4. Emotional Intelligence and Happiness: Happiness Series

January 22nd 2018

EQ and Happiness. The last video in the Happiness series!

This is the final video in the four-part series on happiness that I’m doing. This video is all about EQ, emotional quotient and emotional intelligence. It’s just a very quick, brief video, but I wanted to share this thought that I had with you. I did a workshop a couple of weeks and we were talking about happiness and what’s needed for happiness and its part of this whole series that I’m doing right now.

We talked about IQ and how it’s great… you know, this wonderful measure of intelligence is available to us, and in a very recently, in the recent kind of decade or so, or two, we’ve been talking about emotional intelligence being a really high determinant in workplace harmony and productivity and just happiness levels and success in many different areas of our life. And so we’ve really researched and learnt about emotional intelligence.

We were talking about this in the workshop on happiness and I remember saying that IQ doesn’t necessarily mean you know all the answers. Certainly for people with high IQ they do know a lot of the answers that other people don’t. But a high IQ, intelligence quotient, indicates that if they don’t know the answer then they have the means of trying to figure it out and find the answer. It’s not necessary the person that has all the answers, it’s the person that’s probably the most resourceful at getting the answers, they’re problem solvers. They don’t just live in a world where there are no problems to solve and they know all the answers. I just don’t think that’s what IQ is all about. I think it’s about having the ability to solve problems at an intellectual level, at a very rational, analytical level.

In the same way with happiness someone was talking about is it always good to always have a cheerful, positive attitude in every single situation in life, and it kind of touches upon the last video on optimism. And what came to me and it was just my inner voice, like when I was preparing that workshop was EQ I feel is not always being happy, it’s not about always being cheerful and positive and optimistic like we were talking about in the last video, but it’s about knowing how to get back to that place, so that is your set-point.

You’ve either had a problem set-point and you’ve cultivated the habit of getting back to the place of opportunity set-point like we talked about in the first two videos, and with that comes a high level of happiness, and so you’ve cultivated that within yourself. And so when life throws whatever it does at you and you’re not so cheery and you’re not so positive, that EQ, that emotional intelligence within you where you know how to navigate your emotions and manage them and utilise them and have them fuel your life rather than drain your life, allows you to come back to that place when you’re not there.

And so, just like with IQ how you don’t have to know all the answers, it’s not about knowing all the answers, it’s just knowing about how to get the answers, I think with EQ it’s not about being happy all the time. It’s about knowing how to get back to that set-point of happiness, of calmness, of acceptance, when you’ve kind of gone off the rails with your emotions. It’s kind of knowing how to come back to your centre, coming back to your peace. It’s not having this unrealistic high expectation of I have to be meditative all the time, I have to be one with life all the time, I have to always be positive, I have always got to be non-judgmental. No.

I think emotional intelligence and EQ is all about seeing things as it is, responding appropriately, and when you feel like your response is out of proportion or uncontrollable, knowing how to get it back into perspective and knowing how to get it back within your control. So you control your inner world and EQ is all about how to get that control back with your emotions when it’s gone out of your hands. It’s not about always having it under control. We’re not trying to micromanage our emotions. We’re trying to live with them.

It’s not something to be controlled because we don’t fear our emotions. We always want to control things we fear. And so when you don’t need to control it anymore there’s no fear there anymore because there’s this calmness in I am the master here, there’s no… that’s not up for grabs, like I am the master of my emotions, I am the master of my thoughts, my mind is my best friend. And when it goes off the rails a bit, it’s okay. I know how to bring it back into the space where I feel calm, relaxed, and powerful.

With happiness, EQ, in summary again is not about just always being happy and always being positive and always being optimistic and always being productive. It’s more so about knowing how to get back to that place of being calm, relaxed, and powerful when you’ve gone off track. And so I think it’s a realistic expectation rather than this idealistic expectation to always be happy. Happiness is totally within our grasp. It’s within our reach and we can have it.

It’s when you’ve not been happy for a long time or you’ve never known what it is to be joyful and happy, to allow it into your life is a really big deal because there’s a bit of… I don’t want to be disappointed so let’s just have these barriers against our heart so that we don’t get hurt, we don’t get disappointed, we don’t feel rejected, we will just remain in a place of below par so as you don’t… the fall isn’t as great, and that’s when there’s a lot of fear in the system.

But when the fear is out and we understand that no, I determine how I respond to the world, I’m in control, I have access to parts of myself within my inner world that allows me to navigate whatever situation comes at me with grace and with ease and with relaxation and with power, then you feel like it’s within your hands, it’s within your grasp, and you can be the captain of the ship.

I think with this final video on happiness it’s important to remain realistic like we had talked about in the first video. It’s not about always being happy. It’s about knowing your own emotional cycles, it’s about knowing the way your thoughts default and how to get it back to a place of ‘this is how I want to think’ and training yourself to think in certain ways, allowing yourself to go off-track, and then coming back, knowing how to get yourself back. It’s just strategies at the end of the day and whatever works for you is what works for you.

And so that’s it for the series on happiness. I hope that was helpful and enjoyable and it made you a little happy.

Sharanya

xx