In 30 sec, this is the best explanation of emotional intelligence I’ve ever seen.
Tiktok below:
@itsjulekim Replying to @low_s_o taking things personally never helps. People’s stuff is about them, not anyone else. #relationshiptipsforwomen #relationshiptipsformen #relationshipadvice101 #relationshipadvicefortheladies #noteveryoneisforyou #relationshipcoachformen #certifiedlifecoach #koreanlifecoach #seattlelifecoach #lifecoachforasians ♬ original sound – Jule – Seattle Life Coach
That video exactly described me about 8 years ago (the last year of my marriage).
In a session with our marriage counselor, the counselor said to me, “Danny, you need to get in touch with your emotions, specifically, your anger.”
and I laughed and said, “what do you mean. I feel fine. I’m not agree. I just think we need to talk through… blah blah blah.”
she said, “see, there you go. you don’t feel, you think you feel. You intellectualize as a way to not feel or deal with emotions. You need to feel first, sit with it, listen to it, so you know what you’re feeling, not just trying to figure out what you’re feeling with your brain while you purposely don’t feel the emotion. just feel. it’s easy. but, for whatever reason, you avoid feeling your emotions. She crossed your boundaries. Doesn’t that upset you?”
I started saying, “I’m sure it was an accident and she had good reason. I’m just trying to be curious and open to hearing her reasoning.”
She cut me off, “see. you’re angry right now and you won’t even acknowledge it. You have no idea you’re upset, that’s how far detached from your emotions you are.” (b/c trauma, neglect in childhood, aka defense mechanisms and survival mechanisms, etc, etc.)
Anyway, she said, “on a scale from 1 to 10, how angry are you right now?” I said, “I don’t know, a 3 or a 4.” She said: ” That’s pretty angry. That half way to really angry. What’s that 3 or 4 called? What’s it called, angry at a 3 or 4?” and I didn’t have an answer. I didn’t know. The labels on my anger scale were “1-6 ‘it’s no big deal, I’ll figure it out’. and 7-8 ‘WTF, this is bullshit.’ and 9-10 ‘I give up. I’m leaving’.”
That’s those 3 colors she held up in the video.
I went home and wrote the numbers 1 through 10 and tried to come up with a word for every level of the anger scale. and I didn’t have any words for it. It took a while. I did some google searches and a thesaurus search to find words like, annoyed, miffed, let down, irked, irritated, salty, upset, disappointed, aggravated, pissed, grouchy, grumpy, mad, fuming, raging.
That’s all those colors she held up on the left in the video.
And that’s just 1 emotion‘s scale. do that for joy, sadness, fear, etc. Emotional intelligence is like going from a box of 8 crayons to a box of 100.
What’s really interesting is, now I can see the crayons other people are using by the version of the world they describe around them from their point of view. I can see they only have one red crayon that they are applying to everything when they are really in a salmon kind of mood and they don’t even know it. I see they are in a salon mood… but they can only show me red and be red.
Brene Brown has a brilliant insight, when we mislabel our emotions, we start to embody that wrong emotion. So if we’re miffed and we label it “pissed off,” and we asked “pissed off,” people we treat us like we’re pissed off and we’ll become pissed off. If we’re miffed and we say we’re miffed, people will see it and treat us like we’re miffed and we have a much better chance of talking about it and working through being miffed without escalating to something we’re not.
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If you like topics like emotional intelligence, check out my commination 101 series on my other site or my self master tools on this site.