The Hidden Secrets of Emotional Intelligence Finally Revealed

Hey there, everybody, and welcome to this live presentation on developing emotional intelligence. I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. So let's start out with the basics. What is emotional intelligence? Well, let's start out with what are emotions? Emotions are neurochemical reactions based on schema from prior experiences and sensory input from the current experience in the present context. Oh, my, that is a lot of garbledygook. So let's kind of break it down. When we experience something, whenever we experience something, we form a memory, if you will. And that memory serves as a shortcut in the future for what to expect. The first time you went to the grocery store or to church or to the doctor, you may not have known what to expect, but after that first time, you. You kind of had an idea about what to expect, and it didn't mean that that was always going to happen, but you had a shortcut, so you had a little bit of a way to anticipate what was going on. Based on that anticipation, you may have an emotional reaction. So, for example, going to the doctor, if you had a bad experience at the doctor, then in the future, when you get ready to go to the doctor based on that process or bad experience, you might feel anxiety creeping up. You might start having that emotion of anxiety. Okay, well, as late adolescents, adults, we also have the ability to integrate information from the current experience in the present context. So I can go into the doctor's office now, and I know that I had a bad experience with a doctor when I was about 6, but my current doctor is very good at, in, in this case, drawing blood. But so I know that in the past that happened. And I still get a little twinge of anxiety when I've got to go get blood drawn. I'm like, oh, this is gonna suck. And then I remember, hey, but this doctor's office is very good at drawing the blood. So I've never had a problem. And my anxiety levels start to decline. My brain says, hey, don't need to be in fight or flight mode. There's no threat. So let's go on about our business. Now, the present context is also something to take under consideration because not only are we taking into consideration, we'll use, stick with that example, this current doctor, but we're also taking into consideration things that are going on with me. You know, I may react differently on Tuesday because I'm overtired and overwhelmed and over. Just over it. Whereas on Thursday, I may be having a good day and I can deal more easily with stressors as they come my way. And part of emotional intelligence is being able to recognize, you know, why do I react differently? Did I react differently on Tuesday than I did on Thursday to something that was very similar? Emotions prioritize what we pay attention to and motivate our behaviors. Happy emotions like curiosity and happiness and elation and love, those cause our body to secrete dopamine and norepinephrine, increase our focus and want us to do it again. Because they are pro survival, they're positive behaviors, and they produce a reward of some sort. Anger, anxiety. Those emotions are from our threat response system, those are from our fight or flight system. And they say, hey, there might be a threat going on, there might be a threat to you in this situation, so you need to wake up and pay attention to what's going on. So. So in that case, we get our glutamate, our norepinephrine, our cortisol, our stress hormones that rev us up and help us be more alert and more attentive. When we're in that frame of mind, we pay attention to the threats in the environment. We're not noticing the bunny rabbits that are hopping around on the side of the road. We're noticing the car that cuts us off. We're noticing other things that could be a threat. When we're in a positive frame of mind, we tend to be more able to notice the bunny rabbits on the side of the road. It doesn't mean we miss the threats, but it means we have a more open attention and we are able to focus on a wider variety of things. And as I said, emotions motivate our behaviors. If it's going to bring us pleasure, we're likely going to do it. If it's going to bring us pain or harm, we're likely going to try to avoid it. Emotional intelligence is your ability to identify the emotion, understand the emotion, where's it coming from? Why was it triggered? Why am I reacting this way at this time in this context? And then to regulate your own emotions. So that's actually a lot of stuff that we've got to do. Emotional intelligence also includes your ability to identify and respond to other people's emotions, whether it's your children or your friends or your co worker or even a customer at your office, being able to recognize what they're feeling. And most cases we're going to empathize in some way. Sometimes we're going to need to protect ourselves. Sometimes we are going to notice that somebody's acting and seeming kind of hinky and we are going to feel anxiety, and we may notice that they're extra stressed. And it tells us that we may need to take protective action. So emotional intelligence is being able to use those emotional cues to inform our decision making. There's a really. I really liked it. You may hate it, but I really liked the show Scorpion. And you can probably find it on one of the streaming services. But one of the things that's a running theme throughout Scorpion is that the. The main character is a genius, but he has zero emotional intelligence. He has zero ability to recognize his own feelings or empathize with others, and sort of the metamorphosis that he goes through trying to learn how to understand