Reasons to Deliberately Improve Your Emotional Intelligence

#1: It heavily influences our quality of life

To me, this is the most important and usually the main reason a person decides to pay closer attention to their emotional experience. In a way, your emotional experience is your whole life. When someone asks you “hey, how’s it been?” or in moments of personal reflection, you are reviewing how your life has made you feel and how you feel about life.  

Because it’s not commonly taught, most people do not have a healthy or accurate understanding of emotions in themselves or others. Deliberately improving your emotional intelligence and emotional regulation will increase how often you feel positive emotions like contentment, joy, and ease. It will also give you the cognitive skills to recognize and root out the poor mental habits that increase negative emotions such as frustration, anger and sadness. Isn’t it worth the time and effort to learn skills that directly help ease your psychological pain and support your ability to enjoy life? Especially if it means the direct circumstances of your individual life don’t even have to change at all? 

Emotions are at the core of human experience— it’s a HUGE component of how you measure a person’s quality of life. “Quality of life” is a broad, pretty subjective term for a lot of separate considerations. It could include living conditions, relationships, health factors, various experiences and a whole host of things that are often culturally dependent as well. But they only influence our emotional life and by no means determine it. Your lived experience of day-to-day life determines its quality.

As if that weren’t all complicated enough, how we FEEL about our own emotions impacts emotions themselves too! According to the Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, “learning to manage difficult emotions has ‘several positive outcomes, like better mental health, moral decision making, and memory, as well as general well-being.’” Suppressing our emotions has been tied to worse overall functioning in those same categories. Many of us were taught or have learned to suppress our emotions through unfortunate events and/or more punishing parenting or teaching styles in our early lives. Peer groups and professional organizations can also pressure a person or the entire group of people to bury how they feel. This destructive way of dealing with (or not dealing with) our feelings often fuels the underlying emotional turmoil many humans endure, unleash on others, and bake into destructive cultural norms and entire systems. It’s a tragic outcome for us all, on many levels. 

Note: Emotional suppression is very different from emotional maturity or self-control which allows a person to accept and feel the difficult emotion while choosing to express it appropriately.

Dr. Guy Winch and author of the book “Emotional First Aid” is a strong advocate for routine emotional health care. He argues that just as we can sustain small injuries to our physical bodies, our minds can take subtle blows that can spiral into much larger issues if unaddressed. Essentially, we do not have to wait to be in an emotional crisis before we finally deal with all our internal “stuff”. This requires that we be able to recognize and address them in the first place.

Paying attention to your inner life and building the skills of emotional intelligence and regulation is a key ingredient to greater satisfaction and well-being for yourself and everyone you come into contact with.

Psychological traumas and personal inexperience dealing with painful emotions can make this unfamiliar and very unpleasant work. Like learning any deeply useful but complex skill, it develops over time and practice and takes much longer to feel natural than most of us would like.

It is always a worthwhile pursuit.

Emotional intelligence and regulation pays dividends, sometimes literally, as it allows you to strengthen your social connections and increase the jobs that you can do well. In fact, a host of researchers predict that in the future, the most secure jobs will involve people with high levels of soft skills and emotional intelligence since artificial intelligence excels at automation but not higher order social and emotional skills.

There’s a whole host of reasons this is an incredibly powerful skill set to nurture, and I look forward to continuing this series.


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