On route to building Emotional Intelligence
The Lean In Bangalore chapter had a fantastic session with counsellor and life coach Lily Paul last Saturday at We Work on all things emotions. Let me be honest… I didn’t expect such an enthusiastic and engaging group of members including a handful of men (who skipped out on the world cup cricket match) to show up for a topic that requires vulnerability. Impressed!
Lily has a style I particularly gravitate towards as she balances science and hard facts with case studies and personal stories to help us grasp what may seem as rather ambiguous ideas. What one absorbs from a session like this really depends on where he or she is in their journey of building emotional intelligence as it is a process of continuous improvement. We all walked away with our own Ah-ha-s but I’ll round up some of the content discussed and key takeaways below.
Emotions are messages that signal reward or threat and have a powerful influence on us to an extent that many of us think of ourselves as our emotions. To understand how emotions arise and can be regulated we took a step back to understand the evolution and operation of the three-parted lizard-mammalian-human brain that we possess today. It is good to remember that an event leads to thoughts in our brain and it is these thoughts that lead to our emotions. The same event can cause a group of us to have completely different thoughts based on our conditioning in turn causing us to have completely different emotions. So, when it comes to this wide world of emotions there is no right or wrong… it is about understanding what will serve you well.
Emotional Intelligence includes recognizing, understanding and managing not just one’s own emotions but the emotions of others as well. Having the basic understanding that emotions drive our behaviors and can have a significant impact on people around us either positively or negatively is important. This becomes even more important when we are under pressure as the rather primitive lizard brain that acts on autopilot to allow for fight or flight kicks in first. EI includes building self-awareness, then self-regulating followed by working on motivation, empathy and social skills.
We addressed the first two aspects through specific tools and personal stories which I have summed up below as takeaways.
1) ‘I am responsible for my emotions and behaviours’
We repeated this affirmation a handful of times in the session together and I encourage you to try this at home. We have to start taking responsibility for how we feel, why we feel that way and how we can change the way we feel especially if we don’t like it. It is not up to our partner, friend, mom or colleague to make us feel better although those support systems are fantastic to have… it really is up to us! This tells us that we are in control and can change the direction we are heading in at any point.
2) Journaling
The best way to build self-awareness that is the first step to building emotional intelligence is to start journaling either through books, notes on your phone or various apps available today. The goal is to understand our own triggers, patterns and what is and is not working well for us so we can change it vs. waiting for a situation or another person to change. We went through the feelings wheel (picture above) which really helps breakdown all the different possible feelings/emotions one could have so we can start describing it better than just a broad ‘I am happy/not happy’ that doesn’t communicate enough either to ourselves or those around us.
3) RAIN
We learnt about a tool called RAIN that can be applied to any situation we are in so we can Recognize the feeling, Allow it to be there (be compassionate with ourselves), Investigate to understand why, where, how and lastly Non-identify or Nurture that feeling. There are numerous sources available on the internet about this tool that you can dig into deeper but I can tell you from personal experience that this is a great thought process to have to change your perspective on situations where the egoic mind has taken over and help you make confident & conscious decisions.
4) Mindful Meditation
This one comes as no surprise as research has shown that meditation can help build new neural pathways in our brain and really rewire the way we think, feel and act. Spending even a minute a day to start with is extremely beneficial. There are many different forms of meditation that range from simple breathing to chanting, visualization etc. so you can experiment and choose one that works best for you. It is never too late to start this practise.
Lily left us with the words of Viktor Frankl that really sums up the essence of this session.
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
A big thank you to those of you who joined us, were vulnerable by sharing your personal stories and added to richness of the conversations.
