Becoming Emotionally Intelligent

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,: 2023

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You can learn more about Patrick King. At his website at bitly slash PK consulting. In the previous chapters, we looked at ways to be better conversationalists, how to cultivate real empathy and perspective, and how to become more mindful of meta-language—your own and other people’s. Becoming more emotionally intelligent requires that we also have a sophisticated understanding of what emotions actually are, how to read them, how to feel and label our own experiences, and how to validate them in the people around us. Many people mistakenly think they are emotionally skilled when they are really just emotional! However, having emotions and developing emotional mastery are two very different things. It’s a little like the difference between every human possessing a heart that can pump blood, whereas only a few humans are trained cardiologists who understand exactly how that heart works and how to fix it when it goes wrong! In other words, emotional intelligence is seldom a skill we automatically possess, but something we need to consciously develop.

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If we can, however, it can completely supercharge our ability to connect with others and put our communication skills on the next level. The Emotions Wheel and Learning to Label Daniel Goleman, the author of Emotional Intelligence, claims that so-called EQ is actually a collection of four separate skills: 1. empathy 2. social skills 3. self-awareness 4. self-control We have looked at empathy and social skills, and now we can consider the third skill, self-awareness, and how to use the Emotion Wheel to strengthen it. The Emotion Wheel is a tool that asks you to dig a little deeper beneath surface experiences, whether they’re your own or other people’s. It’s a way to fine-tune our “emotional literacy” and get a richer and more nuanced understanding of the rich palate of possible emotions. According to Goleman (and many biologists and evolutionary psychologists), there are only a few basic human emotions: sadness, disgust, happiness, anger, surprise, and fear. These experiences are so universal that other animals experience them too, and it’s unsurprising, since they relate directly to our survival and speak to our most fundamental experiences of being alive. Think of these emotions like primary colors. There may be a few disagreements about exactly how many there are, but most of us can agree that these cover the bases!

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But of course it’s not always as simple as this. In the center of the emotion wheel are the primary emotions, but these can vary in intensity. The closer to the center of the wheel, the stronger the emotion, and the further out, the weaker. So, when describing how you feel in an utterly terrifying situation, you might say horrified, frightened or scared. Dialing this emotion down, however, gives us subtler feelings like anxious, rejected, or threatened. Even further out on the wheel and we get subdivisions of these feelings. For example, rejected can branch off into excluded or persecuted. Different versions of the Emotion Wheel exist, and some of them capture the fact that we can experience a blend of adjacent emotions.

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Just as the colors on a color-wheel blend into one another seamlessly (and blue-green exists between blue and green), the overlap of, say, sad, and disgusted might be something like embarrassed. As with all psychological models and frameworks, it’s worth remembering that this is just a map of reality, not reality. You may find yourself disagreeing with the way some of the emotion words are characterized, but the idea is to get a systematic hold of more and more nuanced emotional expressions. If you think that there really isn’t any difference between, for example, curious and inquisitive, or think that you could divide the emotion betrayed into at least three separate components, then congratulations—you are clearly developing your own sense of emotional discernment! Use the Emotion Wheel to pinpoint exactly how you (or possibly another person) feels. Since it can be difficult to identify the precise feeling all at once, start with “primary color” and work your way out. Do you feel mainly happy, sad, scared, and so on? Then, move outward on the wheel and see if you can refine the feeling you’ve chosen a little further.

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You might start out feeling a vague and ill-defined sense of anger, but on closer inspection you realize this is actually a feeling of humiliation, which can be further refined to feeling disrespected. But you don’t need to stop there. If you also feel other primary emotions, pick those, too, and identify as many emotion words as you need to in order to capture your current experience. Some Emotion Wheels will be laid out logically so that emotional opposites are positioned opposite one another. If you’re really stumped, try to identify what you’re not feeling, and work from there! Now, the Emotion Wheel is not merely an intellectual exercise. Put into practice, it’s something that can help you clarify how you feel, which can then improve your communication and help you better understand what you want, what your boundaries are, and how best to communicate them. On the other hand, learning to label feelings means you are quicker to see expressions of emotions in others, which makes you far more likely to understand them and work with them, rather than have that emotion be a source of conflict (we will look at emotional validation in the next section).

