EQ: the new intelligence
Every single day, your brain orchestrates a symphony of emotions and physical sensations to keep you alive and thriving. From fascination to fear, singing with joy to being sick to the stomach, your brain’s messages guide you towards nourishing experiences and away from dangerous ones.
This is your emotional intelligence (EQ*) in action.
Some people call it instinct or intuition; others empathy or social savvy.
No matter what label you choose, EQ is a prerequisite for navigating life safely and successfully.
EQ is your body’s clever way of alerting you to dangers you’d do well to avoid, and treasures you might like to pursue.
When you nurture your EQ, you strengthen your ability to:
recognise and regulate your emotions
motivate yourself to achieve goals
empathise and connect with others
say ‘no’ to toxic situations
say ‘yes’ to growth opportunities.
As you become more competent in these EQ-reliant tasks, life becomes much easier.
You start to make decisions from a place of clarity so you can build flourishing relationships, do meaningful work and care for your emotional, mental and physical wellbeing. You are empowered to enrich your life and the lives of those around you.
The catch is that most of us have spent a lifetime developing our intelligence quotient (IQ), but not our EQ. We’ve been schooled to improve our alphabetical and numerical literacy, while emotional literacy is brushed aside or, worse, intentionally undermined. Who among us hasn’t heard the following at some point?
Stop being so sensitive. Just suck it up. That’s life.
The good news is that no matter what messages you have received or where you currently sit on the EQ scale, you can learn to read your feelings and needs, just as you once learned your ABC.
Building emotional literacy
Emotional literacy is the ability to notice and interpret feelings and needs (also called ‘values’). An emotionally literate person:
pays attention to the physical sensations in their body, which arise in response to internal or external stimuli
approaches these sensations with curiosity to discover which needs their body is attempting to meet.
All living things flourish when exposed to nourishing experiences and whither when deprived of them.
Your feelings point you towards nourishing experiences and away from detrimental ones so you can meet your most basic and most complex human needs.
For example, you may wake in the morning and feel a rumbling sensation in your stomach. We call this feeling ’hunger’; it motivates you to eat. Another time, you may have the misfortune of being lied to. You feel heat and tension build up in your head and shoulders as the feeling ‘anger’ takes hold of you. Your anger flags your disapproval of dishonesty and prompts you to do something to rectify this (like voicing your concerns).
The best language I have discovered for building emotional literacy is Non-Violent Communication (NVC). It is a conflict-resolution methodology developed by psychologist Marshall Rosenberg, and it suggests that:
Empathy is our human default, and we only stray from this into harmful behaviours when we cannot recognise more effective strategies for meeting our needs.
To cultivate your natural state of empathy and other high-EQ traits, it helps to familiarise yourself with the language of feelings and needs. Rosenberg suggests that our feelings point to seven universal needs (shown below), which require our attention for us to thrive. There are many permutations of these needs, which you can explore in this more comprehensive needs list from author and peace educator Thom Bond of NYCNVC.
Baby steps
As you practice emotional literacy, you will start to become more aware of the sensations that course through your body all day, every day. Perhaps you will be able to attribute a ‘feeling word’ to them; perhaps not. Many people benefit from labelling their feelings (and this can certainly make it easier to express your emotional experience to others), but it is not essential for developing your EQ. Just as different modes of communication (writing, speaking, braille, sign language) suit different people, your job is to discover the emotional language that makes most sense to you.
The way you experience EQ will differ according to your biology, psychology and life experiences — but no experience is more or less valid than another.
As with any new skill acquisition, there will be times when you will feel incredibly frustrated learning emotional literacy. This is your body, after all; how can you not understand it?! But, with deliberate practice (which I touch on in this article, How to become your own best coach), including appropriate support, you will start to notice positive shifts in your internal state and life trajectory as a result of nurturing your emotional intelligence.
Whether you’re working towards personal or professional goals, emotional literacy is a critical skill to build, which is why it forms the foundation of my leadership coaching, business coaching and coaching services.
If you would like support to explore your emotional intelligence and create a richer, more fulfilling life, get in touch.
* EQ is actually short for emotional quotient, which measures how developed your emotional intelligence is; but it’s so commonly used as shorthand for emotional intelligence that I have chosen to adopt this use here.