Understand your own EI
The first step to understanding anything is to build a language around it to house understanding. Try thinking about something that you don’t have a word for – it’s impossible. To articulate is to think. Words are the conceptual vessels that help us explore and learn. To take this further, you need words to have specific meaning in order to create mental frameworks.
For instance, it is one thing to be able to articulate that you are angry, but simply saying you are angry gives no indication of how angry or how aroused you are. Within the bucket of angry emotions you could be annoyed, irritated, frustrated, fuming or furious. Each of these has a different level of cognitive arousal, a different level of control.
Creating a language of emotions that indicates arousal level is key to building your EI. This will help you dial it up and down as is appropriate to your context.
Learning to consciously control your level of arousal turns your emotion from a weapon of mass destruction to a superpower of success and influence.
To get started, it can be very helpful to use something like the Decida 5-level emotion wheel* (see above), which helps put language around the common emotion buckets of scared, anxious, happy, excited, angry and sad at different arousal levels. Sad goes from disappointed to despair, happy from peaceful to ecstatic, and so on.
When you do this, you intuitively stop seeing good or bad emotions, and start to consider to what extent you’re in control of them. Anxiety is okay (even useful) when it is kept at a level of “concerned” or “apprehensive”, but move into “panic” or “overwhelm” and you’ve lost control and are unlikely to make good decisions.
The toilet paper craze when the pandemic first hit is a classic example of our irrationality when we panic.
Interestingly, when we give in to moments of high arousal, when we “flip out” or “lose our head”, our brain releases chemicals such as endorphins and dopamine, so it actually can feel good in the moment. It’s only when we calm down and regret starts to kick in that we realise how foolish we may have been.
Learning the language of arousal is key when trying to keep your cool. When you are anxious, it is much more useful to think about being concerned about the thing that is stimulating a panic response, rather than suppressing it. Articulating emotion at a lower level releases its intensity. Suppressing it adds pressure until something bursts. Scientific studies show that suppressing emotion can rob us of 20%-40% of our cognitive capacity, with our subsequent performance equally diminished. High performers know how
to manage their emotions and can dial things up and back very quickly and with great ease.
Once we can manage our own emotion, we can then use the emotion wheel to build cognitive empathy with others. We all know how ineffective it is to tell an angry person to calm down, or a grieving person to cheer up.
Better to be irritated at the thing someone is angry about, or discouraged at the thing someone is grieving the loss of. By expressing a lower arousal version of the emotion being felt, the other person feels validated, heard, more connected with, and things settle down.
The ability to be able to dial it up and down can be trained like any other muscle. At first it will hurt, but over time it gets easier as you become more proficient. Practice, like many things, makes perfect.