Adults & E.I.

Is showing emotion seen as being frail?

There’s a stigma that strong people can’t be emotional.. Our society often associates emotions with femininity and unfortunately, femininity with weakness. Women are statistically paid less, treated as inferior, and offered less opportunities than men. Men who are open with their emotions and show them are bullied into feeling that them being emotional, negates their manhood. Within recent years, specifically post COVID, there have been many efforts to change these ideals. People are talking more about Emotional Intelligence.

The source of these stigmas and the real issue lies in a lack of knowledge about emotional intelligence (E.I.). E.I. is a key tool in achieving prosperity and success. In fact, most employers would rather have an employee who is high in E.I. yet low in IQ. You can train someone how to do a job but you can't train them on how to understand and manage their emotions when doing the job. Our emotions are truly our responsibilities, and only ours.

One of the biggest obstacles to conquer when learning to be emotionally intelligent is learning how to be open to accepting your emotions, changing your habits, and taking accountability. Learning how to apply E.I. is even more difficult being that we now live in a world that is highly governed by acceptance from others. Someone is always ready to critique, challenge, and even change our perspectives. There’s always eyes watching, so to be vulnerable? Yeah, that sounds like defeat. However, when you accept vulnerability and embrace your human nature to have emotions, you're better able to dictate your reactions and even change your perspective to a positive light. YIN & YANG.

This is what it really comes down to:

We’re so reactive.

No matter what, we are always going to have emotions. It doesn’t matter how hard you try to become heartless, or how much you try to change how you feel. Our emotions are constantly in play. They are key signals that help us understand ourselves and the world around us. We aren’t taught that we must take the time to understand our triggers, and what makes us feel the things we feel, good and bad. Once we know these things, we can move into governing our reactions when our emotions do hit. When you become emotionally intelligent, you can then weigh your logistics with how you feel and have conscious reactions. You can begin to work through the emotions instead of allowing them to weigh you down. You won’t repress or suppress emotions: you’ll use them to understand yourself and the world around you.

So, is showing emotions seen as being frail? That may be a popular opinion of our culture, but ultimately, it is an ignorant perspective. The most successful people know a key factor to success is taking the time out to understand yourself. It gives you the ability to make choices where you can present yourself exactly how you want to be seen. We can’t battle our human nature but we can learn how to work with it.

That’s true strength.