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1. Anger At work, a fellow employee barges in to take credit for work that you’ve actually done. Immediately you feel bad, but the negative emotions are so powerful that you can’t quite put into words what you’re experiencing. You check the wheel to try to get a handle on the experience and build some self-awareness. You are feeling anger, yes, but when you question this anger, you realize it’s not the dominant emotion, and that it’s milder—closer to, say, annoyance or irritation with the employee’s rudeness. When you dig deeper, you discover that you’re actually upset/sad. You follow this emotion and realize that you’re feeling hurt and disappointed and as though you are not valued. The initial anger has given way to a deeper, more genuine feeling. Knowing this, you approach your colleague to communicate your grievances in a completely different way than if you had simply gotten angry and yelled at them.

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6. Disgust You get back home after a big night out drinking with friends and something feels wrong. You can’t put your finger on it, but you just feel ... bad. Why? You sit down with the Emotion Wheel and can’t identify with any of the primary emotions. That’s okay, though! You choose the one that matches your feeling the closest—disgust. Moving outward you realize that you’re feeling a mild sense of disapproval of your friend’s behavior, a little like embarrassment. It’s not overwhelming shame or repulsion, but it does make you realize that you need to set up firmer boundaries around your own limits and expectations, especially when it comes to alcohol.

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Because you have correctly identified the location of the feeling (you), it means you are less likely to blame your friends unfairly or even to continue on unawares, never quite sure why you feel so uneasy around them. 7. Fear You tell someone that you’re afraid about the upcoming exam because you haven’t studied enough. But then you stop and question this assessment—is that what is really going on? You consult the Wheel and find that anxious and overwhelmed are better descriptors of your emotional state. You realize that you actually have been studying a great deal—perhaps too much!—and should probably take a break and work on a little anxiety management. Because you know this, you change your behavior in intelligent ways—by taking a rest and being kinder to yourself. If you weren’t so emotionally intelligent, you might have continued to tell yourself that you were feeling bad because you hadn’t studied enough, when in fact the opposite was true. Emotional intelligence always improves relationships—and that includes the relationship we have with ourselves!

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8. Happy Let’s say you are newly out of an abusive and unhappy relationship, and just starting to date again. It’s taking some time to reconnect with what you really feel and what you really want. You meet someone new and though you like them and feel good enough, you don’t quite trust your first impressions. Are you happy or just relieved to not be alone? Do you like them or are you enjoying the fact that they like you? The Emotion Wheel can help you tease apart your feelings. You find yourself gravitating toward words like “accepted” and “content." You realize that the way you are feeling is very gently trusting and relaxed, and that there is a complete absence of drama or anxiety.

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This helps you adjust your previous misconception about what happiness feels like—i.e., that it is about constantly doubting the other person’s interest, always fearful of them leaving, feeling rejected and judged, and so on. The Emotion Wheel can help you fix poor emotional regulation, correct faulty beliefs from past experiences, and help you recalibrate. In the past, you might have broken up with this person because you felt “bored." But after using the Emotions Wheel, you correctly identified this feeling as “safe” and carry on with a person who’s right for you. 9. Sadness You receive a gift from your significant other and it’s awful. You immediately express your displeasure; they’re confused and offended and soon feelings are running high. You step back from the situation and consult your Emotion Wheel. What happened?

