Emotional Intelligence

Popular wisdom posits that emotional intelligence involves certain characteristics:

1. Being able to understand and perceive what you're feeling.

2. When you can feel what you want to feel.

3. The ability to control what you feel.

But nowhere in this definition does it say anything about understanding how to feel your emotions better! Why? Because emotions apparently have no inherent value. "They're at best tools to help you get ahead in life. And if you're lucky, to control your feelings so you can then control others and how they feel".

Wrong. Emotions are designed to be felt. Period.

Being in touch with what you're feeling is always a good idea. A little value also exists when you can identify those feelings. And to be able to choose what you feel - that's almost heaven! But control them? That will absolutely end up painful. Guaranteed. You can't win that game.

The big problem with the conventional study of emotional intelligence is they make no distinction between real emotion and artificial, 'man-made' emotion. When you don't know the distinction, you're lost in the maze of trying to manipulate your emotions somehow. Of course you'll feel the need to control them.

But here's the problem:

By trying to control your emotions, you are creating fabricated emotion. Control creates the very problem that control attempts to end. Control is the problem. Not your emotions.

You end up struggling to control your emotions today to make up for your past efforts of trying to control them. See the problem? Controlling emotions starts early in life. We started supressing our feelings instead of feeling them.

Of course, we begin with the 'bad' ones. Stuff a little fear here, a little anger there. A little despair. A little sadness. A little loneliness. What's wrong with that? Nobody wants to end up lonely.

So what happens? We try to not feel the feelings by repressing them. We work on controlling them, in other words. At first glance, it seems to work. We shut down our feelings and magically they seem to have disappeared. Problem solved!

Really? You can't just throw emotions in the closet like old toys and be done with them. They're a living energy. They're powerful. They're alive. You don't kill them by not feeling them. What happens when you do this is, slowly, over time, you're building a time bomb.

Here's what the experts apparently are missing:

Life is an emotional experience. It's not about being happy and loving. What you really want is to open your heart wide and full so you can feel everything that surfaces from your emotional wellspring.

Once you're willing to feel anything and everything that comes up, then you can get close to feeling whatever you want to feel. There's no need to suffer and feel bad first, to then feel what you want. It's nothing like that. It's just being willing to feel your feelings. Whatever they are.

Also, when you feel everything, then you're less likely to have the melodrama and emotional meltdowns that conventional emotional intelligence theory strives to save you from. Plus, it also heals the suffocating web of anxiety, those black holes of pain, and the explosions of anger.

The answer is never to feel less, by stuffing down what you don't want to feel. Learn to feel what's real, and drop what's not. The answer is to know the distinction between imaginary and real feelings. For more details on how to learn the difference between real and imaginary emotions, go to this site on emotional health. So you can learn how to return to your natural way of feeling. And to see how you stack up, go to this page for a free emotional intelligence test.