37. How to develop emotional intelligence in your 20’s

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Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they mean for our psychology. Hello, lovely people, how are we going on this fine day where you're listening in the world. Thanks for joining, Thanks for tuning in to the Psychology of your Twenties. It's lovely to have you here. This week, we're talking about emotional intelligence, or EQ as some people call it, and why it's different from normal intelligence from our IQ. This topic it's different because well, maybe it's not different. I think it's kind of common with some of the topics we talk about, but it's just as important in our twenties as it is in the rest of our lives. But the reason I want to talk about in the context of our twenties is because this decade is when our brain is in those final kind of stages of development, when our frontal lobe is yet to form, when it's in its most critical kind of stage to build those final skills, those final neurons, and with that where we can kind of perfect our emotional intelligence. And I just thought it would be really really interesting. I think it's such a crucial part of success in life, of achieving the things that you want, having healthy relationships, all the things that I think at the base of happiness and success. And I think a really common misconception about emotional intelligence is that, like intelligence to some degree, or like some other innate skill, it's not something that can be taught. It's not something that can be developed. What you're born with. The emotional intelligence that you're born with is what you get. It's the cards that you're dealt for the rest of your life. And that is just totally untrue. It is fundamentally a skill. Emotional intelligence is a skill, and it can be learned. You can alter how you see people, how you see yourself, and how you react to them. Although there are some people who perhaps are more naturally adept, the same way that there are people who are better at sports or have more analytical brains or more creative brains, and that stuff is really to do with your upbringing, your temperament, the personality you are kind of dealt with upon conception and upon birth. That is a huge misconception, and there is a huge misconception around emotional intelligence being something that is stagnant being something that is permanent. What you're born with, the skills that you're born with is what you get, which is completely untrue, and we're going to talk about that today. How do you curate and develop and build emotional intelligence in your twenties because it is so foundational and critical for every year, every decade, every emotional experience going forward. So emotional intelligence it's an interesting kind of corner of psychology because unlike some of the other topics I talk about, I focus a lot on positive psychology and social psychology, emotional intelligence is normally talked about in relation to organizational psychology. You may have guessed what that is, but organizational psychology really has a lot to do with the workplace and how we interact yeah with people in the workplace, and how leaders are born, how we influence people. But it is a lot more general than that. I think that beyond the workplaces perhaps where it has its greatest relevance and its greatest applicability. And there's been some huge talk around emotional intelligence recently. It's kind of become very popular part of the psychobabble, as we would say, as more people begin discovering it, begin discovering its applicability beyond the workplace, beyond corporate life, and see that it is so fundamental to all these other areas that are beyond how we make money and how we control the tides of business. I think so. I think that first kind of came about in the nineteen sixties and seventies, but it's been popularized a lot more recently, and with that we're seeing a lot of cultural trends around emotional intelligence also emerge. It's now taught in Harvard Business schools, in Harvard Business School and other business schools, and I think it's one of those things where I've always had these discussions with my friends where at Uni Woods now, that person's really intelligent, but they have pretty low EQ. They're not very emotionally intelligent. So it's part of that distinction I think these days that we have between I don't want to say natural intelligence, but academic intelligence and what we traditionally think of as intelligence and those more soft, nuanced skills around how we relate to others. Even though it's taught at Harvard Business School, I think that it does have a lot of relevance to all those who aren't there. If you are there, tell me what they're saying about it, tell me if I'm accurate. But it is really really important and it differs from IQ in so many ways. Like I said, IQ, we often think of as analytical skills as the way that we process factual information, how we absorb information, our memory, how we use it. But emotional intelligence really rests in our social relationships and in our own emotional awareness, which we'll talk about later on, and how we interact with people, how we influence people, beyond our general knowledge and beyond how we process information. So let's take a bit more of a deep dive into the compos of emotional intelligence in our twenties, the benefits of a high EQ, and how to develop your emotional intelligence even further if that's something you're interested in. So firstly, let's get our basic information down. What is EQ? What is emotional intelligence? Well, at its most primitive kind of basic level, emotional intelligence refers to our ability to understand, use, and manage our own emotions in positive ways that