beginning you chose one interpretation over another, but the more you repeat it the more it becomes engraved until you reach a point where you feel that this is just part of your personality.
You might even think that this is just the natural objective interpretation of the things you are seeing and feeling. Absolutely wrong. This is not objective, it’s always subjective. You can always choose a different interpretation.
This is where honesty comes in. Are you looking at the big picture? Are you coming up with a logical and rational reading of the stimuli that you are perceiving or are you just going through the motions, are you letting your emotions get the better of you because you’re just lazy?
You’ve been reacting this way for a long time, and you really don’t want to put in the time, effort and energy to make a change, that’s a choice. Nobody’s pointing a gun at your head and forcing you to respond in the worst way possible. Emotionally, nobody found that, you’re not being forced to do this, but you do it again and again.
Kind of like a rat pushing a lever to get a little treat during a scientific experiment. You can choose to respond to your emotions in a vastly different way by simply choosing to be honest.
First of all, you need to be honest about the whole stimuli that your perceiving is you looking at the whole picture. Second, you have to look at how you’re interpreting it. Are there no other logical interpretations that can be supported by same set of facts?
If there are, why are you not using those interpretation? Make this process work for you and it all turns on how honest you are with yourself.
Learn how the power of honesty can give you emotional freedom and free you from the range of toxic emotions that hold you back and drag you don’t form the kind of success that you otherwise deserve.
Life is beautiful. Claim that reality by increasing your emotional intelligence starting today.
Is Empathy Over Blown and Exaggerated?
American media makes a big deal of the human trait of empathy. We are reminded at every turn to always step in the shoes of our fellow people and look at the situation from their perspective.
In fact, empathy is being kicked around so often in mass media that it runs the risk of being rendered meaningless. The more people repeat it, the more clueless people are about what it really means. It really is quite sad because empathy is necessary for emotional intelligence.
There are no two ways about it, this is an inescapable fact. If you want to become a more effective emotional person and be in touch with your emotional intelligence and make it work for you, you have to know what empathy is and how to use it.
Empathy means being able to look at any situation from the perspective of people in reacting with that situation. You may not necessarily like these people, they may not have anything in common with you, but it doesn’t matter.
What matters is that you are able to step out of the crushing gravitational pull of your own ego and pride to step into their shoes.
As you can imagine, this requires a tremendous amount of reprograming because that’s not how people wire themselves. Most of us look at the world in selfish terms. We think the world revolves around us.
In fact, too many of us think that once we die, the world dies with us because we’re no longer there to witness what’s going on. You know that that’s a lie. You don’t have to be a philosophy major in college to understand the concept of absolute truth.
The world existed before you, it exists now and will continue to exist long after you’re gone. That’s reality. How does this play out its terms of logic? Well, if you see a cat, it doesn’t really matter if it has stripes
or spots or has many colors or only one. Once you understand the form of a cat, you know that cats exist.
The same goes with the world. If you can understand the concept of reality, then you know that reality exists whether you’re there to observe it or not.
The problem is a lot of people assume that they are the center of their universe. This is why empathy merely gets lip service. It’s very hard for us to stay away from the gravitational pull of our pride and egos. You would rather imagine that everything turns around us.
This is why it’s really important to master the art of empathy. Ironically enough, to become a more empathetic person, you must first become more emotionally self-aware. In other words, to be selfless, you must first become selfish and self-absorbed.
Examine yourself. Are the emotions that you’re feeling what you think they are? Are you able to effectively communicate these emotions in an objectively clear way? Once you have answered these and other fundamental questions, can you make serious progress when it comes to empathy?
Make no mistake, if you want to become a better leader, more sexually attractive to members of the opposite sex, become a persuasive person all around and otherwise live a more fulfilling and effective life, empathy is part of the picture.
The good news is you only need to click here to get the information you need to maximize your emotional intelligence.
Here’s Why Emotion Intelligence Is as Crucial as IQ For Personal Success
For the longest time, there is the idea that people who make a big deal of emotional intelligence are simply low or mediocre IQ people.
In the minds of a lot of people, those who make a big deal of their emotional skills and sociability are essentially compensating for the fact that they have low or mediocre IQ. If only things were that simple.
The truth is, when you look at any organization, chances are high that the head honcho or the prime movers and shakers of that establishment are not at the top of the IQ chart for that organization.
In fact, in many cases, the most progressive and successful organizations have CEOs that have IQs way below the smartest people in their organizations. The smart individuals, it turns out, are specialists.
Either they work in the IT department, the planning department and other areas, but when it comes to the actual operation of raw executive control of the organization, these individuals tend to have lower IQs.
