welcome to today's video today I'm going to teach you how to get better with your emotional intelligence so that you can improve your life your relationship to yourself but also your relationship to other people as well let's dive in you know when we look at being a human what's great about being a human and what makes humans different than almost all other animals that are on the planet is our depth of emotions now animals do have emotions for years many scientists thought they had no emotions but the difference between us and most an is that
we have a much deeper level of in depth to our emotions and the other difference is how we can imagine a fake scenario in the future and get an emotional reaction about that fake future in this moment right now whether it's a good future that we're imagining whether it's a bad future that we're imagining so we can think about how amazing that is we can think about something a future that doesn't exist yet and it can make us feel something right now that's the the depth of our emotions that we can feel and so today
we're going to talk about something called emotional intelligence which is basically just the ability to identify and understand and manage your emotions both of your emotions and emotions of others and so this is really important for everyone listening if you're a parent oh my God this is super important for you to understand because if you don't fix this within yourself you're going to pass it on to your children so this is important as a parent if you're a spouse or you have someone you're in a relationship with this is extremely important to understand if you're
a business owner this is extremely important for you to understand this is a skill set that everyone who's listening should want to get better at so that you can make better decisions you can have better relationships you can get better with your conflict resolution and you need to learn how to understand and resolve your emotions not act like they don't exist but how to understand okay why am I feeling this way and if I want to feel this way great if I don't want to feel this way how can I resolve these emotions instead of
just sweeping them under the rug like most people tend to do but actually working through them and understanding them and there's a a lot of experts that say that emotional intelligence is more important than cognitive intelligence when it comes to overall success overall happiness and overall well-being and so a lot of people are trying to improve their cognitive intelligence and put more information in their brain but in reality if you want to be more successful more happy and have a better well-being you need to actually improve it's your emotional intelligence but unfortunately unlike IQ emotional
intelligence is not something that people really focus on most of the time people are like I want to get smarter I want to get more intelligent but yeah what about emotional intelligence and so when you look at it emotional intelligence is something that you can improve IQ really isn't something that you can improve and so if you can improve it it is kind of a skill set which is why I call emotional intelligence a skill set and so we're going to go through basic basically a three-step process to help you develop your emotional intelligence so
the first one is self-awareness is to understand yourself understand your emotions I feel like I talk about self-awareness pretty much every episode at some point and the reason why is because I think that it might be the most important skill for someone to have because you cannot change something that you're not aware of so if I'm not aware of how my emotions are affecting me and affecting other people around me then I can't change it but as soon as I become aware of something well then now I can change it on top of that I
feel like there's so much technology and so much stimuli and there's phones and there's TVs and there's Netflix and there's social medias and there's ads everywhere that most people have just become so unaware of themselves because they're always focusing on the outside they're always focusing on what's going on around them around their phone and around their TVs and work very few people I feel like nowadays take time to actually look in the mirror and go within and so in turn because of the fact that there's so few people that are doing that a lot of
people are very just unaware of themselves and if you're unaware of your deep unconscious reactions then you're not going to be able to fix them so many people are just out there just unaware of their deep unconscious reactions and actions and they don't know how it's affecting themselves they don't know how it's affecting other people around them and it's kind of like I always say like when you're in the jar you can't read the label you've got to get out of the jar every once in a while and look back at yourself and say huh
what's going on with this Rob guy is he happy is he fulfilled is he you know are there certain aspects of him that maybe we could change to make him even better and so that's really this aspect of self-awareness it's the Cornerstone of emotional intelligence you can't become more emotionally intelligent if you don't even know what's going on inside of your own head and inside of your own body and so you have to understand it's the capacity to recognize and understand your own emotions your motivations your behaviors your patterns all of that how it's affecting
you how it's affecting others we all have patterns but the question really comes down to are you aware of your patterns you know and so it means like are you aware of what you're feeling are you aware of why you're feeling that way are you aware of how those emotions can affect your decisions and actions are you aware how those emotions and decisions and actions are affecting other people around you I always say that if if everybody on this Earth had extreme self-awareness the whole world would be better everything would be better if people were
just extremely aware of themselves and so then you get start to ask yourself well how do I become more aware of myself then one of the things I think is really important is journaling for Stress Management so I recommend getting a stress journal and this is going to sound kind of weird but it's just a small Journal you know it can fit in your pocket and just keep it in your back pocket and just write stuff down okay whenever it it the reason why this works really well is because a stress Journal really helps you