affect us and affect others. It kind of encompasses how to communicate effectively, how to have those healthy positive relationships, how to succeed at your personal goals. This really interesting study found that when children when kids had higher emotional intelligence, they did a lot better at school. They did a lot better socially obviously, but academically as well. It's such a crucial component to exceeding in the world, into having a healthy professional life, being able to follow through with your commitments, and also making informed decisions. So emotional intelligence really involves those core areas of the frontal lobe, which are responsible for how we see the world, how we interpret the world, and how we process our emotions and make decisions based on what they're telling us. So emotional intelligence it has four main components. These are self awareness, self regulation, social awareness, and social regulation or control. I don't really like the word control in this situation. I think it suggests that emotional intelligence is something that we want to develop and build in order to influence people for our own gain. But it's more about leading, and it's more about being able to dance around other people's feelings and understand their emotional concerns and their emotional needs. So emotional intelligence really starts with you. It starts with self awareness. And self awareness I think is something that is misunderstood in psychology or in those who kind of dabble in psychology to a pretty large degree. In some we often say it is being able to recognize our faults, knowing ourselves pretty well, but it's a little bit deeper than that. It. Self awareness is really about being able to recognize and understand your own emotions, being able to name your emotions but also know why you're feeling them. It gives you so much information about the world to have an understanding of how you cognitively react to things, and it is the foundation of emotional intelligence, being able to respond effectively not to what others are thinking, but at the very beginning, what you're thinking. A big part about self awareness, I think, is realizing that all of life's events, everything that you experience, everything that's hard or good or sad or happy, these events are innately neutral. They don't have any natural, intuitive assigned meaning until we evaluate it as either good or bad. And that's an internal process that creates feelings and it's responsible for how we feel and react. So when something happens in our lives, there is an unconscious evaluation that occurs in our brain that assigns that event as either being positive or negative, and that information that processing the meaning we assigned to an event comes from external sources what we're expected to feel, but also our own learning and how we've responded to things in the past, how things made us feel in the past, so that we have a basis for knowing how we should react, either in a socially appropriate manner or in a way that matches how you expect yourself to feel. But being able to recognize that all events are innately neutral. This allows you to identify why you're having a feeling in that moment, and what is that feeling kind of attached to. Is it a normal feeling, is it something that seems appropriate given the circumstances, or is it based on learning and based on experiences. So that's the whole thing about self awareness, as being able to look at your emotions, name your emotions, and understand why you're feeling it. That is the bedrock of emotional intelligence. Once you're able to identify your feelings. Once you have that high level of self awareness, the other building block of emotional intelligence, the next kind of core ingredient is self regulation. It's all fine and good and well to be able to recognize your emotions, to be able to sit back and say, oh, I'm mad, and I'm mad because of this, and this is triggering me because of this, and being able to know their source, whether it's endogenous or exogynous, internal or external. But that is really no use in terms of your broader emotional intelligence and ability to relate to others unless you're able to control your impulsive feelings, to control your behaviors and manage emotions in healthy ways, and then from that being able to take initiative and to follow through on your commitments, relate, and be able to relate to others and adapt to your changing circumstances. So this is about self regulation. You've had that feeling, you've identified it, but the next step is what you do with it. How do you react to how you're feeling, and how you able to bring that into your broader life, into what you want from life and integrate it in a positive way. Emotional regulation kind of captures all of this. It captures being adaptive to changing circumstances. And it's different from self awareness because self awareness is basically cognition, but self regulation is action is action in response to that recognition. So on the back of these two internal processes, we also have social awareness. Now, this is probably, I think where most people see emotional intelligence as lying as this is where a lot of people I think misguided in thinking that emotional intelligence is actually social awareness. And in some ways it is. But the critical thing about those two prior ideas is that you can't actually have social awareness without having self awareness and self regulation. You can't show empathy, You can't react to social cues or feel socially comfortable without first understanding how other people might be feeling emotions because you have felt them and you can recognize them and name them yourself. So social awareness really encompasses being able to understand other people's emotions and their