Emotional Intelligence (eBook)

Managing Emotions to Make a Positive Impact on Your Life

Gill Hasson (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 2. Auflage
193 Seiten
Capstone (Verlag)
978-1-907312-67-0 (ISBN)

Infos

Transform the way you see the world and the way the world sees you by effectively managing your emotions

The happiest and most fulfilled people are not always the cleverest or most talented, skilled, or educated among us. Instead, those who can effectively manage feelings-their own and those of the people around them-frequently wear that crown. And now more than ever, emotional intelligence is the trait you need to develop to unlock your true potential.

In the newly revised second edition of Emotional Intelligence, bestselling author of the Mindfulness Pocketbook and career coach, Gill Hasson, delivers yet another insightful roadmap to navigating and harnessing your emotions. You'll learn to boost your productivity, happiness, calm, and confidence as the author explains the startlingly straightforward fundamentals of our feelings. You'll also discover how to boost your 'EQ' (emotional intelligence quotient) to improve your personal and work lives, manage conflict, understand office politics, deal with bullying, and more.

Emotional Intelligence walks you through how to:

• Manage anxiety and stress so they don't overwhelm you at work or at home
• Express yourself and your desires clearly and simply so you can get more of what you want
• Be more assertive so you can protect yourself and those you care about from mistreatment

Emotional Intelligence remains the gold standard in effective, self-guided resources for improving your mental health and your life.

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Introduction

What is emotional intelligence?

What is emotional intelligence? It’s being intelligent with your emotions.

Emotional intelligence is the ability to both understand and manage emotions.

It’s using your emotions to inform your thinking and using your thinking to understand and manage emotions.

Although regular intelligence – the ability to reason, rationalise, analyse and so on – is important in life, emotional intelligence is the key to thinking clearly and creatively, to being able to manage stress and challenges confidently and relate well to others.

In this book you will learn how to understand and manage your emotions – your own and other people’s – in a way that is helpful and can make a real, positive difference to your life.

Understanding emotions

Emotions are part of being human. Whether we’re aware of them or not, emotions are a constant presence in our lives, influencing everything we do. Emotions are the glue that connects us to other people and gives meaning to our lives.

Emotions cause us to feel, think and act in different ways in different situations. But emotions can be complicated. This can make them hard to understand; difficult to make sense of and take meaning from.

Understanding emotions involves:

• recognising and understanding the three aspects of emotions – physical states, thoughts and actions – and how they interact;
• being aware of the differences, transition, variations and degrees of intensity between emotions;
• understanding what, how and why you and other people experience certain emotions in certain situations.

Chapter 1 starts you on the road to understanding emotions by looking at the nature of emotions – the inherent aspects of emotions: what all emotions have got in common.

You will see that emotions are made up of three parts: thoughts, physical feelings and behaviour. Any one part of an emotion can trigger and influence another part.

Take, for example, anxiety. Supposing you were anxious about an exam, an interview or a social occasion. Anxiety might start with a thought (‘I’m dreading this’), which might trigger physical feelings (stomach turns over, tense muscles, dry mouth) and then behaviour (unable to sit still or relax).

But your anxiety could start with the physical feeling of dread (stomach turning over, etc.), which reminds you of and makes you think about the upcoming exam or social event (‘I’m dreading this’), which results in the behaviour of pacing up and down. And, of course, the anxiety could start with the inability to relax which triggers the physical feelings and the thoughts that go with them.

No wonder we so often struggle to understand and manage emotions! Although we do see some emotions as positive, there are plenty of other emotions that we regard as ‘negative’ or ‘wrong’.

However, as you develop your understanding of what, exactly, emotions are and why we have them, you will see that judging emotions as ‘positive’ or ‘negative’, ‘good’ or ‘bad’ isn’t very helpful.

The fact is, all emotions have a positive purpose – to keep you safe, to help you make decisions, to develop and maintain social bonds, to experience happiness and creative processes. You can read more about the positive intent of emotions in Chapter 1.

Chapter 2 helps further your understanding by looking at specific emotions; their levels of intensity, the differences and similarities between them and the relationships between them.

Understanding, for example, what envy and jealousy are: envy is wanting to have something that someone else has got – to feel envy when someone you know gets a promotion. Jealousy on the other hand, is a feeling of resentment that another has gained something that you think you more rightfully deserve: feeling jealous of a promotion that you feel you should have received instead of the other person. Knowing the difference between those two emotions can help you have a clearer picture of what you’re feeling and why.

