Emotional Quotient (EQ) is a term used to describe your ability to understand and manage your own emotions and of those around you, and also your ability to demonstrate self discipline when responding to emotional situations.
Emotional Quotient refers to your capacity to feel empathy for others, to be able to stand up for what you believe in and to move towards your goals and dreams in a tactful and respectful manner, always considerate of others. Emotional Quotient is your measure for being able to gather information to form a complete picture, before jumping to conclusions and overreacting.
For the last century our entire capacity for intelligence as human beings has been measured by IQ – Intelligence Quotient. IQ is a measurement of such things as mathematical and spatial reasoning, logical ability, and language understanding. Intelligence Quotient does not measure important things like life experience, wisdom gained through experiences, or personal qualities like being a fantastic friend, a loving and devoted partner or a contributing citizen in our communities – all incredibly important elements to creating your Ultimate Lifestyle. This focus on only one aspect of our overall intelligence and capacity for wisdom has fueled the imbalance in our society and conditioned us to believe that linear thought processes, measured by Intelligence Quotient (IQ) is the only measure needing to be concerned about, however this is entirely not true. By focusing on increasing Intelligent Quotient, combined with both your Emotional Quotient and Spiritual Quotient (to be discussed in next weeks article) will provide for a much more balanced lifestyle and ultimately lead us to living happier and more rewarding lives.
Your Emotional Quotient is an extremely important factor in you living a happy, satisfying and fulfilling life. A high Emotional Quotient ensures that you can make healthy decisions about your life, have happy and healthy relationships and communicate with love and care to those around you. To attain the ultimate and optimum level of Emotional Quotient means to feel your emotions, but to always respond with a loving and peaceful mind and heart. To be able to ‘live above’ the pettiness which often consumes our lives, to be able to witness and experience it, yet never to bring yourself down and partake in it.
With awareness and effort, your Emotional Quotient can increase over time. The key is learning how to tune in and identify your emotions, then taking responsibility and ownership for them and how you react because of them. Every time a strong emotional reaction threatens to cause you to react to a situation poorly is your perfect opportunity to develop a higher Emotional Quotient.
The following steps will help you develop and increase your Emotional Quotient :
1. Next time you begin to feel any negative, lower emotions such as anger, frustration or jealousy, take a moment to bring your awareness to your feelings
2. Focus your attention on where you feel those lower emotional feelings in your body – focus on howyou are feeling that emotion. Does your heart beat faster? Are you sweating? Are you holding tension, and if so, where?
3. Once you have identified the lower emotion and are connected with it, purposefully relax and begin to take slow and deep breaths. If it helps, you can imagine the air that you inhale as pure, peaceful, white energy, and as you exhale, imagine your lower emotions releasing with each breath, leaving only the pure, peaceful, white energy inside you.
4. As you continue to breath deeply, and find yourself beginning to relax, try to understand the true reasons for feeling as you do. Is your anger really just a disguise and manifestation for having hurt feelings? or for being disappointed? are you feeling jealous because you really suffer from low self esteem and live in fear of loss? are your lower emotions really a result of stress? anxiety? uncertainty? general unhappiness?
5. Once you have identified the true cause for your feelings, look at the situation through the eyes of the other person, try to understand how they are feeling and where they are coming from based on your actions. Is it possible that you caused them suffering as well? or that they are in a difficult position and needed to do what they did because of their circumstances? consider their past – who they are and where they come from and try to form a complete picture from their perspective
6. The second to last step is to consider the much bigger picture : the world we live in. For a minute contemplate earth as a planet resting mysteriously within our solar system, look at the sun or the moon and see them for what they are, other planets orbiting our home – then turn your thoughts to the 6 billion human beings that inhabit this earth and the enormous complexity of relationships and life journey’s that we are all on. You could also imagine yourself as being very old and nearing the end of your life and consider for a moment how irrelevant and insignificant this event, which is causing you so much anguish now, will be to you when you are that age. This step is meant to reconnect you with the feeling that life is one, long continuous journey, the good to be taken with the bad, the difficulties intended to be challenges to help us grow and become wiser and more conscious human beings, to help you reconnect with the flow of life.
7. Once you are connected with the much bigger picture, you need to objectively consider what the best, most reasonable, fair and loving course of action is, then summon the self discipline to override your lower emotions and instead act from a higher level of being.
Of course the seven steps above are only a crude guideline to give you an idea of how you go through the process of understanding and managing your emotions. The more you practice and incorporate this into your life, the easier and more natural it becomes.
Allowing yourself to process your lower emotions helps you to understand the true causal factors behind them, freeing you to let go of the negative energy and emotions and opening you up to being rational, fair, empathetic and kind. From this state of being, you can still communicate and create boundaries, but have moved from a victim and retaliative state of mind to being someone with a high Emotional Quotient, able to process and manage their emotions for the higher good of everyone.
What is your view on this? Share your thoughts and experiences below in the comments section.
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“The purpose of the life is to experience and be happy”
