Emotional intelligence measures how effectively we perceive, understand, evaluate, manage, express, and respond to our emotions and those of others. Think of emotional intelligence as emotional maturity. We can increase emotional intelligence by becoming more self-aware and choosing to grow in how we handle our emotions. The benefits of doing so extend into our wellbeing, relationships, and general life experience; our relationships in particular will become stronger. We are all called to increase our emotional intelligence as part of our self-development, and mindfulness and shadow work are a powerful combination of tools that we can use to support this.
Examples of High Emotional Intelligence
- Being able to share our feelings openly with others.
- Understanding how we and others are feeling in a particular moment.
- Accurately perceiving emotions, including their nonverbal signals.
- Understanding what triggers our emotions.
- Understanding how we and others are handling our emotions and what is needed to help with this.
- Taking responsibility for our negative feelings and emotional states, rather than blaming others.
- Letting go of blame and self-blame.
- Regulating our emotions and responding appropriately to them.
- Demonstrating impulse control (thinking before we automatically react).
- Processing unresolved emotions (anger, resentment, fear, grief, shame, and guilt).
- Feeling empathy for others.
- Embodying compassion towards ourselves and others.
- Helping ourselves and others to feel better.
- Accepting ourselves and our potential for emotional growth.
- Embodying healthy self-worth.
- Taking responsibility for our positive feelings and emotional states, so that they guide us into greater wellbeing and fulfilment.
- Choosing to embody positive emotional states and facilitating these in others where possible.
A simple example of low emotional intelligence is road rage, where a driver reacts with anger to another driver’s actions. Another example is the cycle of anger, resentment and blame that is particularly toxic in a relationship and can lead to unnecessary suffering, including the breakdown and breakup of the relationship. By increasing our emotional intelligence in these two examples, we are able to take responsibility for our emotional states and develop greater impulse control with mindfulness so that we don’t automatically react to others with anger and blame.
Don’t I Have the Right to Be Angry?
Anger itself is neutral and should be felt, processed, and expressed appropriately when it is triggered, rather than suppressed. As with any emotional experience, emotional intelligence will help us to be mindful of anger as an emotional reaction. Anger normally alerts us to an injustice, and its ultimate purpose is to empower us to respond to that injustice; the way we evaluate, process and express this anger reflects our level of emotional intelligence. When anger controls us and becomes toxic by manifesting as resentment, blame, hatred, vengeance, and violence, it is undoubtedly unhealthy reactivity and has become distorted through low emotional intelligence.
It is important to realise that sometimes our anger may have been triggered within us through our own misunderstanding of a situation, which can be exacerbated by our cognitive bias. If we have high emotional intelligence, we will stop and check if we have misunderstood the situation and if we have any cognitive bias. Asking for the opinion of others can sometimes help, but only if they have the required emotional intelligence and awareness of the situation.
Sometimes our anger may have been triggered by unhealed past wounds and unprocessed conditioning, which can cause us to react unfairly towards others and only causes suffering. Such anger calls for us to be emotionally intelligent, to come to centre and be aware of what has triggered such anger inside us and whether we are mistaken and being fair in our reaction towards others. If our past wounds and unprocessed conditioning have allowed the anger to be triggered, we need to attend to these with a longer term self-inquiry coupled with shadow work and healing.
Emotional Intelligence and Mindfulness
I define mindfulness as the practice of consciously directing our attention in the present moment, from the centre of our awareness, without reactivity or judgement. This centre of awareness is a step back from the contents of our mind, and when we are in this place we are no longer entangled in our emotions and thoughts and can embody metacognitive states that bring us greater presence, awareness, freedom, and empowerment.
Countless scientific studies show that mindfulness facilitates self-awareness, emotion regulation, and impulse control, which are key aspects of emotional intelligence. See for example Hill and Updegraff (2012). It is therefore no surprise that emotionally intelligent people are by nature more mindful (Jiménez-Picón, et al., 2021).
Mindfulness enables us to regulate our emotions and mature emotionally by increasing our present moment awareness and reducing our reactivity, resistance, and entanglement in unhelpful emotions and thoughts. The process of doing this is actually very simple: it involves bringing our attention back from the unhelpful emotions and thoughts, without reactivity or judgement, so that we can hold our centre of presence or metacognitive state. The simplicity of the process does not mean that it is easy to do, but the more that we practise it, the better we become at it.
Mindfulness has made its name in the mental health profession for being the central component of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (Segal, Williams, & Teasdale, 2002), which is used routinely for treating depression and mood disorders and preventing relapses. Whether we are suffering from anything clinical, or just have a tendency for low mood and negativity, mindfulness will enhance our emotional intelligence by promoting a more effective strategy for handling our negative emotions in place of rumination and reactivity. This strategy focuses on stepping back from our emotions and thoughts and switching into a metacognitive state, rather than trying to think our way out of a low mood by focusing on our problems and what is causing them.
Emotional Intelligence and Shadow Work
Shadow work, rooted in Jungian psychology, involves becoming aware of, integrating, and transforming the unconscious, disowned aspects of ourselves that form our “shadow self”. We often repress, deny, or hide these aspects from ourselves to avoid triggering fear, embarrassment, shame, or guilt, and to keep intact the ego’s persona.
When we repress and disown these shadow aspects, we do not take responsibility for them and often project them onto others, to attack if we think they are negative, or to idolise if we think they are positive. Blame can be a manifestation of such projection. We might, for example, say “you hurt me” to another person when we are responsible for hurting ourselves, just as we are responsible for all our reactive states. This projection and blame can lead to conflict. What we really need to do in order to grow emotionally in such situations is to take responsibility for our emotional states and for co-creating the hurtful situation, and this is where shadow work is especially useful.