What’s going on? You have to look at emotional intelligence. Success doesn’t just involve figuring out what to do. It doesn’t just turn on whether you know how to do things or not.
Instead, a large part of success turns on whether you can really manage people who are often opposed to each other towards a common goal.
You must be able to do this day after day, week after week, month after month. You must be able to scale this in the future and you must be able to communicate this clearly not only to your team members, but also to people outside your team.
Interestingly enough, this skill set cannot be explained by IQ. This is where emotional intelligence comes in.
Not only do you have self-aware to the point that you know what your feelings are, but you are able to communicate your feelings to others in such a way that you’ve become more persuasive, and you are able to remind them about common goals.
This is how you can tell whether a leader can motivate and inspire people around them to produce better and better results.
People with low emotional intelligence who are thrust into leadership positions often use fear, intimidation, or grotesque and cheap rewards to get what they need. Eventually, that gets old. That organization would stagnate if it doesn’t fall apart.
Emotional intelligence is crucial to any organization that is aiming for the fences. Make no mistake, if you’re trying to hit that home run, you need to be led by somebody who not only knows how say the right things to the right people in the right time to produce the right results, but also who is able to do this in many different contexts. That person must also be able to plan out the consequences of such emotional signals.
Understand the importance of emotional intelligence because if you want to be more successful in any area of your life, you need to confront this issuer and you need to master emotional intelligence.
It’s not as hard as you think. It is not complicated, it is not Greek, and it is not written in computer codes. You just have to know what you’re doing and what you’re dealing with.
Unfortunately, so many people think in habitual terms. They think that once they perceive certain things that they can respond emotionally a certain way. This is why they continue to struggle and don’t get the results that they otherwise have coming to them.
If you want to maximize your emotional intelligence, you need the right guidance. This book will set you on the right path.
Forget about blog posts that you’ve read and the webinars on YouTube that you’ve seen, start with a blank slate. Start with what you know.
Can You Really Improve Your Emotional Intelligence?
There’s been a long running debate in the world of behavioral and organizational psychologists regarding emotional intelligence. The issue? Whether emotional intelligence exists or not.
A consensus of experts thinks that EI is a real thing. The big argument centers on what it is and where it comes from. Some people are convinced that emotional intelligence is simply just an extension of your personality. That’s the problem if you’re trying to improve emotional intelligence.
If it’s just part of your personality, then it’s not much different from saying that you are just born with that emotional intelligence or you’re not. This is very depressing. Study after study has shown that emotional intelligence plays a big role in overall personal success. It works hand and hand with IQ.
It doesn’t hurt to be born with high IQ. Don’t get me wrong, this will definitely open a lot of doors for you, but you cannot rely on it alone. IQ can only go so far. You may be a high IQ individual but if you’re lazy, there would be less opportunities for you.
You may be able to grasp otherwise complicated concepts very quickly but if you’re unable to communicate with your emotions effectively, this inability is going to stymie your success.
IQ does not exist in a vacuum. It really doesn’t. It has to coordinate with other very important human skill set. Emotional intelligence is one of them.
The problem with positioning emotional intelligence as essentially arising out of personality is that it becomes random. You’re left with the conclusion that either you’re born with emotional intelligence or you’re not.
This flies in the face of evidence. Why? A lot of people who start out emotionally awkward or even socially incompetent become very smooth polished and effective when they find themselves in social settings.
In other words, they chose to increase their emotional intelligence they chose to hone their skills. They did not wait for their built own personality-based emotional intelligence to kick in. They don’t wait around and took matters into their own hands.
They know that they have issues dealing with other people, so they got the right information, and they worked on this trait over and over again over an extended period of time until they got it right. In other words, building up emotional intelligence, if you look at it as an ability instead of some sort of built in, in born extension of your personality, is very much like working out in the gym.
Do you remember the first time you hit the gym? It was probably hard on your body because you haven’t worked out before. When you hit the bench-press and you put 50, 60, 100 pounds on your system, it felt like murder.
But after two weeks of continuously hitting the weights, it got easier and easier and eventually you reach the point where you can scale up the weights. Now you’re probably lifting a lot more pounds than when you started. The same applies to emotional intelligence.
At first, it’s going to be downright scary. In fact, in certain cases it may seem downright pointless. But the more you keep at it and the better results that you get, the more you stick to it and the better you get at it. You create an upward spiral.
To do yourself a big favor, understand that emotional intelligence is something that you can improve. It’s not something that is set in stone, it is not something that some people are born with, and most are not. Get those ideas out of your head.
