Navigating Your Emotions
You are an emotional being, and therefore, every single day you are going to operate out of emotion. So when the next person says to you, stop being emotional, ask them to show you how. Because I guarantee, even in that interaction that you are having with them, they are exhibiting emotion. Emotional beings, us human beings are.
And therefore, we must know how to capitalise on these cues and clues, this internal system that we have that lets us know that something's going on within our world right now and allows us to make logical decisions if done well to be able to work through that. Now, what's the alternative? The alternative for most of us is to suppress those emotions because someone tells us to, or we've made it a belief of ourself that that's what we should do, particularly when we go to work.
Let's just leave the emotions at home. How's that working for you? It doesn't because you are an emotional being. So what we end up doing is allowing our emotions to rule us instead of us using them as a tool. In those cases, when we are not suppressing them, we're expressing them in reactions, and that's because we're trying to manage the emotion rather than manage the response to the emotion.
What I've learned over many years of being someone who's working in the area of emotional and social intelligence is that managing your emotions is not where it's at, even though that's what we are being told. We need to learn to navigate our emotions.
All right, so for those of you who haven't been around with me for a while, my name's Grant Herbert. I'm an emotional intelligence expert, a sustainable performance coach, and I had the privilege of working with people just like you all around the world and take them on their journey and help them out of my own journey of imperfection. I need to let you know right up front that yes, I'm an emotional intelligence subject matter expert, but I'm a work in progress in its implementation, just like you.
Emotional intelligence is the ability to be aware of what's going on, to label it, and then to be able to navigate through it and manage the response, manage the behaviour. Sometimes it doesn't go all that well.
Social intelligence is the ability to be able to see what might be going on in emotions of others, to remain curious, have empathy, work with them, and to navigate how you interact with them based on the emotion that's coming, and the emotion that you are feeling as well.
So 'navigating' is a great word because navigating says, I'm going on a journey through this. I'm not abandoning or suppressing or ignoring the emotion. Let's go. The emotion has triggered, so let's work with it and let's work with it in a healthy way.
Alright, so a little bit of 101 on emotions. An emotion is actually a physiological cue, a clue, a sensation that you experience somewhere in your body that says, Hey, I need to get your attention. Something's going on internally.
What you make that mean, filtered through your beliefs, the internal dialogue that's going on in that moment, and the thoughts that you're having, will determine how you choose to feel. How you choose to feel will then determine how you choose to react, or let's hope respond.
Now feelings can continue, they can escalate, and they can change. Emotions are fleeting, so the important part here is to be able to understand, and know with certainty, what it is that you're actually experiencing, rather than allow the emotional memory of past situations to take over and for you to label it as being something that it's not and therefore react with a strategy that's not going to work.
So what I've done in the last few months is developed a new way of looking at the journey of navigating your emotions in this age of AI. Now, I haven't rewritten the book on emotional intelligence or social intelligence. What I've done is just made it a little bit more relevant for today's world, and to help us to understand, because we use different terms and have different situations to what we had back in the eighties when it first came on the scene.
So there's still the two elements that we need to deal with, and that is having an awareness and then managing the response. First we have emotional intelligence, which is about having awareness of yourself and managing your behaviour. And then we've got social intelligence, which is trying to understand what could be going on in the others and then managing the way that we interact and work with them.
I've come up with four steps for us to be able to navigate through both emotional and social intelligence using words that might make more sense to me. So for me, having awareness of myself is all about Clarity. Having clarity around what it is that I'm actually experiencing rather than what I think it could be or what I would normally label that based on my limited emotional vocabulary.
Then the management of that is all about Control. Controlling the psychological, the thoughts, and therefore the behaviour. In social intelligence, awareness is all about Connection. For me to be able to have that awareness, I need to be able to connect at a deeper level with people and try to understand, or at least want to understand and be curious about what they could be going through.
And then having Collaboration as the way of managing that journey together as two or more emotional beings. So, emotional intelligence is all about Personal Agency. I'm responsible for that. And social intelligence is about Shared Agency. It's not just me. It's the people that I'm working with, and that's why I love using the word collaboration to describe it.
So navigate your emotions, rather than ignore them or try to manage them. Now, if you are interested in knowing some more about how you could do this, I have something that I have developed for my company, People Builders, to help you to do that. And I'm going to give complimentary access to that until the end of October. And you'll find a link somewhere down, whether you're listening to this or watching this somewhere in the notes, that will allow you to go and look at not what other people are saying about you, but what you feel is going on for you in those four areas of clarity, control, connection, and collaboration.
And then it will give you a report that you can go through with some development tips and a deeper understanding of where you think you are, and where you might be able to shift and improve in those particular areas, so that you can do this thing well called Navigating Your Emotions.
Well, that's it from me for this month. Join me again as we continue to have this conversation and get involved. I'd love to hear your reflections and your insights, so join the conversation. I'll see you then.