Shadow work increases our emotional intelligence by helping us to become more emotionally aware, integrated, and present. It is supported by mindfulness, which helps to free us from our attachment to our ego and its persona, and helps to free us from our reactivity and resistance to our shadow aspects; we can then more honestly understand and appraise ourselves, challenge our egocentricity bias, and better commit to our emotional growth.
It is good to begin shadow work with a commitment to taking full responsibility for our experience, so that we can start to realise how we have created or co-created our difficult experiences with the involvement of our shadow aspects, instead of projecting responsibility for these difficult experiences onto others. Humility and self-acceptance are also useful as qualities to foster for successful shadow work as well as for emotional intelligence. None of us are perfect and neither do we need to be or appear to be. It is good to realise this and to realise that we all have a shadow self and an emotional egocentricity bias that can cause us to unconsciously distort our self-awareness and overlook our shadow aspects. With sufficient humility and self-acceptance, we can let our emotional flaws come to the surface for conscious integration, transformation, and healing.
We can practise shadow work in moments of mindful self-inquiry, or in an extended self-inquiry practice. For more on this, read my posts “The Art of Self-Inquiry” and “How to Release Negative Patterns Effectively“.
Emotional Intelligence Frees Us From Stuck Emotional States
Emotional intelligence teaches us that our emotions don’t have to be passive experiences or programmed reactions that control us and render us a victim of our negative moods. By being more mindful, we can learn to grow beyond our negative emotions and clear their triggers and our vulnerability to them. By disentangling and stepping back from our automatic emotions and thoughts, being more present, and changing our perception, we can choose to create and experience positive emotional states.
The ability to step back from our emotional patterns and switch state is always possible, but how easily we recognise this and put it into practice depends on the strength of our centre and our metacognitive neural networks. These can be built with a deliberate and consistent mindfulness practice. For more on this, read my post The Power of Metacognitive States.
Sometimes we might stay stuck in negative emotions because we are blaming someone else for them rather than taking responsibility, and this will quickly turn into a negative downward spiral because negative emotions and blame feed off each other. If we are emotionally intelligent we will observe our state and take responsibility for our life and our reactions.
Another reason for staying stuck in negative emotions is thinking that we need to honour them and our dark side. This belief might be confused with shadow work. Of course, we always need to feel our emotions and learn from them and what has triggered them, but choosing to stay stuck in them does not serve us. We always have the responsibility to release ourselves from them and to choose a more positive and empowering emotional state. This is emotional intelligence.
Generally, the reasons for failing to process emotions are:
- Not stepping back from them.
- Not taking full responsibility for them.
- Blaming someone else for them.
- Lacking awareness of them.
- Resisting feeling them.
- Denying their existence or influence.
- Believing it is noble to honour them by staying stuck in them.
- Believing it is okay to put up with them.
- Believing nothing can be done about them.
When emotional intelligence is low, it is no wonder that people distract themselves and numb themselves out. Drug and alcohol use, and other forms of addiction are simply masking the underlying issue of unprocessed negative emotions.
Emotional Intelligence and Mindful Communication
Understanding and expressing our emotions, and understanding the emotions of others, are key expressions of emotional intelligence that require us to practise mindful communication in our relationships. In particular, we need to be practising active listening, emotional awareness, empathy, and genuineness. These mindful communication skills help us to:
- Listen with our full attention and presence in order to understand others more fully.
- Be centred in our hearts so that we can relate with greater compassion and empathy.
- Be more aware of the emotions of ourselves and others without reacting to them with attachment or aversion.
- Express how we really think and feel, without being entangled in guilt or fear.
- Embody our true self.
By communicating mindfully in this way, we can grow emotionally and clear the unconscious reactivity and projection that limit our emotional intelligence.
Empowering Emotional Intelligence
We owe it to ourselves and each other to consciously work on developing our emotional intelligence so that we can enjoy greater freedom, fulfilment, and happiness in our lives and more healthy, rewarding relationships. To do so, we need to:
- Recognise the value of developing our emotional intelligence.
- Build up our self-worth to honour our greater positive potential.
- Be responsible for ourselves.
- Begin with an act of will.
- Develop a strong centre and foundation for emotional growth by practising mindfulness.
- Get empowering support from others.
Empowering emotional intelligence in others is at the heart of the self-development work that I do with my clients. No matter what our life experiences and stories have been, we all deserve to benefit from increased emotional intelligence so that we can turn a new page in our lives and fulfil our life potential, while honouring our relationships . Book a free, empowering Guidance Call with me and we will discuss where you are at and what you need to be doing to supercharge your emotional intelligence.
References
Hill, C. L. M., & Updegraff, J. A. (2012). Mindfulness and its relationship to emotional regulation. Emotion, 12(1), 81-90. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0026355
Jiménez-Picón, N., Romero-Martín, M., Ponce-Blandón, J. A., Ramirez-Baena, L., Palomo-Lara, J. C., & Gómez-Salgado, J. (2021). The Relationship between Mindfulness and Emotional Intelligence as a Protective Factor for Healthcare Professionals: Systematic Review. International journal of environmental research and public health, 18(10), 5491. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18105491
Segal, Z., Williams, M., & Teasdale, J. (2002). Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for depression: A new approach to preventing relapse. Guilford Publications.
