Building Your EQ

Elgin Davis

Published in

Winter Hearth Studios

6 min readJul 5, 2019

Volume 1, Issue 10: Building Your EQ

(Originally Published April 5, 2019)

What’s New This Week

Welcome back and thanks for joining us again in the Winter Hearth Epic Life Playbook, where each week we explore the human experience through different mediums, gleaning useful and practical insights to become socially and emotionally powerful.

Following last week’s digest on O vercoming Compassion Fatigue , the theme of this week’s content is Building Your EQ. EQ, as we’ve encountered before in this weekly publication, stands for Emotional Quotient, and is a counterpart to IQ, or Intelligence Quotient. The EQ is a measure of the emotional intelligence of an individual, or, in simpler terms, the individual’s ability to read, recognize, and respond appropriately to the emotions of the self and of others. It’s a pretty complex concept, but for now, we’ll simplify it with this definition. Check out the rest of the digest to learn how to build your EQ this week.

Listen

This week, we’re going to check out a talk from one of the pioneers of the EQ framework, Daniel Goleman. If you missed his appearance in a previous edition of ELP, check it out here. In the talk “Why Aren’t We More Compassionate?”, Goleman combines his superb storytelling with powerful research to help us find out why our society is the way it is and how we can make it better. What can we do to be more compassionate? Tune in to this episode to find out!

Learn

In this week’s Learn section, we have an insightful TED Talk by health psychologist Kelly McGonigal entitled “How to make stress your friend”. This is a great resource full of research and case studies run over the past few decades by various psychologists. It sheds light on the idea that our perception of the effects of stress may actually be more detrimental than the stress itself — a truly intriguing concept. Check out the talk below!
Check out the talk!

Level Up

This week’s Level Up section presents you with practical steps for building your EQ. In this article from Forbes, we learn 5 concrete ways to develop our emotional intelligence. I’ll outline each method below, and give an example of what this might look like for you in practice:

Manage your negative emotions. This is one of the core tenets of emotional intelligence. The ability to recover from negative emotions will change your life drastically, because regardless of what happens to you, if you have trained this skill, adversity will lose its power over your emotional state. In practice, this often means putting life in greater perspective when negative events happen. For example, spilling a cup of coffee and being debilitated by the event for the rest of the day is not managing the emotional state correctly (please don’t cry about spilled coffee… or milk… just don’t do it). Instead, in developing your EQ, you might realize that in the grand scheme of life, a spilled cup of coffee is probably the least of your worries, and you collect yourself and carry on with the day.
Be mindful of your vocabulary. I published this article on Medium a month ago, outlining 8 ways to practice empathy. This is similar to steps 5 and 6 from the article — choosing your words to accurately convey what you are thinking is crucial in developing your EQ. For you, this may mean more descriptive words, like ‘frustrated’, ‘irritated’, or ‘disgusted’, rather than the commonly misused word ‘upset’ that is used by many people today to represent most negative emotions.
Practice empathy. In the same Medium article referred to in the last point, I note that the most important way to practice empathy, perhaps, is to refrain from assuming things about people, especially things that seem to make sense to you but may not actually be true. The example I give in the article is the assumption that because someone hasn’t responded to a text message for a few hours that they must be ignoring you or they must be upset when, in reality, you don’t always know for sure what may actually be going on in someone else’s life. Use your creativity instead to place yourself in the other’s shoes.
Know your stressors. Knowing what pushes your buttons makes it easier to manage those negative emotions before they ever arise. For example, you know that you are going to be enraged if your child comes home late for the fourth time this week. When it’s getting late and little Timmy isn’t home yet, you may become aware of your rising stress level. You are then able to collect yourself and prepare for a more thoughtful (and less terrifying) interaction when Timmy does finally arrive past curfew.
Bounce back from adversity. There are plenty of trite expressions about “bouncing back from adversity”, but there is a reason for this. The thing about adversity is, growth is necessarily uncomfortable. If we weren’t pushed from our comfortable, centered emotional states, we would almost never have the opportunity to grow as people. We’d probably just stagnate, never improving or developing these skills. For example, failing a test in school or a project at work does not necessitate dropping out of school or quitting your job. No, in fact, the adversity has just shown you what you need to improve on, and when you make the choice to accept that challenge, you build up that mental muscle of resilience that will probably come in handy one day in the future.

Fireside Spotlight

In last week’s Fireside Spotlight, we saw a piece called “La Sagrada Familia” from Winter Hearth Studios. This week, we have the first installment in a series of characters for upcoming exclusive Winter Hearth projects! This is a character named Westro — a witty outlaw from the south side of town who loves robbing ice cream shops for popsicle sticks. Follow @adronite on Instagram to keep up with the new characters as they are released! We’re up to something big, and you won’t want to miss it!

He looks friendly enough, right?

Walk It, Talk it

Thanks again for joining us this week in the Winter Hearth Epic Life Playbook! In the words of Dale Carnegie, “Knowledge isn’t power until it is applied.” How can you apply the ideas in this digest to your life? How can you use it to gain power in living a more epic story? Talk to your friends and family this week about something you found interesting in the digest.

This weekly personal development playbook is a labor of love, so if you enjoy reading it each week, please share it with your friends to assist us in reaching our goal of helping the world achieve a better human experience :)

Your Greatest Chapter Awaits

Until next time,
Elgin

Hey, I’m Elgin, and I love to create. I’m the creator of Winter Hearth Studios and the Winter Hearth Epic Life Playbook, a space where we explore the depths of the human experience, discovering the keys to crafting a better life and inspiring you to Live An Epic Story.

I’m currently a 4th year student at Harvard University studying computer science and design, and in my free time I love to travel, draw, read, and pursue bold, exciting adventures.