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How to be emotionally intelligent: Talk to yourself
We often struggle with our emotional ups and downs, during a deadline, while taking on a project, confronting the boss, the partner, in all sorts of life situations. And the only way to better at it is to either mess up seven times and learn seven times or make your emotions your ally.
To be emotionally intelligent is to make your emotions your ally, to be aware of the mood swings as they happen and control them without shoving them downwards and manning up. And the way to do it is through understanding why they happen instead of denying them. I will give you an example. I was media training some victims of an unfair visa system(UK visa system)the other day for my volunteer work with an NGO which works with refugees. I was trying to get them to speak their cause and tell their story to those who will listen i.e. the MPs and the journalists. And as I was speaking to them they told me that they were very nervous. It was their stories, stories that had impacted their lives but they were scared of stage fright.
Stage fright happens to the best of us and this is one of the places where emotional intelligence becomes a valuable tool. What I told her was your body was preparing for going to war, and this was the nervousness, do not worry, your body knows what you are doing trust yourself. Even if you have a stage fright everyone will…