identify your triggers it helps you understand your emotional responses more and eventually develop coping mechanisms help you work through it and so the idea is to learn yourself and so you know you sit down you ask yourself what is triggering you how do you feel why do you feel that way what can you do about it so it's like I'm aware I'm pissed off right now okay let me get my journal about Journal out what's making me pissed off right now well this is what's making me pissed off how do I feel this way how
do I feel what can I do about it right now and you will learn more about yourself than you've ever known if you do this you'll start to see triggers because you'll get so clear by writing it down by taking it out of your head and taking it out of your body and writing it down you'll start to see the triggers before they come up so that you can navigate your life better and you'll develop coping mechanisms when you do get stressed out and so what I recommend for for people is when you're triggered get
curious hey real quick I want to introduce you to something called mindset Mentor plus if you love this podcast you will absolutely love what I'm about to talk about I designed mindset Mentor plus to help you actively integrate every one of these episodes into your life and here's how it works with every episode of this podcast that comes out mindset Mentor plus subscribers get more you're going to get multiple page detailed printable worksheets effectively in mini Master Class that's way more in- depth than just this podcast they also come with journaling questions challenges assignments and
so much more so that you're not just listening to these podcasts passively but you're actively integrating them into your life that way you improve much faster I also do monthly Q&A sessions in there and much much more if you want to learn more about it go to mindset mentor.com or click the link that's down in the description when you're triggered by somebody by Something by A circumstance get curious write down on a pen and paper just start asking yourself questions about what's going on there shouldn't be any judgment instead it's like take a really compassionate
and curious approach to yourself and this journaling can be a really good emotional release as well so you can dump all of your feelings onto a piece of paper and start to work through them because when it's in your head it's really hard to work through things when it's on paper you can plan it out you can start to work through it and as I say I've said it many times in this podcast everything in this world is figureoutable so you know figureoutable probably not a real word but everything is figure out B so if
it's emotions you want to work through you can figure out if it's thoughts you want to work through you can figure it out and so sometimes you just need to slow down and you just need to be in the moment not run from everything you know sometimes a subconscious brings up automatic thoughts that we don't even recognize a lot of times we usually don't recognize a thought we us just recognize how we're feeling so it's like okay let me take up my journal let me write down like what am I feeling right now I'm feeling
piss pissed okay cool nothing wrong with that every emotion is welcome at some point in time we have emotions for reasons okay well what is this what am I pissed about what is this being pissed trying to tell me why am I feeling this way and then another really good thing if you if you this is a hard one but if you really really want to learn yourself start asking people around you what they notice about you because they notice things about you patterns ways that you react that you don't even notice and so you
think you know yourself but a lot of times you don't know yourself until you start getting feedback from other people and then you're like oh my God that hurts but they're right so I would recommend just every once a while just ask people that you really trust people that you love whether it's friends family members whatever it might be for feedback just be like hey what do you think I need to work on what do you think are my downsides what do you think's good about me what do you think is bad about me how
can I get better are there you know triggers or emotions you think I need to work through and they might be able to give you some insights about your emotions that you are completely unaware of and when they say it you'll go o that hurts but it resonates so it must be something I need to work through so that is the first thing is you need to be get you need to get really good at your self-awareness to start to understand yourself because you can't change anything that you're not aware of the second thing after
self-awareness is self-regulation okay now that I am aware of my emotions how do I regulate my emotions some people out there listening have really short fuses or you know you have a really long fuse but then when you blow up you blow up and so we're not taught how to self- soothe by our parents you know we're not really most people are not taught emotions by their parents at all or very well a lot of people who are angry are angry because your parents were angry so self- soothing is really really natural like babies naturally
suck on their thumbs they naturally want a pacifier and when they do they calm down so much it's crazy to see young children what do they have to help them self sooe sometimes they have a stuffed animal they bring around sometimes it's a blanket that they carry around as adults we still need to self sooe I just don't recommend that you suck your thumb or bring a blanket around with you everywhere you go right we're not taught how to do it because frankly if I'm being completely honest most people's parents are not good at their
own emotions and they don't know how to work through them and it's not their own fault they just this isn't something that was taught you know like my parents parents had to go through the you know Great Depression like that's they weren't really thinking about their emotions when they were trying to survive and trying to eat and feed their family right so I want you to understand that so it's like maybe we should just become the more evolved generation at this point in time and start figuring out how to self sooth oursel because maybe our
parents didn't really understand emotions because they were never taught by their parents how to understand emotions because their parents never taught them and it's just a vicious cycle until somebody decides to break it which hopefully is us and so self soothing is just a practice to be able to get yourself from a heightened State pissed emotional crying whatever it might be to a calm and relaxed State it's the it's it is being able to regulate your emotional state regardless of whatever circumstance are happening okay and so how do we really start to develop this self