You will learn that disentangling what triggers an emotion from the thoughts, feelings and behaviour that are part of it can also help you to understand the emotion – and see it as ‘just emotion’, rather than getting caught up and overwhelmed by it.

Of course, although we all feel and experience emotions, an important part of emotional intelligence is understanding and accepting that emotions are experienced differently by different people. Not only that, different people have different ideas and beliefs about emotions – their purpose and intent and how to respond to them.

Understanding this helps you to start managing other people and their emotions more effectively.

Managing emotions

Once you have a clearer understanding of the nature and purpose of emotions, you are in a better position to manage them.

In Chapter 3 you will learn that managing emotions means drawing on emotions to inform your thinking, reasoning and behaviour.

Managing emotions includes the following:

• Knowing when to respond immediately and when to stop and think.
• Knowing when to rein in your emotions; when to engage or detach from an emotion.
• Knowing what is, in any one situation, an appropriate and inappropriate expression of emotion – in yourself and in other people.
• Being able to manage other people’s emotions.
• Knowing how to draw on emotions to develop empathy and rapport with others.

People with good levels of emotional intelligence know that managing emotions does not mean controlling them; it doesn’t involve dominating or suppressing emotions. Instead, managing emotions involves being flexible with your thinking, behaviour and responses; being able to stay open to feelings, both those that are pleasant and those that are unpleasant.

And because we all experience and respond to emotions in different ways, Chapter 3 suggests a range of strategies and responses to manage emotions, other people, events and situations. The emphasis is on identifying ways that work for you, personally, to manage emotions and the thoughts, feelings and behaviour that go with them.

By the end of Part 1, you will have understood, then, that emotional intelligence involves both understanding and managing emotions – yours and other people’s.

It’s a dynamic process; the extent to which you can understand and manage your own emotions influences your ability to understand and manage other people’s emotions. And vice versa.

However, emotional intelligence is not limited to specific strategies to manage specific emotions, people and situations. There is further scope for you to understand and manage emotions – yours and other people’s.

Communication skills, assertiveness, a positive approach and an optimistic outlook are key features of emotional intelligence.

In Part 2 we start by looking at how you can develop your emotional intelligence by developing your communication skills.

You will learn that good communication is an inherent part – a permanent and inseparable element – of emotional intelligence. How come?

Communication between people involves expressing thoughts, ideas, opinions, feelings and emotions. It involves making sense and meaning; understanding each other, what we each think and feel. And we all know how hard that can often be!

Chapter 4 will help you become a better communicator – it will give you insights, ideas and plenty of tips and techniques on how to ‘read between the lines’ and get a better understanding of what others are thinking and feeling.

It’s not difficult – you simply draw on the natural ability we all already have to understand someone else’s experience, their point of view, their thoughts and feelings. Even when their experience, perspective and feelings differ from your own.

This ability is called empathy. And while we all have the ability to empathise, it’s an ability that can be improved in easy, straightforward ways. How? Simply by observing, listening and asking questions.

How, though, you might ask, can you better express your thoughts, opinions, feelings and emotions? By knowing how to assert yourself. Again, assertiveness is an integral part of emotional intelligence. Chapter 5 explains that just as emotional intelligence involves being able to understand and manage your feelings, so does being assertive.

Assertiveness calls for you to express thoughts, opinions and feelings in direct, honest and appropriate ways while at the same time taking into consideration the other person’s opinions, feelings and needs.

Again, this chapter has plenty of advice and easy to follow techniques that you can use to help you to be more assertive. Don’t worry if the thought of saying what you feel, think, want and don’t want makes you anxious; I encourage you to start small and explain how you can practise being assertive in low-stakes situations. Once you feel comfortable in these low-risk situations, you will feel more confident to move on to other issues and situations, little by little.

And as your confidence improves, so will your emotional...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 5.11.2024
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management
• Schlagworte: boosting eq • can I improve my emotional intelligence? • can I improve my eq? • eq book • eq hacks • eq improvement • eq tips • eq tricks • Remote Work • remote work eq • Self-Help Book • social media eq • what is emotional intelligence? • what is eq?
• ISBN-10: 1-907312-67-6 / 1907312676
• ISBN-13: 978-1-907312-67-0 / 9781907312670