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While the other person may have focused on your criticism of the gift and chosen to dwell on the feeling of being blamed, you question your own experience and realize that you are just plain sad about it. You see the gift as evidence that they have not put any thought into it, and you feel disappointed they don’t know you better. The gift actually makes you feel abandoned. Now, when you talk to the other person after you’ve both cooled down, you can keep the focus on this feeling of sadness and not get distracted by the details of the gift, or make them defensive because you’re laying blame. This way, you have the greatest chance of resolving the conflict—and maybe even feeling closer afterward. 10. Surprise Imagine you are the supervisor to a well-functioning and close-knit team, but one day one of the members resigns abruptly, and you find yourself reeling. For a moment, you’re not even sure what you think.

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Other team members are angry and sad, but are you? Looking at the Emotion Wheel allows you to clarify your own feelings so you can properly communicate to the leaving member. You discover that while you are indeed feeling many different shades of surprise, you are also feeling a lack of clarity and a strong sense of confusion about why they left. You let this insight guide the way you plan to organize your final meeting together. Because you’ve correctly identified and owned your own emotions, you’re relaxed and able to communicate clearly and can plainly articulate any questions you have for them. You clear up your confusion and the matter is resolved gracefully. 11. Bad Have you ever just felt bad?

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Our emotions are connected to and dependent on our bodies. Sometimes, our feelings are really just messages from our bodies telling us that something is out of balance. Let’s say you one day feel “bad” and pause to examine the experience more closely. You realize that this label of bad could more accurately be called “stressed." You’ve been working too much, eating poorly, and not sleeping. In fact, it’s not quite an emotion you’re feeling, but simply the sensation of being run down, tired, and a little unhealthy. Many people who battle mental illness learn this the hard way—sometimes, you are not depressed or angry or doing anything wrong. You just need a nap!

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This may seem obvious, but how many of us confuse tiredness with boredom? How do we know when we cross over from a productive, flowing state of busyness and into overwhelm? Too many people live lives where their emotional and physiological dysregulation has gone on for so long that they mistake it for their long-term personalities or assume that it tells them something big and serious about their life choices. For example, someone may feel broadly unhappy at their jobs but not really know why, and may conclude that it’s too challenging, when the opposite may be true—it’s not challenging enough. Or someone might come to believe that they are sensitive and difficult people by nature, when really what is happening is that they are repeatedly having their boundaries violated. They have been ignoring and mislabeling their feelings of anger and indignation as fussiness or inflexibility. If you become an expert at knowing exactly how you feel, however, you are never in the position of misunderstanding yourself or setting up miscommunication between your conscious mind and your own needs and limits. The Power of Emotional Validation As you can imagine, the more emotionally literate you become with your own experience, the better you will understand the experiences of those around you. It can take a lifetime to learn how to not just identify and name your own feelings, but do the same for others and keep them clear and distinct from one another.

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If we’re honest, a lot of behavior we call “empathetic” is really just poor boundaries between our feelings and other people’s. Once you feel like you’ve had practice naming and labeling your own emotions, the next step becomes obvious: projecting this outward and better understanding other people. With the ability to recognize and name emotions, you can show others that you have heard, understood, and paid attention to their experience ... not to mention you’re in a far better position to help! A great way to get closer to someone is to simply pay attention, listen, observe what you see, and then (tentatively!) call out the emotion you think they may be experiencing. The point of doing so is not to get embroiled in a linguistic exercise or impress people with your therapy skills. Rather, emotional labeling is a way to validate someone, which is a powerful form of empathy that creates a deep feeling of connection. Validation is something that every human being needs and craves, and so much of our communication depends on us feeling that we are validated. Sadly, though, many of us feel consistently under-validated in daily conversation.

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But what does validation actually mean? When something is valid, it is legitimate. It is real. When we validate someone or their experience, we are not necessarily agreeing with them, but we are communicating that, on some very fundamental level, they have a right to that experience, and that in its own way it makes sense. We are recognizing that what they are expressing is valid, which goes beyond judgments of right or wrong. To witness someone else’s experience is really the core of communication—we wouldn’t speak unless we wanted other people to really “get” what we were trying to say, right? That’s what validation is: the message that says “Yes, I see you. I hear you.

