Developing Emotional Intelligence

I grew up in a family that wasn’t good at dealing with emotions–at least, not the negative ones.  I don’t know how many times I found myself in trouble for letting it be known that I was angry, frustrated, hurt, or even sad. Shed a tear and the first thing someone was going to say was “Don’t cry!” Happiness was acceptable, but only in moderation–too much and you were just showing off, rubbing someone else’s nose in your good fortune. And describing someone as “really emotional” was never a compliment.

Add to this the fact that I, like every other woman in the United States, grew up in a culture which generally marks feelings as a sign of weakness (witness the recent response to President Obama’s tears at the mere thought of the small children murdered at Sandy Hook), and women’s feelings, in particular, as supremely unreliable. We’re prone to being hysterical! We change our minds at whim! We’re moody! We’re hormonal! How can our feelings be trusted–and why should they be, since feelings are a sign of weakness anyway?

Here’s why: because feelings are the only real way we have for assessing the human experience of a given moment. It does no good to tell yourself not to be angry; emotions can’t be ignored. They can be repressed for a while, in favor of a different response, and you can certainly hold your feelings in–but they’ll just take on a different shape if they aren’t acknowledged eventually. Sometimes anger turns into self-destructive behaviors, like alcoholism or overeating. Sometimes sorrow will turn into full-blown depression.

So instead of repressing our feelings–or questioning them, or wondering if we’re entitled to them–it makes more sense to me to use feelings as a learning opportunity and develop some emotional intelligence.

What does that mean, exactly? You’ll find several different definition of emotional intelligence, if you Google the term, but to my mind it means two things: the ability to recognize others’ emotions as separate from our own (to realize, for instance, that the person standing next to me might be really angry about something that doesn’t upset me at all), and the ability to acknowledge our own feelings while determining their source, so we can shape our behavior in the future. That second part of the definition is what I’m focused on today. And note that I didn’t write “avoid negative emotions in the future” as part of my definition, because that isn’t possible. There will always be something in life that makes us sad, frustrated, or anxious. Avoiding certain emotions is never an option.

What we can change, however, are the ways that we acknowledge and deal with them. Here are two examples of ways one might respond to a difficult situation at work. One shows a pretty high level of emotional intelligence:

I guess I can’t really be mad that people jumped on me when I mentioned the budget in that meeting–Susan told me that would happen, and I went ahead and did it anyway.

Susan told me it was a bad idea to mention in the budget in that meeting, but I really think the budget is an important thing to consider. I’m frustrated that others can’t see that.

In the first example, the person is question is doing two things: denying an emotion (anger) by telling herself that it’s not acceptable, and beating herself up for a mistake (not listening to Susan.) Neither of those things is helpful. If she is feeling angry, telling herself that she has no right to feel anger is pointless. It’s already there, right or wrong. Secondly, this person can’t always substitute someone else’s judgement for her own–nor should she. Assuming that Susan is a human being, she isn’t fundamentally right about everything just because she was right this time.

In the second example, on the other hand, the person in question is doing two different, more useful things: validating her own assessment of the situation (“I really think . . .”) and acknowledging her feelings (“I’m frustrated . . .”). But because she has validated her assessment, she already knows how to move past this moment of frustration: by coming up with a different strategy for helping her colleagues see the importance of considering the budget. If she hadn’t taken that first step–trusting her ability to assess the situation–she wouldn’t recognize the source of her frustration–the fact that others don’t agree with her. She’d simply turn that frustration on herself and swallow it down, adding a stiff shot of shame as a chaser, believing the problem was her behavior.

Emotional intelligence is usually discussed in connection to negative feelings–figuring out where our anger is coming from, for instance. But it’s also helpful in assessing positive feelings. When you’ve done well on a project, for instance, you can’t just assume that this will always be the case in the future. You have to take a moment to figure out where, exactly, these feelings of accomplishment come from. What did you do well? Did you communicate an idea effectively? Find a way to work through a series of conflicts with your colleagues? Did you negotiate a process for building a consensus? And how, exactly, did you do those things?

Developing emotional intelligence requires that we set aside our notion of feelings as a sign of weakness and treat them, instead, as opportunities for learning and growth. It requires that we acknowledge all feelings–both positive and negative–as equally helpful to understanding our experiences. It does not require that we externalize every single feeling we’re having, nor that we ask others to accept some responsibility for what we feel. But learning to make peace with our feelings and use them to our benefit, rather than allowing them to become a source of self-harm, is one step toward better emotional health.