Emotional Intelligence – The Ultimate Masterclass 2.0

Emotional Intelligence

Now is your chance to achieve what most people can’t: Emotional Intelligence.

Join us on this journey of self identification and healing, join us on the journey where everything that is going on in your life, and in your mind will now make sense, join us on a journey where we will help you conquer everything that’s standing between your emotions and your success.

One of the biggest breakthroughs I had in my research was linked to emotional intelligence. I have attended seminars, bought courses, and read countless books that unified emotions, and classified them as either positive or negative.

If you feel anger, and you do something that can calm you down, then you compensate the emotional imbalance and you can start moving towards an emotionally intelligent state of mind. I came to realize, that emotional intelligence, as intelligent as it may seem, is the most ridicule and stupid concept that you can try to explain to people.

See intelligence can’t be so openly linked to emotions.

We know for a fact that when we make a stupid ass decision, we usually act based on emotions and not logic. When we’re logical on the other hand, we are able to steer ourselves towards a more resourceful outcome in any given situation. That is only if, we have the logical interpretative capacity to deal with the problem in the first place.

When we add logic to emotions, we can create an emotional equation… Now what the heck do I mean by that right?

Emotions are not unified. They can not, and should not be classified based on the nature of the emotion, but its intensity. The frustration you feel when you spill a cup of coffee can not be compared, in terms of intensity, to the frustration you feel when you lose a friend or a partner.

The happiness you feel when you watch a kick-ass movie, is nothing compared to the happiness.. Heck to the joy you feel when you get your dream job.

That’s where it gets interesting.

When you’re frustrated about a spilled cup of coffee, and then you open your phone and realize that you got an email saying: “Congratulations! You got the job!” You won’t care about the coffee anymore.

On the other hand, if you’re frustrated about your love life, you won’t even feel like you want to watch a movie in the first place. Your subconscious brain can anticipate the predictable emotional reward. And when the intensity of a negative emotion overweighs that of an anticipated potential positive one, you won’t even bother trying. You already know that its not enough to fill the hole you feel on the inside.

The emotional equation is that which measures the emotions based on intensity, and not nature.

When we look at emotions from the lens of intensity, our entire perspective can change.

Let’s take another example here:

You wake up in the morning, you get dressed, eat your breakfast, do whatever you usually do in the morning, and then you get in your car to head to work. As you put the keys in the ignition trying to start the car, you hear the car struggling, but it doesn’t work.

Well obviously you’re not going to be happy about this unless you’re on some sort of super happy drug. The question here isn’t whether you’re going to feel stressed out or not. The question is, how stressed are you going to feel? At what intensity are you going to experience those negative emotions?

Well, if you woke up and you were feeling a bit sick… You wanted to call in and say you can’t make it but decided to suck it up… You won’t feel very stressed. As a matter a fact, after the short wave of disturbing emotions passes by, you might feel a sense of relief that your car didn’t work so you can stay home and rest.

Now let’s take the same example but put it in a different context:

Two days prior to this incident, your manager says: “ If you’re late to work one more time, despite the reason, you’re fired!”

In that scenario, the intensity of stress you’ll feel is going to be hell getting loose.

Now we know that the part of our brain responsible for our emotional responses is the limbic brain. In other words, the subconscious brain. It is the most primitive pat of the human brain. Instinct, desire, love, hate… Are all a product of subconscious conditioning. At the core of this primitive brain is one utmost functionality, which is to ensure our survival.

When we encounter an event that jeopardizes our longevity and that can be perceived as a potential risk to our survival, we instantly get into a state of stress.

See if you’re crossing the street, and you almost got run over by a car, you don’t need to take a step back and logically analyze what happened to then decide that you need to feel stressed. Even though you weren’t hit by a car, you were instantly hit by a rush of cortisol, adrenaline and norepinephrine. You get pushed into the fight or flight mode. Now considering that you have an average level of sanity, you won’t try and fight the car, you will try and evade it. However, your reaction was so quick, that there is no way it derived from the logical part of your brain which by the time it analyzes what’s happening and how you should react, you’d be long gone.

Let’s put this example in a context before we carry on.

You’re going to write an exam, and while crossing the street, you almost got hit by a car. Your body enters in a state of stress. Unless you had some sort of coping mechanisms to calm yourself down before the big test, you will most likely perform worse than you would if that incident didn’t occur to you. Your cognitive reasoning is partially impaired as all your energy is going towards your need to survive. See now even if you sit down for a second and have a little conversation with yourself, you’ll find it pretty challenging to change your body chemistry. Even if you say yourself: “ Alright listen up pal, we’re good, we’re not dead, stop stressing out…”

Your subconscious brain will plainly tell you to shut up and keep stressing.

It is this kind of primitive reactivity that ensured our longevity, hence its a crucial function for survival. The problem arises when we use our so called logical brain to catastrophize non-urgent situations and consciously throw ourselves into a state of stress.