Emotional intelligence (EI) is the handling of raw, instinctive and basic emotions with skill, maturity and perspective and will enable you to avoid some or most of the unhappiness that arises where you are at the mercy of your raw emotion. One way of seeing EI is that it is about living life with skill and wisdom at the level where people appear to be separate islands and to be focussed on and looking after themselves. In this way you can learn to avoid the common traps and hazards that cause people unhappiness in the forms of eg anger, jealousy, and craving on potentially an almost continual basis. If a person does not ever understand and exercise EI then life to them will often seem very hard and painful.
Sadly many people do indeed not understand or exercise EI and are instead living in a brain washed trance. They are blindly obeying what society says they should do, how to speak, how to behave, and what to think. They are following a pied piper dancing to the repetitive beat of society’s unrelenting conditioning through parental example, television, magazines, education, peer pressure, and cultural norms. They desperately want to be the same, be ‘normal’, and be ‘cool’. The result is that they see a false ‘reality’ and believe it to be authentic. For example they actually start to believe that it really matters that their bodies conform to a society ‘norm’, or worse conform to a media promoted mythical standard of beauty and thinness that is anything but ‘normal’ or widely attainable. They actually start to believe that they must dress in a certain way, talk in a certain way, have enough friends on their social networking sites etc
Even more damaging society teaches them that they should be driven by the ‘Self, Me, I’ agenda, and be a slave to their ego, and thereby be unhappy most of the time believing what their Ego’ perspective tells them. This is all a false reality, and there is no easy way to say this, but when we do not behave with EI, then we are deluded by our minds, and barred from being spiritual.
Of course we are not born with this false reality. Arguably children are born ‘spiritual’ e.g. they are born feeling unconditional love, have no ego, and live in the moment. As children grow we observe them being contaminated and brainwashed. Our challenge is to undo this conditioning in ourselves.
At its simplest level, we are beings that think and exist in (and only exist in) the moment. Like a PC if at any given moment we are running a virus i.e. suffering from a delusion, allowing in negative emotion, then we keep out spirituality. In order to develop and maintain a spiritual perspective, we have to begin by behaving with EI.
Your personal Journey of self development
I invite you to seriously consider embarking on the journey of practising EI and SI that will lead you to happiness. As with any journey of self development to be successful you will need to concentrate on where you are going and not dwell on where you have come from. I really do understand how you may currently be feeling unhappy, discontented and disappointed and believe me you are not alone. Modern western culture is leading vast numbers of people into the unhappiness trap.
But you can be different and you can escape. To commence your escape I want you to put your past and how you are currently feeling to one side and get a blank sheet of paper and spend a few moments writing down how you would like to feel and what success would look like. If it helps refer to my description of happiness on Page 4. Then I want you to keep this visualisation of success to refer to at any time after you commence your journey, whenever your resolve or confidence is reduced by life’s events.
I need to be honest with you and warn you that depending on where you are starting from this path may be very long and hard. There is no short cut or fast track. But the good news is that rather than jumping ahead and trying to read and understand all about EI and SI all at once I do not want you to do that. In fact there is absolutely no point in that because it will not work because you will just feel overwhelmed. Also this is because there are some fundamental things you need to work on and really understand at the beginning of the path which are the essential foundation for moving forward in your transformation. For the time being I only want you to take the first three steps identified in 2.2, 2.3 and 2.4 below one at a time without jumping ahead. Even when you have achieved just one or two of these first steps you will be amazed at the impact it will have on how you feel about your life and yourself. So the good news is that initially I only want you to read section 2.2 which is short in length but massive in its importance and I would rather you just read that three times than going any further at this stage.
Emotional Intelligence