The brain has two systems: one for tasks (trained in school) and one for social skills (trained at home). Since 96% of families are emotionally dysfunctional, most adults never learn emotional competence. But these skills can be taught: empathy, listening to non-verbal cues, self-awareness, de-escalation.
Chapters
So I want to talk about why we don't naturally develop emotional competence and we have to be taught how to be emotionally competent. It turns out that our brain has two different systems and we're really good at solving problems because we've trained our brains to be good at that, but we're not good at relationships because we haven't been trained how to be emotionally competent. So there are two systems. First, there is the task-focused system in the brain, and then there's the social system in the brain. Our educational system and our whole society is based on the task-focused system. So when we start learning in preschool all the way through graduate school, we're doing things like getting knowledge acquisition. We're learning rules, procedures, and algorithms. We're learning critical thinking processes. We're learning how to reason. We're learning about inductive and deductive logic. We're learning about probability analysis and quantitative and qualitative analyses and the scientific method. All of these different ways of learning and ways of thinking train the task-focused system. And that's what education is all about. Now, our society for thousands of years has depended upon the family unit for developing the emotional side of our brains. But unfortunately, 96% of all families are emotionally dysfunctional. And that means that 96% of us, including me, came out of our families into adulthood emotionally dysfunctional because our families are incapable of training us how to be emotionally incompetent. So what are the skills that we need to learn in adulthood in order to be emotionally competent? Well, that gets us to the social system. We have to learn skills like empathy. We have to learn what emotions are. And you know something, we're not born with emotions. We create emotions at about 18 months of age. So we have to learn how to do that. We have to learn how to listen and not just to words. We have to listen to the entire communication that another human being is directing towards us. You know, only 94% or rather 7% of a human communication is verbal. 93, 94% is nonverbal. And yet we are not trained how to pay attention to that nonverbal part of the communication. We have to learn how to reflect what other people are saying. We have to learn how to de-escalate ourselves when we're angry and upset, and we have to learn how to de-escalate other people. We have to learn how to increase our emotional competence so we can have high emotional intelligence. We need to learn emotional self-awareness, which most people don't have. And most importantly, we need to learn how to reprogram our childhood triggers because we're taught things in childhood that do not serve us well in adulthood. So this is why, one, we're not emotionally competent as adults, and two, what we need to do in order to develop that emotional competency. Well, the good news is we can learn all these skills, and I've actually created some online courses. I'll put links in the comment below that if you're interested in developing your emotional competency, this is a really great place to start. So have a great day. We'll see you soon.
