How can I improve my emotional intelligence?

[Intro] Hello, and welcome to my podcast, Empowered to Thrive. I'm your host, Corinne Powell, and I'm the owner of Change Radically. 

In this space, we'll talk all things inner wellness, and parenting will certainly come up too, because I'm a mom to four kids, so parenting is a huge part of my life. This space is designed for safety. Your inner child is welcome. Your past self is invited to listen as well. 

And no matter what type of day you're having, I want you to know I'm glad to be with you. I live out of vulnerability and transparency, so come and be. Be yourself. Be messy. Invite a friend, and please stay a while. Keep coming back. I want you around. Now, let's jump into today's episode. 

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Corinne Powell: Hello there, friends. I am thrilled to have you here with me. Thanks for making time, and taking time out of your day to spend with me. It is my honor to be here with you. And I wanted to chat about emotional intelligence, how we can grow in it ourselves, and how we can help our children to cultivate it as well. Whether you're a parent or not, please know that there's always something in these episodes for you. I am too good at going off on rabbit trails to ever say that what the title of the episode is will be the only thing the episode encompasses. It will always encompass something else in addition. So that is good news for those of you that might say, well, I don't mind taking something about an emotional intelligence for myself, but I don't have any kids to pass that on to.

Emotional intelligence is what it sounds like. It's understanding what emotions are and knowing how to navigate life with them. And, you know, on the one hand, this sounds like something that, of course, we would all know. Why would we need to grow in this area? And on the other hand, it is not a class that's taught in school. In many homes, emotions are not, the full range of emotions are not tolerated.

And certainly it's not modeled in knowing how to feel, what to do with our feelings, how to repair when there's a damage to the relationship. So that's what we're going to talk about today. And I'd like to start with that, with this idea that many of us have grown up in homes where there was no language around feelings. There was no direction to notice our body, to recognize that the sensations we feel in our body is because of the energetic charge we experience through the emotions, the energy in motion. So when we feel these intense sensations in our body, it's often a byproduct of the feelings that we have. 

And I don't really like to label them as positive or negative emotions because they are really just the feelings. They don't need to be judged as good or bad, but more so noticed and felt and then allowed to move through in a natural progression so then they can be discharged. So let me give you a scenario. Say for example, something happens to me and I start to notice that my stomach is hurting, that I am feeling a sense of overall tightness in my body, a constriction, that I'm starting to hunch my shoulders a bit, that I'm starting to feel a sense of freeze. I don't want to move. I don't want to act.

And I recognize that all of this is a response to say what somebody did or an event that happened. And I started to feel afraid and anxious. I got nervous. I was unsure of myself, unsure of what the future might hold, the future could mean 10 minutes forward, and unsure about the impact that would come to me. And at the core, all I'm trying to do is keep myself safe every day. I'm just trying to survive. I'm trying to enjoy myself, enjoy my life. And I have a choice. I have a choice to either notice, take into account, I feel this constriction. I feel this impulse to stop instead of moving forward. I notice the stomach aching and I give language to the anxiety, to the apprehension, the fear, the worry.

In noticing all that, then I have another action to take, and that's to help move that energy through me to be able to discharge it. And that might mean I ask someone who I feel safe with for a hug, and I feel the warmth of their embrace. I feel the strength from their embrace. Maybe I relax into the embrace and I listen to their breath or their heart beating.

Perhaps as I feel that embrace, I allow myself to feel safe. I remind myself I'm safe in this moment. If that's not possible, there are times when I might move my body. I might put a upbeat song on or a comforting instrumental piece and listen to it. I might move my body in a way that feels good with the music. I might shake my hands, depending on the feelings that I'm having and the energy I need to discharge. There are times I even offer myself a warm embrace. I put my arms over each other and I allow myself to feel the embrace.

There's other instances I speak to my inner child, the little girl that I used to be, who's showing up, feeling similarly in my present body to how I felt in the past. For many of us, there are times in our past where we felt the fear, we felt the anxiety, and we didn't have a safe grownup to be able to go to, to be able to find security in in that moment, to be able to hear the comforting words, the reassuring words.

When that happens we do our best. We try to figure out how to manage and how to move forward. But oftentimes, there's a deficit within us. There's underlying, compounded, unprocessed emotions. And if all of this sounds like a confusing pile of words. I'm gonna try to break them down for you. And if all of this is making full sense, then just keep riding the wave with me. I know that for some of you, you've been on the healing journey for a while and others of you might just be starting on it. You might be sitting on the sidelines wondering if you want to embark on it.