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That makes sense. I get it." When you correctly put a label on someone’s experience, it can feel extremely validating to them because it means a few things: •You’ve paid attention •You’ve listened •You’ve understood •You haven’t injected any of your own biases or interpretations All of the above are really ways of saying “You matter, and what you are saying matters." It is about the worth of the speaker and their message. In fact, we can validate other people when they are not able to validate themselves—and this can be a big part of healing. How much more valuable it is for someone to help you understand what you are experiencing, than give advice or make judgments about what you should be experiencing. Again, validation has nothing to do with agreement or being in the same situation. It’s not praise or flattery.

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Rather, it’s about showing someone that you’ve received them and their message, and that it deserves to be heard. Without validation, people feel invisible, worthless, irrelevant, or just plain bad. Worse than disagreeing with someone is ignoring them—because it sends the message that their experience is not even worth consideration in the first place. If you’ve ever talked to a conversational narcissist who simply could not listen to you or care about what you were saying, you’ll know how painful and disorienting it can be—the reason is because you were being invalidated. So how do we validate others in conversations? One way is to use emotional labeling. Step 1: Put a name to the emotion (the Emotion Wheel can help). Read verbal and nonverbal cues and use what you know about the person and the context to make guesses.

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That’s all they’ll be initially—guesses—so be tentative rather than rushing in with a know-it-all diagnosis that might miss the mark and cause offense. Step 2: Verbalize your observation. This is an attempt to reflect the other person’s experience back to them—that means not adding anything that isn’t there or leaving anything out. You can use phrases like: “It seems like ... ” “It sounds to me like ... ” “I wonder if you’re feeling ... ” Here, you want to be cautious and leave plenty of room for them to correct you. In the very beginning, try to phrase this labeling more as a question, and deliberately ask if you’ve understood. “You seem so scared right now—have I got that right?" This maintains your attitude as one of care and curiosity, not one where you’re trying to push your analysis on them. Don’t worry if your first guess is wrong; if you adjust it accordingly, the other person gets to feel your receptivity, and trust and rapport can grow.

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“Oh, I see. Not quite scared ... but more like anxious. Do you think you’re still feeling anxious about it?" You might also like to add a few generally validating statements, such as: “I can see why you feel that way." “That must be really hard/strange/confusing/etc." “I hear you." “How frustrating!/How sad/etc." “I can see where you’re coming from."

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“That makes sense." “I’m here for you." Step 3: Acknowledge the course of the emotion What triggered it? Depending on the context and situation, this might be obvious, or you may need to ask deliberately what their interpretation of cause and effect is. You don’t want to make this seem like an interrogation or forensic investigation, and you don’t want to come across as looking to assign blame. Sometimes, it’s enough to merely repeat what you’ve been told but make a few efforts to arrange that data so that it’s clear what the source of the problem is. For example, if the person has given you a long list of unreasonable demands made on them at work, and expressed how unhappy they are currently feeling, you can put two and two together even if they haven’t explicitly done so. You can offer a kind of summarizing statement that synthesizes what you’ve been told: “It seems like your job is causing you a lot of trouble at the moment."

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You haven’t added any new information, but you have offered a tentative interpretation of how it all comes together. It's worth rememberIng, however, that not all situations really do have a cause, and sometimes the person will be so overwhelmed with emotion that they are not quite ready to identify the source—or perhaps not interested in doing so. Continuing to insist on it might feel like you are attempting to solve their problems, when they really just want to be heard. Step 4: Validate the emotion This is the most important step. It’s especially important when you are the cause of the emotions, and the emotions are pretty negative! None of us are neutral, objective beings, and we all come with our own expectations, biases, and assumptions. Validating what we are told is not about pretending we don’t have these expectations, but rather about setting them aside and communicating that we accept what we’re told for what it is. Imagine someone is angry with you because you forgot their birthday.