emotions. So let's talk about developing emotional intelligence. The first part is emotion identification. And I'm going to start out with talking about basically what you're wanting to do, and then I'll finish up with some ideas on ways you might be able to do it. The first step in emotion identification is to ask yourself, what do the following emotions feel like or look like for you? Happiness and elated. Joyous. It goes by a bunch of different synonyms. Generally, they mean roughly the same thing. Curiosity. That's another emotion. And I know I missed some emotions here. There's lots of emotions, but I was kind of hitting the big ones. Excited. Now, that's different than happy. Happy is, well, being joyous. Excited may mean eager. But interestingly, another word that we use for excited is anxious. And this can be really confusing to children to figure out what does anxious mean? If they're anxious about Santa Claus coming, if they're anxious about going to the theme park this weekend, how is that different than anxious about going to the doctor? You know, how does that. How does that work? So we do want to clearly define the words that we're using. Angry is another one of those words. Now, angry has a lot of different permutations or shades to it. We have straight up anger. But then there's also resentment, envy. Envy is anger at somebody for having something that you want. It sometimes is also called jealousy and guilt. Guilt is anger at yourself for doing something that you shouldn't have done or not doing something that you should have done. But anger is when you are angry with yourself over something. These will look a little bit different. When I'm angry at somebody, it looks a little bit different than when I'm angry at myself when I feel guilty about something. Anxious can also be called scared, worried, overwhelmed, depressed. We have sad, blue, burned out. Some people when they are depressed, they feel just Completely burned out. They can't. They don't have anything left in them to care anymore. They're just. They're. They're out of gas. They're done. Hopeless, helpless or powerless. And all of these are slightly different. And it's important, especially as adults, that we discover some of the nuances of these. For children, you can stick with the main ones. You know, happy, mad, glad, sad, you know, the big bullet points. But as we grow older, we want to learn more about these nuances. And then I put grieving here. Now, grief is an interesting one because it's a combination. Typically, the grieving process goes denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Now, people don't go through it linearly like that, but all of those emotions are involved. And a lot of times, denial is actually anxiety. You don't want to hear it, you don't want to believe it, because it's overwhelming. It's terrifying to think about whatever it is, is going to happen, or whatever it is has happened. So denial can be a form of anxiety. And then we all are familiar with anger and that sense of depression and hopelessness once we realize that the losses happened. Let me go back there for a second. You have what they look like for you, and that's the good place to start. What do these things look like for you? But then also what do they look like for others? And if you're a parent, this can be. Or a caregiver, this can be super helpful. Because we are not born knowing how to identify emotions. Children need help learning how to label their emotions. What is this that I'm feeling right now? And as parents, we can help them identify that. So what does it look like when Junior is scared? Sometimes kids, when they're scared, will withdraw. Sometimes they will act out. Sometimes they'll become oppositional. What is it that your particular Junior looks like when. When they are scared? And these are all things that can help clue you in to how they're feeling. So you can sit with them and say, it seems like you're feeling scared right now. Let's talk about what that. What's going on? What is making you feel scared right now? What. What's the threat? So we can start opening a conversation. It also helps us understand their behaviors. If we can connect their behaviors with particular emotions, we might be able to empathize and better understand exactly what's going on, what's motivating them. If they are refusing to get out of bed, they're not doing their chores. Are they being oppositional because they're Angry with us? Are they being oppositional because they're going through a phase, trying to assert their independence? Are they not doing these things because they're plumb out of gas? They are depressed. And yes, children get depressed. What's going on? And if we know what these emotions, how these emotions manifest in our children, it can, you know, clue us in a lot easier. What's the function? So we've identified what they look like in ourselves and in our significant others in our life. What is the function of each of these emotions? And this is something you can talk about with kids a little bit. But it's also important to recognize, why do I have this emotion? What is it trying to tell me to do? Remember, it motivates us in some way. How does each emotion impact what you pay attention to and your motivation? So when you're happy, what's the function of that emotion? Well, guess what? The function of that emotion is to say, awesome. You're safe, you're empowered. And if you just did something that made you really happy, do that again. Keep whatever conditions are going, going, because this is a good place to be if you're curious. The function of that emotion is to encourage you to grow, to encourage you to learn more