emotional concerns, and their needs and their social concerns, and how you can provide them or maybe take them away. So you begin to see yourself not as a sole individual, not as your own feelings, but see your feelings and how you might react in relationship to other people, both recognizing how your reactions affect them, but also how you might actually understand their reactions a lot better by looking internally and thinking how would I react in that situation, what would I be feeling? And that's social awareness. A critical thing about this element of EQ is that it's the hardest to learn. It's the most intuitive. I know, I'm kind of contradicting myself, and you know I said that emotional awareness and emotional intelligence is something that we can learn, which it is, but the hardest part of it is being able to apply that to other people because other people are unpredictable. As I always say this to my friend Erin, but people aren't always going to react the way that you would to a situation. People have their own cultural experience, as their own personal learning experiences that have taught them to behave in different ways and reaction to their feelings. It's also the part that is most kind of biologically determined. Social awareness is normally something that some people have at a higher level compared to others. And a good example of this is people with autism who might struggle with social awareness. That's no fault of theirs. It's not like they're not trying hard. It's that it is something that is more innate, and it is the most difficult component of EQ to master. But once you do, you get that final stage, that final step, that final component, which is where ideas of leadership and influence really come into it, and that's relationship management regulating other people. So in this final stage, you know how to develop and maintain good relationships. You can communicate clearly, you can inspire and influence others, and you can manage their emotions and needs because you understand them. You have that self awareness and that social awareness, and with that, much like self regulation, you can apply it to your interactions with others. These final two steps are just I think the thing that really trips the most people over because social awareness is an isolated activity. You can kind of do that yourself by sitting down and evaluating your feelings and journaling and going to therapy or doing whatever you need to do to connect with your own emotions and feelings, but being able to learn what they look like in others is a much more difficult task because emotional reactions and experiences, as we said, are not universal. Okay, So, hilst all these components that we've talked about are crucial and important to emotional intelligence, to being able to relate to others, some people may only have one or two components, and that's where they kind of get stuck. Maybe there's someone who can influence people, but they're still really aloof and have low social awareness. Although it's probably unlikely that they're intentionally influencing people, they still have that capability. They still have that capacity despite being low in social regulation and social awareness. And on the flip side, you can have a high degree of self awareness, really understand and have deep knowledge of how you feel and how your emotions relate to the world, but still remain unable to manage relationships and unable to step into that social regulation element that we're talking about. So it is kind of a four piece puzzle where if you don't have one piece, if you're missing one of them, your emotional development. But emotional intelligence, we would say is under developed, so all pieces are just as crucial. You can't just skip a step. But the other caveat is that emotional intelligence is also highly dependent on others. It is relational. Maybe that's been pretty clear so far. But you can't influence others if other people don't exist, and you can't understand their emotions and relate to them and have good relationships with them if they didn't have those emotions in the first place. So yeah, it's incredibly relational, and it's depending on how other people are reacting in their feelings. You might have all components of EQ, but say you have a relationship with someone who's a psychopath or completely lacking in self awareness, they will struggle and you will struggle to display your beautifully high levels of EQ with them. I knew someone like this who had really low self awareness. It's really hard to meet their emotional needs and to understand how they're feeling because they don't even recognize it themselves. That person probably is unsure of what their emotional needs are. Or if they're someone who's psychopathic or can't have empathy or doesn't have consistent emotions, they might have disturbed social and emotional needs. So it is really hard to navigate those relationships, even if you're an expert, even if you're really skilled and have all of the tools that you would need for emotional intelligence. Like I said, it's relational. It might also be Another instance that I can think of is if you're in the workplace, which is where emotional intelligence is often investigated. There are some really conflict seeking people out there. We've talked about this in some of our other episodes. Conflict seeking people a people who are excited and exhilarated and get a lot of stimulation from creating fuss and having fights with people and gossiping. These people are going to be really hard to regulate or to influence or to relate to if you're not someone like that, because you're never going to understand their perspective. You're not a conflict seeking person if you don't like confrontation. Managing the emotions or understanding