soothing and start to work through this right first thing you want to do is get better at pausing before you react when you feel a really strong emotion especially a negative one don't react immediately and you might say oh my God Rob but I I don't know how to not react well there is a space there is a second like Victor Frankle who was a psychologist he wrote a incredible book called man search for meaning I recommend everyone read it and he was an incredible psychologist who lived through uh living in Nazi prison camps he
lived in owitz he saw the worst things that could possibly happen to humans and what he says is he has this this my favorite quote of his says between stimulus and response there's a space and in that space lies our freedom and our power to choose our responses and in our response lies our growth and our freedom so when you notice oh my gosh I'm about to feel an emotion I can feel it ramping up pause for a second when you start to notice your your state changing the first thing you want to do I
say it all on the podcast if you've been listen for a long time you can probably answer this for me first thing you want to do breathe our breath rate the depth the pattern is the first thing to change when your emotional state changes there's a Japanese study that researches at oswa University in Yokohama found that six deep breaths over a 30second period can help you lower your bre blood pressure and slow down your heart rate so Dr Herbert benser Benson at Harvard Medical School coined the phrase something called a relaxation response and that relaxation
response that our body has is triggered and stimulated through deep conscious breathing so it's just in through the nose out through the mouth in through the nose out through the mouth so that's what I would recommend is as soon as you notice your State starting to change go in and start breathing and say okay I'm going to I'm going to calm myself down it's not saying I'm going to uh ignore the anger or ignore the sadness it's I'm going to breathe first so that I can go into the anger I can go into the sadness
with a little bit more curiosity and start to say he I'm just going to I'm going to calm myself down before I let myself get you know ramped up and and blow up there's some people I know that that they just basically black out when they get mad okay well hey it'd be a really good idea for once you start to feel that ramp up maybe you breathe so that you don't go into that right another way that you can really start to train yourself to to go from heightened state to to calm state is
during workouts if you work out like I do this is I'll work out really hard during sets and I'll do this when I'm at my house and I'm alone and my trainer's not there and then what I'll do is I'll set 60 seconds for a rest timer and that's pretty average but what I'll do is I'll close my eyes and I'll take deep breaths and I try to calm so I I'll get really heightened and I'll I'll calm myself and I'll put on 60 seconds I'll close my eyes and I'll breathe and I'll try to
bring my heart rate and my my breath rate slow as possible I try to calm myself and so I'm practicing heighten state to calm heighten state to calm and so work out is actually a really good strategy for emotional training and regulation as well so that's how you kind of start to get better at it and then the third part is adaptability you need to become flexible with your emotional responses and so emotional strength is like a muscle the more that you train it the stronger that it gets so you don't try to change the
world around you you try to get better at reacting to the world around you most people don't get this most people see the world and they point out there and they say this world needs to change and those people need to change and they need to change your beliefs no no you can try to change the world and you can try to make good changes and I'm okay with that but it's not about looking out into the world being like the world has to be different it's about getting better at reacting to the world around
you I bet that you can think of someone who you know that no matter what happens to them they're almost always calm that's a skill set that is a muscle that has somehow been developed over years and years and so what you got to get better at is going okay yeah the world is crazy there's a lot of change there's always change that happens the only constant in this world is change so instead of resisting it maybe I can just use that as just an opportunity to grow because change can lead to to New Opportunities
it can lead to learning it can learn to lead to development of yourself so Embrace change it might be out there also like when you mess up which you will mess up you will blow up at someone you will not be perfect you're going to blow up at someone you're going to say something you didn't mean you're going to react in a defensive way you're going to get too emotional how can you learn from it how can you react better next time instead of guilting yourself and shaming yourself and calling yourself a POS oh my
God I can't believe you did that you do this all the time so stupid that's that doesn't help you at all it's going okay I messed up that's not me I'm still a good person I'm going to distance myself and my identity from the behavior and go okay let's look at the behavior and let's see how I can start to change that behavior don't guilt yourself and shame yourself use it as a lesson and a chance to get better and so analyze what went wrong in that moment when you reacted a way you didn't want
to and just say how can I get better next time and it's only when you really start to understand yourself and understand your emotions can you start to do the same for other people when you start to do this you become a better parent and you start to teach your children how to have emotional regulation you start to be able to help your friends your family members your spouse your emotional regulation is one of the most important things that you can get better it's one of the most important skill sets for you to focus on
because everyone around you is being affected by your emotions whether they're good emotions or bad emotions and your children are learning from you the question is what are they learning and if it's not what you want them to learn well then that's just something that we need to work on and improve upon so that's what I got for you for today's episode if you love this episode please share it on your Instagram stories tag me in at robd Jr Rd i a l Jr and with that I'm going leave you the same way I leave
you every single episode make it your mission make somebody else's day better I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day