things to say, hey, you know, let me take a look at this. Excited or eager about doing something. The function of that is to motivate you to get ready to do something you're anticipating based on that prior learning experience or what you expect to happen. You're anticipating having a joyous time, a good time, so you get excited about it. That's that anticipation, anger and anxiety fight or flee. Both of these emotions we experience in response to a possible italicized, bold, underlined possible threat. And I think it's really important that we recognize that not every time we feel angry, is there really a threat. Sometimes we are feeling we are reacting based on our prior experiences, our memories and our assumptions about what's going to happen, our expectations about what's going to happen, not the facts in the present moment. In other videos, I've talked about how anger and anxiety are like our smoke alarm. Just like your smoke alarm may go off and, you know, because something dripped off of the onto one of the burners when you were baking or something, there's no real threat. That's just, you know, annoying. Your emotions, your anger and anxiety are like that smoke alarm. They're saying, hey, there might be a problem, there's smoke, you better get up and see if there's a fire. There's possibility that there could be a threat to you. You need to look in this context at this time, is there actually a threat to you? And if not, okay, you can deal with that. If there is, okay, you can deal with that. Anger and anxiety. When we feel those emotions, our body is dumping copious amounts of blood sugar and stress chemicals to give us the energy to get up and figure out if there's a problem our body's not telling us. Hey, there's a threat out there. Why don't you just sit there and feel bad about it for a while? That's not. That energy needs to do something. It's trying to motivate you to protect yourself. When we feel depressed, that's our body either saying, hey, dude, you are burned out. You ain't got any more gas left to give. You need to take care of yourself or this situation you don't have control over. And you're going to have to adjust to a change which most of us don't. Like accepting powerlessness or if you're just sad or blue or depressed, it could mean that you lost something that was important to you. You may not be able to get it back. You may. I don't know. But depression helps us recognize when something important is gone. That way we can figure out how to move through that grieving process and grief. What is the function of that emotion? To help us move through to the point of acceptance where we can adjust our thinking and our lives based on what has happened and then emotional understanding. What triggers each emotion for you? So you've identified what it looks like, you've identified the function and what it motivates you to do. Now we need to look at, for you and for the significant others in your life, what triggers these emotions? You know, ideally, we want to trigger the good and mitigate the triggers for the bad. You can't eliminate the bad. You know, it's. You're going to have stress triggers, you're going to experience depression occasionally. Unfortunately, that's all part of the balance in life. The dialectics, the yin and the yang, whatever you want to call it. But being aware, because you can significantly alter your environment if you're aware of what triggers different emotions for you, what helps you feel happy, elated, joyous, curious, eager. You know, all those are wonderful. What things trigger anger, resentment, jealousy, guilt, anxiety, depression, grief. You know, it's important to recognize, and it may be stuff in your environment. It may be when certain things happen or certain people treat you a certain way. But knowing what triggers those emotions can help you be more mindful. When you're more mindful, you can notice when it's getting ready to happen or when it has happened so you can address it before it bubbles out of control. Another aspect to emotional understanding, and I mentioned this a little bit earlier, is recognizing your vulnerabilities. Now, vulnerabilities are different than triggers. Vulnerabilities are things that make you more likely to have difficulty dealing with triggers when they happen. So, for example, if I haven't gotten enough sleep or if I am feeling poorly, I have less tolerance for nonsense. For people who are being aggressive and sort of up in my face, that will trigger me more when I'm sleep deprived or not feeling well than it will on a day where, you know, I slept well, I feel fine, and I've got enough energy that I can deal with it. It's important to know what your vulnerabilities are. Some people can do just fine with only a small amount of sleep. Others not so much. Some people do just fine when they've got 16 things going on all at once or in big crowds. Other people, not so much. So what makes you more vulnerable? What drains your energy so you have less leftover and reserves to deal with life when you get triggered? Think about these things for obviously you, but also maybe your office mate, if you share an office with somebody, your housemate, whether it's your significant other, your spouse, your roommate, your child. What makes these people more vulnerable, especially to the. To the. What we're really looking at here are the distressful emotions. You know, we're typically not vulnerable to happiness. So what we're talking about is what makes the, the people in our lives and ourselves more vulnerable to being triggered when faced with triggers for distress and then emotion regulation. So you've identified it, you understand it