It is something that you can improve as long as you choose to. Click here to get an awesome blueprint so as to make emotional intelligence maximize your chances of success in all areas of life.
Emotional Awareness
Emotional intelligence, at the very least, enables you to be aware of other people's emotions. This means you are able to correctly identify the range of emotions that they are feeling.
This is what makes other people's emotions very tricky because we're not confronted or faced with black and white situations.
When you look at somebody, you can't just say that that person's angry. Usually, the person has a range of emotions. Maybe you're looking at somebody, and they're feeling apprehensive, a little fearful, and quite shocked. Other people would have a different mix of emotions.
People who have high emotional intelligence don't gloss over or dismiss these secondary or tertiary emotions. Correct emotional identification often boils down to getting a clear understanding of the mix of emotions somebody is feeling.
It's so much easier and simpler to just say that a person is shocked and call it a day. Unfortunately, you're not really fully understanding that person if you don't bother to look at other emotions that may be at play.
Another key component of emotional awareness is your own ability to be emotionally honest with yourself. In other words, you have to be able to read your own emotions, and this has to be a complete and honest objective assessment.
In other words, you can't just assume that since you're subjectively feeling a certain way, then that is the absolute truth. On a purely subjective basis, that is absolutely correct.
After all, if you're feeling angry or upset, you have every right to feel that way. You obviously should know yourself enough to clearly label what you're feeling at any given time.
The problem here is, your emotions don't exist in a vacuum. Other people looking in from the outside must be able to clearly read you as well. There's a problem when there's a disconnect between the objective reading of your emotions and your own labeling of your emotions.
It's not unusual for people to feel really angry, but other people would think that they're just disappointed, let down or inconvenienced. Eventually, this disconnect can actually cause serious problems.
Finally, increased emotional awareness leads to the ability to function without emotional denial. In other words, when you feel some strong emotion, you can easily own up to it. You're not making excuses for it, nor are you trying to pass it off as something else.
In addition to understanding other people's emotions as well as your own emotions and clearly identifying them, emotional intelligence also involves deep emotional analysis.
When somebody feels emotionally upset, it is not just something that they feel at a given point in time and in a certain place. It has an impact. It can tie back to something that happened before, or it can cause consequences that will resonate in the future.
People with high EI understand this. This is why they are just as concerned about future impact and consequences as they are with root causes of why people feel the way they do. This analysis also applies to their own emotional states.
Emotional Control
This is where things get real. In the previous two parts of emotional intelligence, it's very easy to just look at it as some sort of intellectual exercise.
It's very easy to file this information in the category "something nice to know" and leave it at that. But if you are able to control your emotions, you are able to ultimately control your destiny.
The sad reality is that the vast majority of people actually act out of impulse. Now, most people are not going to admit this to your face. Most people would come up with all sorts of rational sounding explanations why they made the kind of decision they made. Don't believe them.
In a recent study, scientists discovered that a large percentage of people's decisions were made purely out of impulse. However, when asked to explain those decisions, the subjects came up with all sorts of rational sounding reasons.
In other words, they would let their emotions get the better of them and they would make decisions, and then they would look for excuses or justifications that make it seem that their decisions made sense.
When you control your emotions, you are less likely to let your emotions get the better of you. When you make a choice, or you take action, you are more likely to do so based on a rational decision-making process.
In other words, you would weigh the pros and cons, you would go out of your way to research what exactly is going on and what type of action would lead to the best outcome. That's how rational people make smart decisions.
You're more likely to do things that way than simply going with your gut or, worse yet, getting all emotional and just letting your emotions run wild as you make a decision.
Emotional control is also crucial because you are able to respond to other people based on your character and values. This is a big deal because too many people simply react emotionally.
They can't help it. If somebody pushes at them, their number one instinct is to push back. If they feel that somebody said something that isn't so nice, their default response is to reciprocate.
This is a serious problem because if you want to be successful, you must be able to respond based on your values. You must also be able to react based on your character.
But unfortunately, if you just spend your time simply reacting, you're dealing with your lowest common denominator. You're dealing with revenge, getting stuff off your chest, making a problem go away, or even worse, giving in to your worst instincts.
Believe it or not, emotional management plays a very big role in whether a person is going to reach the pinnacle of success.
Like I said in the introduction to this blog, there are lots of people with high IQs who are living their lives far below their fullest potential. A lot of this under-performance, if you will, stems from their lack of emotional management.
It's not unusual for perfectly intelligent people make unintelligent choices because they react emotionally. When you develop your emotional intelligence, you are able to manage your emotions better, so you would be able to make higher quality decisions.
