Improve Your Emotional Intelligence

Welcome to today's video. Today I'm going to teach you how to get better with your emotional intelligence so that you can improve your life, your relationship to yourself, but also relationship to other people as well. Let's dive in. You know, when we look at being a human, what's great about being a human and what makes humans different than almost all other animals that are on the planet is our depth of emotions. Now, animals do have emotions. For years, many scientists thought they had no emotions. But the difference between us and most animals is that we have a much deeper level of in depth to our emotions. And the other difference is how we can imagine a fake scenario in the future and get an emotional reaction about that fake future in this moment right now, whether it's a good future that we're imagining, whether it's a bad future that we're imagining. So we can think about how amazing that is. We can think about, about something. A future that doesn't exist yet. And it can make us feel something right now. That's the depth of our emotions that we can feel. And so today we're gonna talk about something called emotional intelligence, which is basically just the ability to identify and understand and manage your emotions, both of your emotions and the emotions of others. And so this is really important for everyone listening. If you're a parent, oh my God. This is super important for you to understand because if you don't fix this within yourself, you're gonna pass it onto your children. So, so this is important as a parent. If you're a spouse or you have someone you're in a relationship with, this is extremely important to understand. If you're a business owner, this is extremely important for you to understand. This is a skill set that everyone who's listening should want to get better at so that you can make better decisions, you can have better relationships, you can get better with your conflict resolution. And you need to learn how to understand and resolve your, your emotions. Not act like they don't exist, but how to understand, okay, why am I feeling this way? And if I want to feel this way, great. If I don't want to feel this way, how can I resolve these emotions instead of just sweeping them under the rug like most people tend to do, but actually working through them and understanding them. And there's a lot of experts that say that emotional intelligence is more important than cognitive intelligence when it comes to overall success, overall happiness and, and overall well being. And so a lot of people are trying to improve their cognitive intelligence and put more information in their brain. But in reality, if you want to be more successful, more happy, and have a better wellbeing, you need to actually improve at your emotional intelligence. But unfortunately, unlike iq, emotional intelligence is not something that people really focus on. Most of the time people are like, oh, I want to get smarter, I want to get more intelligent. But yeah, what about emotional intelligence? And so when you look at it, emotional intelligence is something that you can improve. IQ really isn't something that you can improve. And so if you can improve it, it is kind of a skill set, which is why I call emotional intelligence a skillset. And so we're gonna go through basically a three step process to help you develop your emotional intelligence. So the first one is self awareness is to understand yourself, understand your emotions. I feel like I talk about self awareness pretty much every episode at some point. And the reason why is because I think that it might be the most important skill for someone to have. Because you cannot change something that you're not aware of. So if I'm not aware of how my emotions are affecting me and affecting other people around me, then I can't change it. But as soon as I become aware of something, well then now I can change it. On top of that, I feel like there's so much technology and so much stimuli and there's phones and there's TVs and there's Netflix and there's social medias and there's ads everywhere that most people have just become so unaware of themselves because they're always focusing on the outside. They're always focusing on what's going on around them, around their phone and around their TVs and work. Very few people, I feel like nowadays, take time to actually look in the mirror and go within. And so in turn, because of the fact that there's so few people that are doing that, a lot of people are very just unaware of themselves. And if you're unaware of your deep unconscious reactions, then you're not gonna be able to fix them. So many people are just out there just unaware of their deep unconscious reactions and actions. And they don't know how it's affecting themselves. They don't know how it's affecting other people around them. And it's kind of like I always say, like when you're in the jar, you can't read the label. You've gotta get out of the jar every once in a while and look back at yourself and say, huh. So I would recommend just every once in a while, just ask people that you really trust, people that you love. Whether it's friends, family members, whatever it might be for feedback, just be like, hey, what do you think I need to work on? What do you think are my downsides? What do you think is good about me? What do you think is bad about me? How can I get better? Are there, you know, triggers or emotions you think I need to work through? And they might be able to give you some insights about your emotions that you are completely unaware of. And when they say it, you'll go, oof, that hurts. But it resonates. So it must be something I need to work through. So that is the first thing is you need to be get, you need to get really good at your self awareness to start to understand yourself because you can't change anything that you're not aware of. The second thing after self awareness is self regulation. Okay, now that I am aware of my emotions, how do I regulate my emotions? Some people out there listening have really short fuses or you know, you have a really long fuse, but then when you blow up, you blow up. And so we're not taught how to self soothe by our parents. You know, we're not really. Most people are not taught emotions by their parents at all or very well. A lot of people who are angry are angry because your parents were angry. So self soothing is really, really natural. Like