I recently stumbled upon information about emotional intelligence. At first you might be thinking it’s probably just another regurgitated version of something already stated in the past with fresh new words all over.
The truth is, you probably have not heard of this before. Emotional intelligence refers to the ability to manage relationships, including; friends, spouses, children, and family.
IQ (Intelligence Quotient) has no real deciding factor in your life. The only real thing it can predict is how well you might do in a scholastic setting. It does not change with age, and within reason you cannot increase it (at least not significantly).
Emotional Intelligence has room for improvement. You can increase your emotional intelligence.
The interesting thing here is that the core of your centralized neurological system is the emotional area of your brain. The base of your brain is where the emotion is directed from. Your thinking brain wasn’t developed until after the emotional brain (in order to understand this concept you’d have to believe in evolution, this doesn’t mean you don’t have to believe in God either). Our primordial ancestors had emotional driven responses long before thought was developed into our DNA structure of our brains. To this day empathy is learned long before analytical thinking. As soon as your born and introduce to a social setting, you begin learning empathy. A newborn baby hears another baby cry and that baby also begins crying, if you are holding that baby you begin trying to calm them down and assure them it’s okay. This is how empathy is learned. You’re teaching your child how to be empathetic.
It’s interesting to note that children that are raised in healthy and normal parenting situations tend to be very empathetic and sympathetic to their peers. If two children are playing and one of the falls, the other will attempt to calm them down. They’ll offer a blanket, or try to help them up, or even try to get their parents, etc. This is empathy that has been taught to them throughout their short lives.
On the other hand, a child that is abused and is in the same situation (see another child fall and is crying), the abused child will tell them to get up and if that doesn’t work, begins yelling at the child. If that doesn’t work they’ll resort to hitting them. This is learned behavior, a learned response. Teaching your children empathy can be a great way to make them more successful in life. It only takes simple communication with your child and really helping them realize their emotions and what they mean.
There was a study about temptation conducted with children around the age of 4. The children were each given a marshmallow and told that they could eat the marshmallow right then or if they could wait until the conductor of the test could return from a few errands they could have another marshmallow. 1/3 of the children ate their marshmallows right away, another 1/3 ate them a little while later (but before the conductor returned), and the other final 1/3 that didn’t eat their marshmallow were given an extra one when he returned. These children were followed up on 14 years later and something astonishing was found. The children who waited out the temptation for instant gratification were much more successful in school than those that did not wait. The scores of the students whom waited actually scored on average 200 points better than the children who did not wait! The difference is that of a child raised in a family with parents who have college educations and successful careers, as compared to those children who have parents whom didn’t graduate high school. That’s a staggering difference! All because they didn’t eat a marshmallow for 7-8 minutes?
The reason is pretty obvious, not wanting, or at least able to fight temptation for instant gratification yielded much better results. When you want something right now and you have to have it now, and then you don’t receive it causes impatience. Constantly seeking instant gratification (success in school, career, etc.) is kind of ridiculous when you think about it. Rome wasn’t built in a day, right? So this seeking of instant gratification is actually a fallacy and a terrible thing to follow. It makes achieving goals nearly impossible because you don’t pursue them long enough to reach them.
The kids who had the patience to wait, would continue to use this skill later in life. Giving them the upper hand when it comes to realizing the distance of their goals. To me optimism and patience kind of go hand in hand. A positive, or optimistic thinker is going to look at what most would consider a “failure” as a way to improve (Thomas Edison anyone?). The pessimist or negative person is going to chalk it up to inability to perform and create an excuse to not continue to pursue. Let’s think about what this could mean? Did you learn to walk the first time you tried? How about driving a car? Learning to read? The list goes on. So why would anything you do that is new be any different? Is it because you’re an adult and you should have learned everything already? How unrealistic is that? Realizing mistakes is an opportunity to improve, that is if you allow it to be. If you constantly beat yourself up about the mistakes you’ve made, rather than look at them as learning curves or experiences then you’ll never grow, you’ll never get better, you aren’t going to improve. You’ll stay static or you may just give up all together and isn’t that the opposite of learning? Learning conveys a process of receiving information that is new. How can you expect to know how to do something you’ve never done before? Don’t allow excuses (and your ego) to keep you from growing and learning. Be confident in anything you do, if you don’t know how to do it, practice! Within reason this is true, don’t set unrealistic goals and expect to achieve them. I mean don’t set out to make a time machine and spend every waking moment of your life on it, never achieve it and call me a liar (however if that makes you happy then by all means). Be realistic about your goals and set small goals as stepping stones along the way. They’ll help you realize your closer to your goal and it will give you a little confidence booster along the way.
Another thing I wanted to mention was you gut feeling. Apparently their is a direct physical correlation between your gut feeling and your emotional brain kicking in. It’s telling you something is right or not right based on factors calculated at incredible speeds, basically pay attention to your gut feeling (don’t let it make all of your decisions without actual contemplation) and you’ll find yourself making much better moral and healthy decisions. If you don’t feel comfortable doing something, don’t do it! If you think you should really go for something then do it! You can’t have a positive outcome without doing something about it. If you want something positive to happen, then you have to do something positive. Just like in physics, you get out what you put in (with about a 10% loss of energy, but we won’t get into that here), basically you get what you give. Actually that’s the reason I’m typing right now, the reason we have this blog, this website overall is because I made a decision (as did Adriane) to pursue something we felt we could do well with. Blogging about special needs, we decided to monetize our blog with ads, and if we don’t make a dime, what’s the downside? We’re able to help other parents with special needs children to lend some advice, or people interested and or want to learn more about special needs and parenting those children.
We felt we had something to offer, and so we took the positive route and set out to make a blogging site about our special needs children. It’s been very therapeutic for us even, and really helps generate a lot of positive thought. Slowly but surely we’re getting new visitors and this is exciting. We realize it’s going to take time to achieve popularity and any decent amount of revenue, but in the mean time (and if it never makes money) we’re able to offer a helping word and that’s what we wanted in the first place.
Learning to recognize your emotions and when and how they affect you is a huge step in emotional intelligence. You can’t control how you feel, but you can control how you react to those emotions. You can’t force anyone to change or do something you want them to do without their consent. That in mind, you can change yourself. That’s very powerful in my opinion.
Note: The information provided above is my own interpretation of Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence. I in no way infringed on copyright laws of the aforementioned author.