“Emotions are not reactions to the world, they are your constructions of the world.”-LISA FELDMAN BARRETT
Emotions play a central role in our lives for better or for worse. No matter how successful we are in many aspects of life , one single unmanaged emotion and your entire thinking process is in jeopardy. It requires to learn to manage our emotions to navigate with an even keel through life’s ups and downs. We will explore how to move towards emotional regulation and even step into the soul of emotion.
In 1990s ,Peter Salovey from Yale University described emotional intelligence (EI) as “The ability to monitor one’s own and other’s feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions.”
Daniel Goleman popularised EI and classified into 5 components;
- Self -awareness
- Self-management
- Motivation
- Empathy
- Social skills
The theory of how emotions work has been debated for decades by psychologists, neuroscientists, philosophers, and evolutionary biologists.in (http://biologists.in/) essence some postulate that emotions are innate, that a particular area of the brain is associated with a particular emotion, while recent research supported by neuroimaging technologies reveals that our mind connects different parts of our brain to make sense of emotions based on past experiences.so our emotional understanding is based on past experiences and emotions.
Now, if they are constructed they can also deconstructed .our emotional concept can be tweaked and changed by new experiences.
Here we can work on these 5 components for the regulation of our emotions. Emotions are energy in motion. Regulated energy construct and irregulate energy destruct.
Awareness – self-awareness, awareness of others, and awareness of the environment is the core 5 component of EI.
It means being aware and adapting to the situation. The quality of awareness and the capacity to adapt is very helpful in managing emotions that have arisen in the past ,that are affecting our behavior in the present. Let me give you an example. A while back I had to go for a meeting. I was running late, drove fast and had a minor accident. It (http://accident.it/) shocked me. The next day, I had to drive, and the fear of driving was there. I drove slowly, but manage to reach it safely and the next day,it was the same.
After a month I nearly forgot about the fear so, my concept of fear evolved based on a series of new “past “experiences, but sometimes we are entangled in a vicious cycle where awareness plays an important role. We have to create awareness for certain patterns of our and others’ emotions in order to handle them properly. After identifying the pattern we have to learn to manage it by responding not reacting.in (http://reacting.in/) this process motivation, empathy, and social skills help us.
Emotions have their own theories and their solutions. With practice of these 5 components, we can have ways to make sense of emotions and how to respond to them.
We can also do a simple exercise just note down the positive experiences, noting down our positive experiences and enriching our vocabulary of positive emotions, supporting the weaving of a positive mindset and a happy life.