babies naturally suck on their thumbs, they naturally want a pacifier, and when they do, they calm down so much it's crazy to see young children, what do they have to help themselves soothe? Sometimes they have a stuffed animal they bring around, sometimes it's a blanket that they carry around. As adults. We still need to self soothe. I just don't recommend that you suck your thumb or bring a blanket around with you everywhere you go. Right? We're not taught how to do it because frankly, if I'm being completely honest, most people's parents are not good at their own emotions and they don't know how to work through them. And it's not their own fault. They just, this isn't something that was taught, you know, like my parents parents had to go through the, you know, Great depression. Like that's they weren't really thinking about their emotions when they were trying to survive and trying to eat and feed their family. Right? So I want you to understand that. So it's like maybe we should just become the more evolved generation at this point in time and start figuring out how to self soothe ourself. Because maybe our parents didn't really understand emotions because they were never taught by their parents how to understand emotions because their parents never taught them. And it's just a vicious cycle until somebody decides to break it, which hopefully is us. And so self soothing is just a practice to be able to get yourself from a heightened state, pissed, emotional crying, whatever it might be, to a calm and relaxed state. It is being able to regulate your emotional state regardless of whatever circumstance are happening. Okay, and so how do we really start to develop this self soothing and start to work through this? Right. First thing you wanna do is get better at pausing before you react. When you feel a really strong emotion, especially a negative one, don't react immediately. And you might say, oh my God, Rob, but I don't know how to not react. Well, there is a space, there is a second. Like Viktor Frankl, who was a psychologist. He wrote an incredible book called Man's Search for Meaning. I recommend everyone read it. And he was an incredible psychologist who live through living in Nazi prison camps. He lived in Auschwitz. He saw the worst things that could possibly happen to humans. And what he says is, he has, my favorite quote of his says, between stimulus and response, there's a space. And in that space lies our freedom and our power to choose our responses. And in our response lies our growth and our freedom. So when you notice, oh my gosh, I'm about to feel an emotion, I can feel it ramping up. Pause for a second. When you start to notice your state changing, the first thing you want to do, I say it all on the podcast. If you've been listening for a long time, you could probably answer this for me. First thing you want to do, breathe. Our breath rate, the depth, the pattern is the first thing to change when your emotional state changes. There's a Japanese study that researchers at Oshawa University in Yokohama found that six deep breaths over a 32nd period can help you lower your blood pressure and, and slow down your heart rate. So Dr. Herbert Benson Harvard Medical School coined the phrase something called a relaxation response. And that relaxation response that our body has is triggered and stimulated through deep conscious breathing. So it's just in through the nose, out through the mouth, in through the nose, out through the mouth. So that's what I would recommend is as soon as you notice your state starting to change, go in and start breathing and say, okay, I'm gonna calm myself down. It's not saying I'm going to ignore the anger or ignore the sadness. It's I'm going to breathe first so that I can go into the anger, I can go into the sadness with a little Bit more curiosity and start to say, oh, yeah, I'm just gonna. I'm gonna calm myself down before I let myself get, you know, ramped up and blow up. There's some people I know that. That they just basically black out when they get mad. Okay, well, hey, it'd be a really good idea for once you start to feel that ramp up. Maybe you breathe so that you don't go into that. Right. Another way that you can really start to train yourself to go from heightened state to calm state is during workouts. If you work out like I do, this is I'll work out really hard during sets, and I'll do this when I'm at my house and I'm alone and my trainer's not there. And then what I'll do is I'll set 60 seconds for a rest timer. And that's pretty average. But what I'll do is I'll close my eyes and I'll take deep breaths, and I try to calm. So I'll get really heightened, and I'll calm myself, and I'll put on 60 seconds. I'll close my eyes, and I'll breathe, and I'll try to bring my heart rate and my breath rate slow as possible. I try to calm myself. And so I'm practicing heightened state to calm. Heightened state to calm. And so working out is actually a really good strategy for emotional training and regulation as well. So that's how you kind of start to get better at it. And then the third part is adaptability. You need to become flexible with your emotional responses. And so emotional strength is like a muscle. The more that you train it, the stronger that it gets. So you don't try to change the world around you. You try to get better at reacting to the around you. Most people don't get this. Most people see the world and they point out there and they say, this world needs to change, and those people need to change, and they need to change their beliefs. No, no. You can try to change the world, and you can try to make good changes, and I'm okay with that. But it's not about looking out into the world, just being like, the world has to be different. It's about getting better at reacting to the world around you. I bet that you can think of someone who, you know that no matter what happens to them, they're almost always calm. That's a skill set. That is a muscle that has somehow been developed over years and years. And so what you got to get better at is going, okay, yeah, the world is crazy. There's a lot of change. There's always change. That happens. The only constant in this world is change. So instead of resisting it, maybe I can just use that as just an opportunity to grow. Because change can lead to new opportunities. It can lead to learning. It can learn to lead to development of yourself. So embrace change. Emotional.