- July 15, 2020 -
EQ
-the uncomfortable conversations-
EQ - Emotional Intelligence
What is emotional intelligence? The definition from Oxford languages is -
- the capacity to be aware of, control, and express one's emotions, and to handle interpersonal relationships judiciously and empathetically.
"emotional intelligence is the key to both personal and professional success" -
How does this play out in our day to day life? We are seeing the importance of emotional intelligence on a daily, almost hourly basis as we communicate digitally on all social media platforms. What is more prevalent now as we adapt to our ever changing lives in 2020, is the complete lack of emotional intelligence.
Everyday as we scroll through our feeds and news sites we see simple headlines typed out to grab our attention, to grab our emotional reactions. You dive deeper into the comments of these articles and you can see precisely that of which I speak. It breaks down into three categories, you see many of those that never bothered to read the article past the headline, you see those that read the first paragraph or two, and finally those that read the article and fact checked the information, with all of the above active in the in the comments. This leads to the varying degrees of platitudes that we all are so used to seeing by now.
This is not an issue that only occurs online, we are seeing it in our daily lives. We are seeing more and more outbursts against frontline workers, more and more attacks and complaints against minor inconveniences. What many are coining the "Karen Pandemic". 2020 has brought out more stressors then many of us are used to dealing with, and as such we are seeing this lack in emotional intelligence. How we choose to handle ourselves at our worst, tells us the most about us as people.
This break down of EQ is, unfortunately, generational. EQ is not something that is taught in schools, but nearly the opposite. Because of this many never develope the skills or understanding on how to control ones emotions. Instead we have placated to accommodating those that cannot control their own emotions with safe spaces or an effort to displace "triggers". We see this most prevalent in our higher education, but it is becoming more common place in society.
This is challenging to overcome. The biggest challenge is to understand that this cannot be fixed by a higher authority. This is a personal issue. The only person that can fix a lack of emotional intelligence is the individual themselves. Unfortunately that is an answer that most do not want to hear, because it goes back to personal responsibility.
We can start to change this with incorporating conflict resolution in our schools. We must start teaching our kids that it is okay to disagree. It is okay to challenge the thought process. We must teach them to develop the skills to argue without losing control of their emotions. Emotions are a wonderful thing, but far to often we make decisions and fight on emotions instead of relying on facts.
To be able to teach our children, we must firstly teach ourselves. We need to learn how to be better and control our own emotions. We must learn conflict resolution. We must work on ourselves to be the better role models for those that look up to us.
I challenge you to work on your EQ and better yourself so that way you may be able to help others be better as well.
- We are all looking for how we change what is going on, we must start with ourselves. -
-Alex-