Emotional IQ – PUMU: Perceive, Understand, Manage, Use

I admit that there was a time I was at the bottom level of skill here.  I was so bad that not only were Anger and Frustration the same for me, so was Hurt, Fear, Confusion, Overwhelm, Inadequacy… pretty much all of it showed up as Anger.  Why?

If I want to sound all clinical: I wasn’t adequately trained in Emotional IQ to make the distinctions.  In regular English, I was an Emotional Idiot.  Sure, I may have been an intellectual genius if you believe in IQ and percentile scores and all that.  But what had in genius in one side was counter-balanced by a level of emotional cluelessness that is almost hard to believe!

I had to improve my Emotional IQ just to get good enough to be at the “nearly everyone can do this” level.  It really is frightening to think about how little I really knew back then!  I can’t even imagine what my life would have been like without the discovery of the Language of Emotions!  I can tell you this, though.  If I can get to where I was to where I am, ANYONE can become an Emotional Genius!

Emotional IQ – The Obvious Level of the Subtle Art

Nearly everyone can tell when they are feeling big, obvious emotions.  (Well, unless you’re the younger me, then all you know is one – but we’re talking about normal people!)  If you’re raging, there is little doubt you’re angry.  If you’re paralyzed with fear or running randomly in a panic, everyone can tell that’s fear.  When you’re despondent or spiraled into a deep, dark depression, everyone can tell that’s some kind of hopelessness.

If that was as distinct as someone could be with their emotions, it would not be uncommon.  We would like to think we’d be better than that, but many people are not.  Over the years, a lot of us get just a little bit numb.

Sometimes it’s not numb so much as jumbled.  We’re not sure what we’re feeling, so we just toss things into large categories and hide behind the emotions we give ourselves permission to have.  Often, men will hide behind anger.  Women will sometimes hide behind some form of fear or depression.  We want to be better, of course, but that’s just where a lot of people land.

Many of us stay above that.  We can tell what we’re feeling pretty clearly.  We know when we back down because of fear.  We know when we’re feeling overwhelmed and need to make some changes.  We know when anger is really anger and not a mask for hurt, and sometimes we can even tell when we’re angry because we’re hurt.

Just knowing what you’re feeling is helpful.  Most people know when they are angry, they want something to change, and by yelling, screaming and throwing things, maybe, just maybe, they’ll MAKE it change.  At the very least, they express themselves, and sometimes there can be some utility in that, too, at least if you can channel it in a way that hurts no one and breaks nothing.

Fear tells us to hide.  Overwhelm tells us we need to stop.  Hurt tells us there’s damage and we want to get space between us and what is hurting us.  It may not be a lot of information to work with, but it’s a start!

Emotional IQ – The Subtle Level of the Subtle Art

To most people, an emotion like Anger and a close cousin like Frustration feel the same.  Someone with an exceptional level of Emotional IQ can tell the difference.  When you can tell the difference, it informs an action plan.

There are several sets that are close cousin emotions, like Anger and Frustration, or Hopelessness and Overwhelm, or Fear and Inadequacy.

There are also levels of each emotion.  Some people think Frustration is just a level of Anger, but it isn’t.  Frustration has a different message.  With both, you could rate each feeling from 1 to 10.  Frustration is a specific enough emotion that we don’t have much of a vocabulary for it.  We might call a 1 or 2 “a little Frustrated” and something higher just “Frustrated” and then “really Frustrated.”  We might use exasperated,   At some point, we often start to use the vocabulary of Anger.

Anger has a huge vocabulary.  It’s such a common emotion that we have a lot of way to talk about it, sometimes colorful ways.   We might be bothered, annoyed, miffed, ticked, infuriated, enraged, losing our temper, losing our cool, offended, riled up, galled, fuming or bitter.  What order we might put those in varies from person to person, but we all understand that there are levels of anger.

Same with Fear.  We have quite a vocabulary to describe Fear.  In fact, we have quite a vocabulary to hide the fact of fear behind code words, such as “stress” and “concern.”  Inadequacy, like Frustration, has a much smaller vocabulary.  Overwhelm has a limited vocabulary, too, mostly consisting of phrases such as “just too much to do” or “too much going on” up to “buried,” “swamped,” and, of course, “overwhelmed.”

Emotional IQ – Mastering the Subtle Art

It takes practice, and it takes the first U in PUMU to really get good at emotional IQ.  When you Understand, you can feel what you feel and then check the feeling against the meaning.  If you feel something you were going to label Anger, and you check it against the meaning of Anger and it doesn’t apply, but Frustration applies, then you know what you’re feeling is Frustration, not Anger.  Once you have Understand working for you, Perceive becomes dramatically easier.