But we all know that there are emotions we feel, there are feelings that we have throughout the day. And the first step is to start noticing them. You don't need to judge them. You just notice them. You recognize the sensations we feel in our body and the feelings that we have. And sometimes we might notice there's a correlation and other times we just notice whatever it is. And then we have a choice to do something about it.

And for some people, they feel sadness and they get angry. And that's actually a protective way of keeping themselves safe. The anger is this hard exterior that keeps people away, frightens people, gets a rise out of people. The softer emotion of sadness is buried below it. But when we've learned that it's not safe to be vulnerable and it's not safe to show sadness or to cry, we have to figure out a way to make it through, to manage through that. And so sometimes we default to anger or just some other hard emotion.

If you notice that happens for you, that's a great first step, just noticing it. And then perhaps if you can excuse yourself, go to a private area. You can allow yourself to start to feel that softer emotion underneath. Maybe it's way too big of an ask to do that in front of people but we have to start somewhere. So we either start with somebody that we feel safe with or we start with ourself. And if you don't feel safe with yourself, then who is that person that you do feel even just a little bit safe, safe enough to try something out with and as we notice and as we feel and as we take the next step to try to allow that energetic charge to move through us for the emotion to be discharged from our body.

And then through that process, we're helping to create a new experience around that circumstance. We're actually teaching ourselves how to become emotionally aware, which leads to emotional intelligence. We can name the feelings that we have. We can recognize the correlation between the sensations in our body and the feeling states. By default, we start modeling this to the children that we have, the people that are around us and they learn from us. Like it or not, we're always modeling something. People are always learning something from us. And then the hard work of repair is another beautiful way to live as we become emotionally intelligent, there's a recognition that for some of our responses there needs to be a further action.

Say you get angry with somebody that you love or someone you don't care about. You say some things that later on you regret or you realize it at least was inappropriate to say. It didn't need to be said. You felt it, but you didn't need to say it. Their words could have been hurting, crushing, debilitating to another person. And maybe they deserved a response. But that doesn't mean, you know the saying goes, hurt people, hurt people. It doesn't mean that we have to perpetuate that hurt. We don't have to let somebody off the hook. They can still be responsible for their actions, but we don't have to go on to perpetuate the hurt. If they hurt us, it can stop there. We can set up a boundary, but we don't need to necessarily cause pain towards them in response. So repair looks like owning our own actions, not minimizing what we've done. Even when the other person is partly to blame or fully to blame, we still own our part. We, in some cases, need to apologize. We can acknowledge the other person's feelings. Or when it comes to children, we have to take a lot of responsibility for our own actions.

I'm not really thinking of the adult child as much as the young child. When we feel like they were rude or disrespectful to us. Oftentimes that's our ego, that's us feeling the ways we feel because of the projections, the internal projections, the past wounds that we're living with. It's oftentimes not about what a child's done or hasn't done. It's oftentimes about what we've experienced, what has happened to us in the past. How we're interpreting our child's actions or lack thereof. And the hard work of repair is a beautiful way to build deep, close connections, whether that's with your children or other people in your life.

These are just a few key points, as I say almost every week, because it's always the case. We could go so much further with this conversation. And if you would like to, please set up a one -on-one session with me and we can delve deeper into this topic and we can explore this further. On the other hand, if you want to delve into this, just lightly with your children or by yourself, I offer a resource. I've created a workbook that is all about this topic. And you can find it on my website, my online shop, and there will be a direct link in the show notes, but you can also go to changeradically.com/shop and check out all my resources there.

So I hope that this brief conversation has been helpful to get you to just start to consider. And I hope that you're able to start to notice a little bit more this week and grow in this area. Because by you growing in this area, you are benefiting the people around you and the planet at large. So thank you. Thank you for being willing to do the work, the inner work, the beautiful, deep, sometimes very hard inner work. I'm in it with you, doing it right alongside you, cheering you on.

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[Ending] Here we are. We've come to the end of another episode. Sit back and reflect on what you heard. What's the one thing that resonates with you that you can take away and do something with? Let's not just listen. Let's listen and take action. Now action may look very different for us. But it's not. But it's doing something with what we hear. 

I hope that you'll share today's episode with a friend that you think would also enjoy it. And please come back next week. I hope that you have a fabulous week and that you remember when you pillow your head at night, when you're going through your days, that who you are is good. And I'm glad that you're alive.