now, how do you regulate it? And Linehan has a lot of great tools in dialectical behavior therapy. Hayes has a lot of great tools in acceptance and commitment therapy. And I have other videos about those things on the, on the Doc Snipes channel. But thinking just in general, what strategies can you use to increase the positive emotions in your life and tolerate, then mitigate the negative? I didn't say eliminate the negative because we can't do that. When unpleasant emotions come up, how can we tolerate them? How can we sit with them for a minute, then get into our wise mind and figure out how to improve the next moment? How can we mitigate it when it happens? So going through these things is important to figure out how we can do that in our lives. What do you need to do? And this is sort of a challenge I'm issuing to you. What do you need to do in order to increase happiness in your life? One of the things I do and you saw in the community, I was sharing videos of the birds that come to my bird feeder. I love birds. It's one of those things that just makes my heart happy. I love chipmunks, but we don't have chipmunks in this part of Nash, in this part of Middle Tennessee. So bummer to that. But when I want to feel happy, you know, sometimes I'll go and I'll watch videos of chipmunks or I'll go out to East Tennessee where I can actually see them. Emotional intelligence activities. Now, you can start out with the very basics with kids, like getting a chart that has different emoticons on it so they can identify, they can point how they feel. And this is really good for elementary, preschool age children who aren't getting super deep into that yet. They're still just trying to identify the basic emotions. So that can be really awesome. Another thing that you can do, and you can do it. Heck, I do it as an adult. This isn't something that you have to do only if you're a kid. But think about animals or other embodiments of emotion. What else could represent this feeling? And that really encourages you to think, what does it look like? So, for example, characters, and a lot of people, myself included, use Winnie the Pooh as a character example. Tigger is an example of excitement. Tigger is bounding with excitement constantly. And when I think of being excited, I want to be like Tigger. Piglet is always very worried. Piglet is very anxious. He's wringing his hands. And you can tell in the way he talks. He's just. He's very meek, he's very timid, he's very scared. And then Eeyore is depressed. He just doesn't see a lot of happiness and stuff. He puts one foot in front of the other. He's not, you know, clinically depressed, but he's not a happy, happy donkey. I thought about putting Rabbit here because Rabbit does tend to get angry quite often. But Rabbit has so many more dimensions. He tends to be a little bit more. Challenging to deal with. So when we're talking about just personifying a particular emotion, Tigger, Piglet and Eeyore, they're pretty good for anger. You know, some people, especially older children, adolescents, maybe even adults, they don't want to talk about Tigger, but they may Talk about things like trains or automobiles or, you know, what does anger look like? A bullet train. A bullet train is one of those trains that goes super, super fast. And anger can feel like that. It just barrels right on through. You can also relate it to musical instruments and noting the octave and the pace also impact the feeling. So a bassoon can feel curious, but it can also feel scary or depressed. It has a range there, the piccolo, that's the little tiny flute. That is a much higher pitch. So what feelings does that evoke in you when you hear a piccolo or a trumpet or a tuba or a xylophone? Remember the xylophones that we used to have when we were kids? Obviously the professional musicians have a much more fine tuned xylophone, but there's a big range of what a xylophone can do. You can look at pictures of yourself or others. You can, back in the day when we had magazines, you could do it online now, going through pictures with children and saying, what is this person feeling? You look at them, what do you think they're thinking? What do you think they're feeling? We do this a lot in my house with animals, but whatever, you can listen to music for the evoked feeling. Like listen to Peter and the Wolf or the Nutcracker. When I was creating this presentation, I found an amazing site. It's stockmusicsite.com and they have a page where all of the music is categorized by mood. How cool is that? And it's, I don't know, four columns of different emotions. There's probably 200 different emotion words there. I don't necessarily agree with all of the feelings that they associated with different, with different emotions. But that could be an interesting experiment or exercise to do to pull up an emotion like curiosity and listen to the different tracts and say, why do you think that tract was put under curiosity? Or what do you see in your mind when you hear this tract? You can do charades where somebody acts out an emotion and you've got to try to identify it. Apples to Apples is a board game where you have to match two things so you can have an emotion. And then you can have, for example, a picture of something and try to match the emotion in the picture or a statement. It takes a little bit of creativity, but you can work it. You can do a collage, what makes you feel anxious, angry, depressed, what have you. And each emotion gets its own collage. So people can start thinking about all of the different things. And I usually start with happiness. That make you happy. So you may have birds and bees and flowers and trees. I know it