the emotions of someone who is is going to be a pretty hard task, even if you have high levels of self awareness in relations to the emotions you feel. But if you think about someone who has really high EQ, who's very skilled at perception, they may still be able to manage this or dance around these kinds of people. Give that person who has a need for conflict a little taste without disrupting the peace and others because they have experienced other emotional situations and they've been able to cultivate that skill and that response to changing circumstances. So, what are some of the benefits of having high emotional intelligence being one of those people who can navigate all situations effortlessly well. Emotional intelligence, like I've already said, it affects things like your performance at work or school, you can really easily navigate the social complexities of a workplace. You can lead and motivate others, excel in your career. People with EQ often test higher on most job indicators. They're better at things like job interviews, they're better at managing internal conflict. It also really influences some other things, like your physical health and your mental health. So if you're unable to manage your emotions, you're probably not managing your stress either, and this can lead to some pretty serious health problems. So uncontrolled stress, as we know, raises blood pressure, suppresses the immune system when we have high levels of cortisol, and therefore increases things like the risk of heart attacks and strokes, and speeds up the aging process. So that's where that self awareness component is really important to the other areas of your health, because if you aren't able to recognize how you're feeling, recognize what is influencing, you might experience greater stress and greater arousal, and that also contributes to mental health. Uncontrolled emotions and stress can also impact how you feel emotionally, making you more vulnerable to anxiety and depression. And if you're able to understand and get comfortable with or manage your emotions. Then you're able to form stronger relationships, which stops you from feeling lonely and isolated, gives you more control over your emotional experiences, improves your relationships, and also finally your social intelligence. Yes, emotional and social intelligence, if you couldn't tell from this episode and what we've talked about so far, are very much connected. And being in tune with your emotions definitely serves a social purpose. As we can say from that social awareness and social regular component. It connects you to other people and the world around you and enables you to recognize you friend from foe. You can measure another person's interest in you, pursue healthier relationships, balance your nervous system through social communication, and feel really loved and happy. So emotional intelligence is probably another important difference it has to just general intelligence. Is it's more linked to just a general sense of well being and peace and comfort and being able to navigate what life kind of throws at you. So a big part of this conversation and a big promise I made was I was going to tell you how you can increase your EQ. So there was a reason we talked about emotional intelligence in terms of those four key components, because they're all equally crucial, but you can also build your EQ by focusing on each one of them. So starting it self awareness managing your stress is just the first step to building emotional intelligence. Being able to recognize your emotions as well, that's also really crucial, and if you can't get over that, if you're unable to do that, it's unlikely that you'll be able to increase your emotional intelligence. So you should be able to manage core feelings like anger, sadness, fear, and joy in order to feel the full breadth of emotional experiences, but also know how you react to them. So the questions to ask are when I encounter an emotion, how do I react? Are those emotions accompanied by physical sensations? Do you experience individual feelings and emotion or can you feel them at the same time, So anger and sadness, it's really interesting. Some people feel them as different sensations and can't feel them at the same time, whereas others feel them as one and can have that kind of nuance. Me personally, I can't be angry and sad at the same time. It's a different experience. There's also that question of can you experience intense emotions? What do they feel like? And all of this is contributing to you being able to pay attention to your emotions. That is the biggest factor in building EQ and the biggest recommendation a lot of scientists and psychologists have is when you feel an emotion, do you have a process for sitting back, recognizing it, understanding why you're feeling that way, and being able to realize is it internal? Can I do something about it? Or is it external? And should I change something about my environment? And that's crucial. Once you understand how your brain flows through those key pathways and those patterns, that's when you have high levels of self awareness, really taking time to evaluate what you do, how you respond, what your reaction is. In order to engage your emotional intelligence, you also have to be able to use your emotions to make constructive decisions about your behavior self management. That was a second component. So once you're able to recognize your emotions, you have to be able to do something with them right. You have to be able to respond to them positively so you don't lose control of your emotions or your ability to think things through and to act thoughtfully and appropriately. A really good way to kind of build this, and to build particularly your reaction to stressful and