It’s Coach Rachel Bailey here, 

To make life easier, more fun, and filled with ease and joy, I’d love to bring you additional content here that I just may not have time to get to on the podcast. 

To start us off, I wanted to give you 5 tips for developing your emotional intelligence. Why? Because I have found that emotional intelligence is the key to better relationships and faster results in your life! 

So, without further ado, here are 5 tips for developing your emotional intelligence: 

1. First, Practice giving every emotion you feel a label. “I feel bad” is not clear to your conscious or subconscious mind. Not only that, the label “I’m bad” is hidden in the sentence. We want to separate our emotional state from who we are as much as possible. So instead, practice stating an exact emotion, for example “I feel angry.” The act of simply stating exactly how we feel can actually decrease the emotional charge! Give it a try! 

2. Along with tip number one, is to become familiar with the different types and subtypes of emotions. There are, in general, 5 major negative emotions: Anger, Sadness, Fear, Hurt, and Guilt. Of these emotions we can have a sliding scale. Maybe we don’t feel “Anger” but we feel a smaller version of this, like frustration or irritation. Or perhaps we feel this emotion very strongly, and we feel rage, rather than anger. Once you know the 5 major negative emotions, you can familiarize yourself with other synonyms that describe how intensely you feel these emotions. Or, simply scale the amount you feel the major emotions: “I feel anger at a scale of 4 out of 10” for example. 

3. Feel the emotion. When you feel an emotion, this is the time to practice naming and scaling the emotions, as laid out in tips #1 and #2. Tip number 3 is then to sit (or walk) in the emotion. Oftentimes our first instinct is to distract ourselves from how we feel. And distraction has never been more readily available than it is today. But distraction only suppresses an emotion, bringing it back up at a different time, perhaps in a magnified and disproportionate way. So instead of reaching for a snack, the phone, your video game or favorite streaming service, instead sit or walk in the emotion. This can look like externally journaling about how you feel and why, or going for a walk to internally process what is coming up for you. 

4. Take ownership. Oftentimes when we feel negative emotions, there are other people involved. If we feel angry for example we might feel we’ve been wronged in some injustice or another. If we feel hurt, we may feel that someone has betrayed us. With emotions we feel, it is incredibly easy to blame other people for our emotional state. This removes our power. Instead of blaming the other people in your life for how you feel, instead go inward to find what values of yours have been encroached upon. How has your core identity played a role in your emotional response. This is not blame. This is curiosity. Get curious about why this has upset you. Get curious about which intrinsic values you feel are being jeopardized. 

5. Once you have named, scaled, and felt the emotion, now is the time to decide how to respond. Make sure you have fully processed step 3 and 4 before moving to step 5. Once you know exactly what you are feeling and why, now is the time to pick an appropriate response. How can you communicate your feelings to those directly involved? When you do this, make sure you implement your findings from step #4, and start by using an I statement to take ownership. For example “The other day I was feeling really hurt. Upon reflection I think it’s because I was thinking you didn’t care about me. I guess I thought that because [insert their actions last] you didn’t invite me to your birthday party. Is there a reason I didn’t get an invite? I’m wondering if we can communicate about what happened.” 

What do you think? Are there tips you would add to this list? 

Thank you for investing your time in your emotional health today! I’ll catch you on the next episode of Life Coach In Your Pocket! 

Remember, life is a journey, and you’re in the driver’s seat! 

With love and grace, 

Rachel Bailey