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You may genuinely feel like it was an honest mistake and that you didn’t intend to cause any hurt. Nevertheless, you can see and validate that they do feel hurt. Their reality is that you’ve hurt them; yours is that you did it by accident and are really sorry. Those are different experiences, but they can exist side by side. So you say, “I can see you’re pretty mad right now (observing and labeling). You’re upset because I forgot (acknowledge the cause or source of emotion), and you have every right to be (validation). I get it." You can then follow up with apologies or make amends, but notice how your validating them doesn’t depend on your invalidating yourself.

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You can witness and acknowledge their experience without getting defensive, judging their reaction, or trying to force your own experience. For example, “You’re overreacting. I already told you I didn’t mean to hurt you” or “Why are you trying to make me feel guilty?" Validating someone else’s emotions takes practice and a mindset shift, but in many ways it’s the easier option. Simply remind yourself that you don’t have to react to what you’re told—just acknowledge and validate it. You don’t have to decide what you think, pass judgment, compare their experience to yours, find a theory or explanation to make everything make sense, argue with them, praise them, deny their feelings, or try to fix them. Just listen. You might be wondering, what if you really don’t agree with them?

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What if what they’re saying sounds completely crazy? Well, continue to validate them. Remember that you are not trying to position yourself as an arbiter of reality or appraising the objective truth of what they’re saying. You’re not validating the factual content of what they’re saying, but the emotional content. If they tell you they’re terrified that lizard people are secretly running the world, you don’t have to agree with this idea—but you can see their terror and validate all the same. “Wow, that must be so scary for you." One caveat: saying “I know how you feel” or “I feel the same” can be tricky, so try to avoid this kind of phrasing. Truthfully, we often don’t know how other people feel, and our knowing is irrelevant anyway.

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Even if we have experienced an identical situation, our responses and interpretations are always going to be unique to us. What’s more, when you say something like “I know what you mean” or “I would have done the same,” you are subtly suggesting that your support of the other person rests on you being in agreement with them. This can in fact be a slight shift response (see Chapter 1) where we subtly turn the conversation or frame of reference back to us. In reality, what we think about the other person’s experience is not that important. What Invalidation Looks Like Let’s take a quick look at what not to do. The following statements all fail to reflect and validate the other person’s experience: “It could be worse/at least you have your health/think about everything you have to be grateful for/etc." Translation: You feel bad but you shouldn’t—this is judgment. “I’m sorry you feel that way.” Translation: The way you feel is weird or inconvenient and somehow not quite true. Be honest, has anyone ever felt seen and heard when someone uttered this empty phrase?

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“Don’t say that!" Translation: Your feelings are wrong. You need to feel some other way. “You’re over/underreacting” or “you’re overthinking this” or “don’t be so sensitive." Translation: Your feelings are wrong. You need to feel some other way. “I’m not having this discussion!” or a rapid change of topic. Translation: Your feelings are not worth talking about.

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“You’ve really upset me/I wish you hadn’t told me." Translation: The most important thing about your feelings is the effect they have on me. Because I’m more important. In everyday life, most invalidation happens not because people are callous or unempathetic, but because they’re trying to show how much they care. Imagine that someone is telling you that they feel ugly and unlovable. You personally think they’re gorgeous and adore them, not to mention you hate seeing them so upset. You end up saying things like “Hey, stop saying that! You’re not ugly.

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That’s ridiculous." Then you start listing their good attributes because you’re trying to be kind and helpful. Your intentions are good ... but you’re still invalidating the way they actually feel and still taking over with your own interpretation. They will see your kindness, but they will ultimately not feel heard. Invalidation can happen especially when we’re in the wrong. It takes an enormous amount of maturity and courage to validate someone’s experience of you if it’s unflattering! But sometimes that’s the only way to get through a tricky conflict. It’s a question of balance—where we validate ourselves without it meaning we invalidate others, and vice versa.

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e the birth of Marie Curie in: 1867

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died. Magic Johnson, back in: 1991