What is the definition of emotional intelligence and how can you develop yours?

From a website dedicated “to communicating scientific information about emotional intelligence” I found these definitions:

Emotional intelligence represents an ability to validly reason with emotions and to use emotions to enhance thought.

They also say: a more formal definition is...the capacity to reason about emotions, and of emotions to enhance thinking. It includes the abilities to accurately perceive emotions, to access and generate emotions so as to assist thought, to understand emotions and emotional knowledge, and to reflectively regulate emotions so as to promote emotional and intellectual growth.

So now we have a formal definition which I might translate this way: emotional intelligence allows you to know what you are feeling, understand others' feelings and to be able to use those feelings to promote your own emotional and personal development.  

That doesn’t sound too hard, does it? Well, actually for most people it is quite difficult. It is only easy for us when we are babies because emotional intelligence is a natural part of being a human being. And just as intelligence (called by us IQ) is a measure of our intelligence capacity so too is EQ a measure of our emotional capacity.

While intelligence can be affected by a person’s environment, even more so a person’s EQ can be affected by a person’s environment. To make that perfectly clear: if as children you were not allowed or supported in continuing to express your emotions as a baby so easily does, it is as if a little plug was put in some part of your emotional expression ability. For example, you are two years old and you want to play with the water in the toilet. Mommy says “no” and picks you up and moves you away – probably closing the door of the bathroom so you cannot get back to the water. You are pissed off. But Mommy does not have time for you to have your way right now. She distracts you or is not happy with you in some way. Most likely she does not encourage your anger but likely tries to get you to be a “good little girl”.

This simple example shows you how this happens. Children often are forced to not feel or not show they feel what they actually do feel – particularly if it is anger, hurt or sadness. So those old emotions get stuck and begin to be much of the driving factor in how you live your life. They create your unconscious beliefs about yourself and your world.

The way to develop your emotional intelligence is to work with someone who can:

• Offer you tools to rid yourself of the old stuck emotions.
• Help you bring the false beliefs about yourself and the world to light.
• Provide you with tools to keep your emotional and personal growth growing for the rest of your life.

I have been working on just this very thing myself for about 30 years and from someone who didn’t even know I had stuffed a lot of unexpressed anger and who most of the time didn’t know what I was feeling and felt often very disconnected to myself, I am now considered an emotional intelligence expert. It takes work but the results are amazing.

Oftentimes people are very afraid of this kind of work because they believe they might be overwhelmed and not be able to handle the emotions that come up. However, if you find the correct help, you will discover that that isn’t the way it works at all. Somehow our own healthy desire keeps the old stuff coming up at a rate that you will be quite able to handle.

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