No doubt emotional intelligence is more rare than book smarts, but my experience says it is actually more important in the making of a leader. You just can’t ignore it.” –Jack Welch
The ability to understand and manage your own emotions, and those of others is called emotional intelligence, it involves a set of skills, including self-awareness self-management, social awareness or empathy and relationship management. Higher emotional intelligence can lead to better stress management,stronger relationships, improve job performance, and greater access to various aspects of life The components of emotional intelligence include self-awareness or the ability to recognize your own emotions, strengths, weaknesses, and how they affect others. Self-management involves controlling disruptive impulses, and emotions and adapting to changing circumstances empathy is the understanding and sharing the feelings needs and viewpoints of others and recognizing nonverbal signals relationship management is building and maintaining positive relationships, managing conflict, community, communicating effectively and inspiring others. Emotional intelligence is something we should be teaching all of our children. We should begin in grade school and teach our children how to manage their emotions. We should also teach our children how to process their anger in a healthy manner; angry people are not emotionally intelligent folks who engage in lateral violence are also not emotionally intelligent.i The majority of our people in prison today are there because they did not practice emotional intelligence.
The way people behave will often show you whether they have emotional intelligence or not. Managing our emotions is the most important thing we can do for ourselves. Many of us witness people projecting their anger on others inappropriately. We would all do well to find ways to process our anger inhealthy ways. If you are the type of person who says don’t get me mad because I don’t know what I’ll do, that means to me that you have a short fuse and if I say something that triggers you, you’re going to get very mad and defend yourself when you don’t have any reason to defend yourself you’re just expressing your anger in an inappropriate way we all see this on the reservation, people arguing in public or getting triggered by something you say, especially if it’s true you’ve heard the saying truth hurts. Some of us respond to that by flying into a rage and either chewing someone out inappropriately or assaulting someone some people have gone to jail because they couldn’t control their emotions. They didn’t know how to use emotional intelligence to their advantage, We all need to find ways to process our anger in a healthy way, as individuals we usually are aware of what triggers us, so one of the most important things you can do is to know yourself and what upsets you and figure out a more appropriate way to respond or react and practice ways to do it in a healthier way. It’s no one’s responsibility except yours to understand your emotions and heal your triggers and to learn how emotional intelligence can help you we all have cell phones or computers and access to the Internet and there is a lot of information out there, so do your research aboutlateral violence and emotional intelligence and find ways to process your anger in a good way not in ways that are inappropriate or will hurt someone.
Some of us can admit we’ve engaged in lateral violence – I admit I have. We can heal by first changing our thoughts. Can any of you admit to being mean in your lifetime? It’s very courageous to engage in self-refection to change your life. When we aren’t very nice and not being very emotionally intelligent it might be hard to admit to ourselves, but there’s always time to change. We can always change our lives: change the way you think and change the way you behave. Start by changing the way you think and then change the way you express your negative emotions you might find you’ll be a lot happier and a lot less stressed when you can be more emotionally intelligent.
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