Chapter 5-1: Identifying Your Emotions

Now that we know what emotions are, we’ll discuss emotional intelligence, break it down into 5 key skills, and then review those skills in greater detail. For clarity, each of the chapters will be numbered as 5-1, 5-2, and so on, to denote their relation to the major subject of emotional intelligence.

Emotional intelligence encompasses the 5 following skills:

• Knowing your emotions.
• Managing emotions, specifically negative ones like anger, anxiety, and sadness.
• Motivating yourself.
• Recognizing emotions in others, or empathy.
• Handling relationships.

Someone with high emotional intelligence can regulate her moods, control her impulses, motivate herself, empathize with others, and hope, within reason, that things will turn out all right. Emotional intelligence is really a meta-ability, an ability that determines how well we can put all our other abilities to use, including IQ.

Identifying Your Emotions

Knowing your emotions is really a form of self-awareness. Self-awareness is the ability to recognize a feeling as it’s happening to you. Being able to monitor our feelings as they’re occurring helps us understand ourselves and our psychology. Failure to understand our emotional responses leaves us at their mercy. The more certain we are about our feelings, the easier it is to make personal decisions.

Even mild shifts in mood can change the way we make decisions. Making decisions in a good mood creates a perceptual bias that makes us more positive in our thinking -- in other words, making decisions when you’re happy leads to happier decisions. And the opposite is true, too: making decisions when we’re in a bad mood leads to more negative thinking -- you’ll make worse, more negative decisions when you’re in a worse mood.

Being aware of our feelings essentially means we can mentally take a step back from what we’re feeling and observe it, instead of act on it right away. Though being aware of our feelings doesn’t guarantee we can change what we’re feeling, the two usually go together. Recognizing you’re in a bad mood usually means you’d like to get out of it.

Don’t equate self-awareness with a “Stop that!” mentality. Balance is the goal for emotions, not suppression. All feelings have importance and value. We just want to make sure our emotions match the situation at hand, and that we can control them when they get in the way of what we want to achieve.

• When a child hits another child out of anger, yelling “Stop that!” at them might stop the action, but it won’t stop the feeling: the angry child will still be angry. Awareness would be a response more like: “You’re hitting them out of anger. It’s okay to be angry, but it’s not okay to hit people. Why are you angry, and what else can we do about it?”

There are 3 general styles for dealing with emotions:

• Self-aware. This is the preferable style of dealing with emotions. These people are aware of their moods as they happen but can be mindful about how they deal with them. They’re more sure of their boundaries since they know how they’ll feel. They tend towards a positive outlook on life since they know they can manage whatever moods are thrown at them. They don’t dwell on bad moods and can get out of ruts faster. They can be mindful of their emotions and manage them successfully.
• Engulfed. People who deal with emotions this way generally feel lost and overwhelmed inside their emotional responses. They aren’t aware of what’s happening to them. Their moods shift often and overpower them. They do little to change their feelings, and feel out of control often.
• Accepting. These people are more clear on what they’re feeling, but they also don’t feel like anything needs to change. Usually this category falls into two smaller categories: people who are usually in good moods, so they don’t have any motivation to change their moods, or people who are usually in bad moods but are resigned to feeling like there’s nothing they can do about it, so they might as well accept it.

The goal is to be self-aware. But how can you tell if you fall into one of the other categories?

The book gives an example to help you figure it out. Imagine you’re on a flight. The pilot makes an announcement on the intercom that there’s turbulence ahead and everyone needs to return to their seats and fasten their seatbelts. The plane hits this turbulence and it’s the roughest you’ve ever experienced -- the plane is getting tossed around like a beach ball on the waves. What do you do?

• Are you the kind of person who buries themselves in a book, magazine, or movie, tuning out the turbulence and assuming it’ll be fine?
• Or do you anxiously review all the emergency protocols, watch the flight attendants to see if they’re panicking, obsessively listen to the plane to see if you can hear something go wrong?

If you fall into the first category, you deal with emotions by accepting them. If you fall into the second category, you get engulfed by your emotions.

As you become more self-aware of your emotions, you’ll discover that what once felt like anger might actually be a different, subtler feeling. Part of knowing your emotions is increasing your emotional vocabulary--words you use to specifically identify what you’re feeling. Goleman provides some useful words to increase your emotional vocabulary:

• Anger could also be: outrage, exasperation, annoyance, or violence.
• Sadness could also be: cheerlessness, self-pity, or despair.
• Fear could also be: concern, misgiving, or edginess.
• Enjoyment could also be: relief, pride, sensual pleasure, or mania.
• Love could also be: acceptance, trust, or kindness.
• Surprise could also be: shock, amazement, or wonder.
• Disgust could also be: contempt or disdain.
• Shame could also be: guilt, humiliation, or contrition.

There are obviously more emotions than listed here, but this is a good starting place to start to expand your emotional vocabulary.