2020 sure has been a year to remember. It’s beginning to feel a little bit as if we are all divorced from reality. Before the pandemic we were living in a world that was absolutely confronting an onslaught of change. The pandemic was a huge disrupter. Many of us were forced to freeze in place. The effects on certain sectors of our economy will not soon be forgotten.
What’s going to happen next?
What will it take to pick up the pieces and move forward? As I’ve said before in different ways in differing contexts. It’s about the people. It’s about the resilience, it’s about the grit, it’s about adaptability, it’s about the emotional intelligence.
I do know is we need emotional intelligence more than ever.
The problem is the pandemic is actually reducing our EI. The virus has created an emotional landfill in all our lives so that for some of us the only thing we’re able to connect with is a phone charger. And technology has only exacerbated the problem in many ways. Research shows too much time in front of computer screens actually reduces our ability to read the nonverbal communication of others and effectively deal with them. Yes, Zoom calls can be nice but it’s not the same as in-person conversation.
We all need to strengthen our emotional intelligence. We need to all fight the empathy atrophy of lockdown.
What is Emotional Intelligence?
From Harvard Business Review Guide to Emotional Intelligence:
From a scientific standpoint, emotional intelligence is the ability to accurately perceive your own and others’ emotions; to understand the signals that emotions send about relationships; and to manage your own and others’ emotions.
Reduced to the four Verbs: Realize, Recognize, Refine, Regulate.
1) Realize
Self-awareness is the most essential of emotional intelligence skills. Why? Because without this you’ve got no way to evaluate what skills you have, what you lack and what you need to work on.
Self-awareness means having a deep understanding of one’s emotions, strengths, weaknesses, needs, and drives. People with strong self-awareness are neither overly critical nor unrealistically hopeful. Rather, they are honest with themselves and with others. People who have a high degree of self-awareness recognize how their feelings affect them, other people, and their job performance.
So how do you increase self-awareness? By introspection?
That doesn’t work. In general, we are terrible at self-awareness and spinning stories in our heads only makes it worse. Ironically, you get self-awareness from other people. You understand yourself by connecting with others, which gives you the self-awareness to better connect with others. It’s not a paradox; it’s a virtuous upward spiral.
Self-awareness is powerful but to really get better, we have to learn how to deal with our own emotions in the moment...
2) Recognize And Label
You need to check in with yourself during the day. How do you feel? We often don’t pay attention to our emotions until the needle is already in the red zone. if we don’t recognize how we feel, we can’t regulate our behavior.
And once you know how you feel, label the emotion to get a handle on it. Your brain can’t deal with something if you don’t know what it is, so give it a name. Neuroscience studies by Matthew Lieberman at UCLA have shown the incredible power of labeling to help us control and dampen powerful emotions. Ironic as it may be, saying the word “anxious” makes you less anxious. Gotta name it to tame it. And the better you recognize emotions in yourself, the better you can eventually recognize them in others.
3) Refine
Labeling is good but if you can only call things “good” or “bad” you barely qualify as sentient. Being black and white about emotions demonstrates a lack of EI. If complex, nuanced emotions are no more perceptible to you than ultraviolet radiation, the world is going to be a very distressing place, especially in the age of COVID.
We need to develop “emotional granularity.” The more you can refine your understanding of your emotions, the better you can deal with them. The more fine-grained recognition allows you to do what is needed to amplify or extend them.
So broaden your emotional vocabulary, examine your feelings and start keeping track of the differences. Maybe you feel “stressed.” More granularly, is it anxiety about an uncertain future? Or fear of what you assume will happen? Or pressure because of too many responsibilities? This level of understanding allows you to better solve the problem.
Studies show emotional granularity leads to good things.
4) Reframe to Regulate
Research from a Harvard study of bankers right after the 2008 crisis hit showed that most of them were incredibly stressed. But a few were happy and resilient. What did those latter folks have in common?
They experienced the same events but their brains didn't frame them as threats; they saw them as challenges to overcome. And just by showing the normal bankers a video explaining how to perceive stress as a challenge, he turned sad bankers into super-bankers.
The research showed people who came to view stress as a challenge to view stress as a challenge instead of as a threat, we saw a 23% drop in their stress-related symptoms. It produced a significant increase not only in levels of happiness, but a dramatic improvement in their levels of engagement at work as well.
Reframe stress as excitement. Studies show the physiological states are the same, it’s only how we choose to see them that is different. Emotions are concepts formed by the interpretation of the things happening in your body. It can be up to you if you try.
We can learn from this awful time we are living through. You can’t keep the human spirit down. No matter what faces us, we bounce back.
