The Side Of Emotional Intelligence That Isn't Talked About In Leadership

When most people think about "Emotional Intelligence", they think about people who are calm, collected, and reserved.

But is this really true?

Well, last week I wrote about a Breaking Point that I hit in my life.

I spoke about how I hit an emotional point where I felt like I had completely broke.

The experience felt extremely jarring, and it felt like it took me a long time to recover as it was a powerful emotional experience.

However, there's a deeper aspect to this story that I really only found out today.

See, there is something I like to say to clients.

All emotions are good, you just need to figure out how to express them.

The emotion I mainly felt and expressed during my breaking point was 100% Anger.

I also sometimes call it, "Righteous Anger".

It's not an emotion I feel regularly, but I definitely felt it in that moment.

Was I wrong for the emotion I felt?

No, I do truly believe that the situation called for Anger.

What I wasn't as sure about was if I had expressed it well.

If you read what I wrote last week, I said as much.

However, when you track what happens in your body, you can learn a lot about how you function.

I have a coach for training and improving my HRV.

When you study Neurocardiology, you learn that emotions actually begin in the heart and are impacted by a variety of factors, and in turn, impact many other aspects of our lives.

When we express emotions well, we have the ability to increase our HRV.

This works vice-versa as well.

How we express (or don't express) our emotions has an impact on so many different psychophysiological levels.

This includes our psychology, our nervous system, and even our ability to generate Mg-ATP (aka fuel for the body).

All of these will be impacted based on how we handle our emotions - positively or negatively.

Speaking with my coach today, I told them how I wasn't sure how my HRV would be impacted last week due to the situation around my emotions.

My coach then notified me that they were actually impressed by the great results I managed to achieve last week!

They also said something very profound.

"The idea isn't to not have reactions, but to be able to have the appropriate reactions and responses, and to teach our bodies how to recover. It's moments like last week that are exactly what you're training for!"

In that moment, Anger was not a bad emotion to have.

The way that I reacted to having that Anger appears to have resonated well with my psychophysiology due to the great HRV results I obtained.

Developing your Emotional Intelligence, or EQ, or EI, is not about being calm, collected, and reserved.

It's about understanding our emotions, feeling them as they are, and expressing them in a way that is beneficial.

I may not have been completely sure how my body was reacting immediately after my breaking point, but my body was completely aware of the emotion and how it was expressed well.

This is also why we should be keenly aware of our VQ or Vitality Quotient.

Measuring HRV is directly a matter of VQ, and only indirectly EQ.

As I do not feel Anger regularly (most people would say I'm the least angry person they know), my IQ wasn't sure if I handle the situation correctly, and my EQ hadn't been trained in it well enough to know either.

However, because I tracked and now understand what my VQ was in that moment, both my EQ and IQ are able to now better understand how the situation actually played out, and will now be improved because of it.