emotionally intense experiences, is to stay really mindful of what exactly is upsetting you about the information you're receiving and why is it overriding your thoughts and self control. A big piece of advice that someone once gave me is never react in the moment. If you're in a job interview, always take a moment, step back and think, really think about what emotion you're feeling, what's your main reaction, and how do I respond to that cautiously? What would the best version of myself do? Here? A really great way to apply this is when you are in emotionally demanding situations. Maybe you're having an argument with someone. Take a few minutes, take a day, take a couple hours, and step back and think what would the highest version of myself? What would the most emotionally intelligent version of myself do in this situation. So the next key skill that we talked about was social awareness, your ability to recognize and interpret queues from other people, being able to communicate with them and feel attached to them, and to understand how they're feeling and in this situation, mindfulness is an ally for emotional and social awareness. To build social awareness, you need to be mindful of what other people are feeling and experiencing, and you need to be able to apply your own experiences to their reactions. There will be subtle emotional shifts taking place in other people that you have to be able to recognize. You have to be able to recognize their goals and their objectives, and that's where empathy really comes into play. Building that core skill of empathy is so crucial. It is perhaps the most crucial part the same way that social awareness is the hardest part of emotional intelligence. Empathy is something that is really difficult to curate. It's really difficult to develop, but it really sits with in the same kind of area as that self regulation. Taking a step back, mind mapping out if I was in this situation, what would I be feeling? Resting on your own self awareness to think about what would my intentions here be, what would my objectives be in this situation? And move forward with that knowledge, think about someone else as if they are yourself. And you know this is an expert advice, this is just things that I have gained from the Internet and from my your own personal experience, But think about someone else as if they are yourself. What would you want here? What would you be trying to get out of creating reaction in someone or reacting a certain way, and how do you leverage that in order to engage in relationship management and social regulation, which is the final stage. Working well with others is a process that, as we have said time and time again in this episode, begins with emotional awareness and your ability to recognize and understand what other people are experiencing. So there are a few key skills here. The first one is becoming aware of how effectively to use nonverbal communication. It's impossible to avoid sending nonverbal messages. You cannot control the muscles in your face that react to other people, and that's how you worthlessly convey your own emotions. But it's also the tip of how to read others. So engaging that emotional part of your brain to recognize what certain reactions mean in others is super important and can play a huge part in your relationships. Open communication, talking about things when you see them, and using humor to relieve stress and laughter their natural antidotes to conflict and too heavy emotional situations, but creating that kind of space to be able to engage and have hard conversations with people, or have necessary conversations with people. And the final kind of lesson and skill is learning to see conflict as an opportunity to grow closer to others. Conflict and disagreements, we've talked about it so much on this podcast, but they're inevitable. They are just so normal, And I think a big thing in our twenties is thinking we need to run away from confrontation, but that's just not the case. Confrontation and being able to resolve conflict in a healthy, constructive way can strength and trust between people. So teach yourself and learn and appreciate that conflict doesn't necessarily mean a bad thing. It is a learning opportunity and it's important for your emotional intelligence to be able to navigate that situation and learn what worked, Learn what made you feel better, but what made other people feel better as well, in order to increase your EQ and kind of reap all those benefits that we've talked about. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. A little bit of a different one, a bit more psychology base. Even though that's the idea of the podcast, delving into the mind, delving into social relationships, all in a day's work. I found it really interesting to think about these things, think about how I could apply it to my own life, and also knowing that I still have a couple of years to really lay the foundations for an emotionally intelligent life and relationships full with EQ however you want to apply it, and in the workplace as well in my personal life, it is such an important skill. I hope that that has been clear to you based on how much I've said about it in this podcast. But thank you again for listening as always, if you do feel cool to do so. If you've enjoyed this podcast or some of the other episodes, please leave us a review on either Spotify or Apple Podcasts. It really allows this community and this platform, this podcast to grow and to reach new people. So if you've gotten something out of it, I would really appreciate it. It would make my day, and thank you again for listening. Next week, we're talking about attachment styles, another social psychology episode, but very very interesting. Nonetheless, have a beautiful day,