Stop Letting Your Emotions Control You (Most Replayed Personal Development Wisdom Snippets) | #593

[Agi Keramidas]
Welcome to Personal Development Mastery Podcast. This is another snippet of wisdom where I select the most insightful moments from previous episodes. Today's snippet is from my conversation with Robin Hills, a thought leader in emotional intelligence.

It is about being smart with our emotions. Let's dive right in.

[Robin Hills]
This term emotional intelligence is being bandied around quite liberally, and a lot of people do use it, and a lot of people think that they understand what it is, but may not necessarily have a full understanding of it. I'm still learning. But to put it into a very neat summary statement that people can take away, emotional intelligence is about being smart with your feelings.

It's about combining your thinking with your feelings in order to make good quality decisions and build up authentic relationships. Let me give you a very pertinent example, Agi, that I don't think a lot of your listeners will like to hear, but I think it's absolutely vitally important. Low levels of emotional intelligence occur because people have low levels of impulse control, and it's what you were talking about in terms of controlling your impulses.

Yet I think a lot of people are not realizing how low their emotional intelligence and their impulse control is. The example I will give you is everybody seems to be surgically attached to their mobile device, and the minute it pings, it doesn't matter if they're in a very important, in-depth conversation, there's this urge, this impulse to look at the phone. Now, I'm here with you.

If my phone happens to go off, I will completely ignore it because I'm working in the present moment with my friend Agi, and we are having a conversation, so that has to be the focus of my attention. The number of times that I've been training, or I've been in meetings with somebody, or I'm talking to somebody, and what goes on in their mobile phone is far more important than what I am saying or communicating with them. The number of times that happens is an infinite number of times.

It seems to happen all the time, and that is frightening. That is frightening. If we go back to our definition of emotional intelligence, being smart with our feelings, being smart with our emotions, when we are feeling the intensity of an emotion, what we should be doing is saying to ourselves, what is the data that I am being given here around my environment that is causing me to feel the way that I'm feeling?

Now, it's all very easy for me to sit here in the comfort of the space that we're talking in now, Agi, and to say all these things. In the intensity of the event, it can become very, very hard, but I think it's important to determine why you are feeling that emotion. If you're feeling angry, why are you feeling angry?

Well, you're feeling angry because someone has transgressed one of your core values, and that usually is the reason why you are feeling angry. So, the important thing is to determine what it is that you need to do to utilize that anger to right the wrong, to have the discussion, to have the debate, to do what it is that you need to do to move yourself forward, to make quality decisions, and to build relationships. If you're feeling sad, why are you feeling sad?

Often, it's because you have lost something very dear to you, and there's something of real value, and it might be anything. It could be a dear friend, a member of your family, or it could be that you're going to be losing some time, or you're going to be losing some money. What is it that is driving this sadness?

If you can answer that question, it will help you in terms of regulating and working with your emotions. And if I can give you another example, a very real example, everybody experiences a degree of anxiety before they're about to go into a meeting, before they're going to be interviewed on a podcast with Agi. Recognize that that emotion is there for a reason.

It doesn't feel very pleasant, but the reason why you're experiencing that emotion is because we are preparing ourselves mentally and physically for something which will be a challenge for us. And to actually welcome that emotion, rather than to try and fight it, I think is an important part of utilizing anxiety in an emotionally intelligent way. And I heard a wonderful phrase years ago, somebody said that if you have butterflies in your stomach, what you ought to do is to learn to get those butterflies to fly in formation.

And I think that's a wonderful phrase to sum up the way in which people should work with their anxiety.

[Agi Keramidas]
Thank you for listening. You will find a full conversation with Robin Hills in episode 290. The link is in the episode description.

If you enjoy this podcast, can you think of one person that would find it useful and share it with them? Thank you. Until next time, stand out, don't fit in.