Emotional Intelligence
Before the jumping into emotional intelligence, I need state that I am not a trained or certified therapist or counselor, so please take everything I write in this post as personal learnings and experience.
So what is emotional intelligence? Emotional intelligence is loosely defined as 2 parts:
1. The ability to understand one’s own emotions and express them in a healthy way
2. The ability to factor emotions into relationships and circumstances
The Bible has plenty of examples of emotional intelligence. Jesus expressing emotions in a healthy way when feeling sad at loss of a close friend (John 11:32-36), showing empathy and care for people (Mark 1:40-42) and not letting His emotions prevent Him from doing God’s will (Matthew 26:36–39). Solomon also displays emotional intelligence by using how emotions will be present in a circumstance to make a good judgement (1 Kings 3:16-28). Emotional intelligence is a good skill to develop and grow. The first step to growing in emotional intelligence is to understand your own emotions and express them in a healthy way.
Understanding one’s own emotions and expressing them in a healthy way
There are a few steps which can be helpful in understanding and expressing emotions. I am not yet professional at these but am making progress.
1. Get familiar with emotions
2. Identify your emotions
3. Experience them healthily
Each of these are expanded upon below.
1. Get familiar with emotions. The first step in the process is to grow in understanding is get to know about emotions. A great way to do this is an emotions/feelings wheel. Using a feeling wheel starts in the middle with a core emotion and working outwards until a word is found that describes how someone feels. It is also important to look up definitions of words. An example of an emotional wheel is shown below. There are emotional wheels that include body sensations to help identify them [1]. If that is a lot all at once here is a list of 27 emotion words which are most commonly felt from a study done by some researches at Berkeley [2].
Emotions Wheel
Other helpful things include watching emotional movies, reading emotional books or getting counseling. These things will help us be aware of emotions and observe them being experienced. It can also facilitate experiencing similar emotions!
2. Identify your emotions. This is the practice of experiencing an emotion and knowing what it is we are experiencing. It can be tough to pause in the moment to notice one’s self experiencing an emotion and practice identifying them. It certainly is for me. A helpful alternative is to take time later in the day to reflect on the emotions experienced in the day and identify them.
3. Experiencing your emotions healthily. In this part we want to accept that you are experiencing emotions and bring in the Holy Spirit and facts about what your situation. By accepting the emotions we are experiencing, they can be expressed in a healthy way. If we do not, it can lead to a closed off response to emotions. By bringing the Holy Spirit and facts into the situation we can determine if we are responding adequately or under or overreacting to a situation. Sometimes our emotions validate our experience and sometimes they can skew our perspective without us realizing it. A practical tip for this is to ask the Holy Spirit for His thoughts and wisdom and to write a list of all the facts about the situation. Then determine if our emotional response is healthy. It can always be helpful to ask another unbiased person about the situation as well.
After understanding and healthily experiencing personal emotions, the next step is to factor other people’s emotions into situations.
Factoring emotions into relationships and circumstances
This is hard for me. I mainly think mentally & logically and about external factors, not emotions. It takes a conscious effort for me to factor other people’s emotions into a situation. One shift in mindset that has been helpful for me is to focus on emotions as the thing to solve and help with, instead of focusing on solving or helping with what is causing the emotions. Here are ways for factoring emotions into decisions and circumstances.
Decision making:
Before making a decision (about what to do or say), ask the Holy Spirit for help and write down or mentally list the people involved in decision.
Think about how the decision might impact the people listed emotionally.
If possible, ask people for their feelings about the decision and what would make them feel better about it.
Responding to other people’s emotions:
If noticing someone being emotional, ask yourself the question why is the person experiencing those specific emotions and try to understand things from their perspective.
After thinking ask if they are feeling that way because of the reasons you think, you can ask them to share as well
Make it a practice to state or repeat back why they are feeling they way they are (active listening). This will help clarify any misconceptions.
Sympathize or empathize with them, affirming their emotions.
In summary it is all about valuing people and their emotions. To spend effort to understand and consider one’s own emotions and those around. It is a journey to grow and learn, but is one that will result in a fuller life.
References
[1] https://lindsaybraman.com/sensation-feelings-wheel/#download