rhymes. And then mindfulness meditation and journaling, reflecting at the end of each day the emotions that you experienced, what that looked like, what that felt like when you experienced them, what triggered that emotion and why. Distress tolerance is another important tool. Thoughts. You want to list distress tolerant thoughts so you have them on hand so you're not sitting there telling yourself, I can't deal with this. What can you tell yourself that is distress tolerant? For example, this sucks right now. However, I will get through it. Remind yourself of times you've endured distress in the past. Address extreme words like, this will never end and everything is a total disaster. And that goes back to those negative statements or negative thoughts that tend to keep people stuck. Have activities that you can do to distract yourself. If the problem can't be resolved right away, that helps you. You don't want to just sit there with your distress for two weeks if you're waiting for test results or something to come back. You want to be able to identify your emotions and sit with your distress for a second. But then you need to figure out, okay, what do I need to do to improve the next moment? And sometimes these are activities. Guided imagery can also be helpful. You can envision yourself tolerating the distress, or you can envision the distress as something like a lion with a thorn in its paw. That may help you have compassion for whoever's angry, because when they're angry, they are reacting from a place of feeling a threat. So if you envision their anger as a lion with a thorn in its paw, it can help you have a little bit of compassion for them. You don't want to get too close to an angry lion, but you can have compassion. Jabberwock is another thing that you can imagine from the poem Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll. Now, the jabberwock can look really scary sometimes, but when I'm working with kids, I encourage them to we read the story and I encourage them to draw for me what they think a jabberwock looks like. And that can be a nemesis, if you will. But it's something that they can sort of externalize and figure out how to deal with and then sensations that are synergistic. If you're feeling angry. I know when, sometimes when I feel angry, I will put on my music really loud and I listen to some pretty hardcore metal, so, you know, it's synergistic. I'm not listening to Vivaldi, which is antagonistic. It is the opposite of what I'm feeling so sensations can be sounds, smell, sights, whatever. Regulation through M Beta. Mindfully notice and accept without judgment your emotion. First you've got to identify it and acknowledge it. Breathe. We've talked about this a lot. Breathe slowly to trigger that relaxation response. Evaluate the facts in context. Think about your options and then choose. Act using the option most likely to help you be the person you want to be and move toward the things that are important in your rich and meaningful life. And finally, when we're working with others, you're going to breathe. But present a presence that's calm, compassionate and confident. You don't want to go in like a know it all when somebody's already feeling threatened. But going in as a compassionate presence that's supportive, that wants to hear, that you know, wants to help, can communicate a lot to a person just from your nonverbals. Have an awareness of the situation. Notice what the words and non verbals of the person are communicating. If they are speaking really slowly, if they're speaking really quickly, what are they communicating? And again, sometimes this will. At this point you'll recognize that this isn't a safe situation. But most of the time you're going to be able to proceed and recognize. Remember their feelings are based on their reality and try to be aware of how you might be triggering them, even inadvertently. Maybe you look like somebody from their past they that you know brings up bad feelings. Or maybe you represent an organization that they have had bad dealings with. It's not you, it's what you represent to them. And their schema right now is triggering that threat response. Validate the feeling that you think that they're experiencing. This communicates understanding and respect. You don't want to say I understand because you may not, but I get the sense that you're angry. I get the sense that you're feeling really hopeless right now. That goes a long way because then somebody's like oh my gosh, you get it. Let me tell you, if they feel angry or anxious, then invalidation will likely intensify the perception of that threat. So if you ignore them, or worse yet, tell them that they're wrong or they're overreacting, it's probably going to intensify that distress. Once you've kind of met on common ground, explore ways to cooperate, compromise or synergize. And do this by asking, don't assume, don't tell them you need to do this or I will do this for you. Ask them what is it that I can do to help? Or how is it that we can make this work. Humans are not born with an emotional vocabulary. Depending on a person's culture, they may not be comfortable with feeling words, so metaphors can be helpful. Emotions impact our perceptions and our reactions to the world. And being able to identify, understand, and regulate our emotions can help us not only improve our interactions with others, it also helps improve our health because we're less stressed if we're able to identify those emotions, react and regulate them, and it can improve our productivity. If we are not stuck in this angry anxiety stress soup, we're able to think more clearly and be more productive. You can learn more.