Blog Talk About Career Ownership | Thinking Rich | Inner Experience

Mind Your Own Career: Your Guide to Right Working for Right Living can help you to explore important questions about how you, your work, your career and your life are integrated, and to understand, and even to change, the answers you find.

The guide lays a foundation with a basic philosophy and some practical tips for changing your answers to these questions, so your answers become more suitable for who you are, what you need and what you want – in your work, as well as in your larger life.

Enhance Your Emotional Intelligence To Develop Your Feeling Ability

You can practice and develop your ability to interpret things emotionally by becoming more aware and more intelligent about your own and others’ emotions.

Basically, this means developing your level of emotional awareness so that you can easily separate an emotion from the response that you or another has to that emotion. Such separation between emotion and response gives you more effective emotional control and also hones your ability to interpret things that trigger emotional responses in yourself and others.

You can evaluate and monitor your level of emotional awareness on a six point scale:

1. Knowing the feeling is there: You become "aware" of the feeling when you first think about it or realize that you or another feels something at that moment.
   
   
2. Acknowledging the feeling: You may not know exactly what the feeling is, but you notice and acknowledge that you or another has some feeling.
   
   
3. Identifying the feeling: You capture the feeling and its intensity, making it more manageable, becoming clearer about the feeling and its causes.
   
   
4. Accepting the feeling: You accept yourself or another in the moment, and begin to shift from understanding the feeling to dealing with it and its effects.
   
   
5. Reflecting on the feeling: You grasp both the cause and the effect of the feeling, and can move with confidence to deal with it effectively.
   
   
6. Forecasting feelings: You can consider how you or others might feel if you choose or do not choose a specific possibility.

Steve Hein offers these suggestions for developing your emotional intelligence:

• Label your feelings, rather than people or situations, e.g. "I feel hurt and bitter" versus "You are an insensitive jerk." Or "I feel afraid." versus "You are driving like an idiot."
  
  
• Distinguish between thoughts and feelings. You express your thoughts when you say “I feel like …” or “I feel as if …” or “I feel that ...” You express your feelings when you say “I feel (words to identify the feeling and its intensity).”
  
  
• Take complete responsibility for your feelings. "I feel jealous." versus "You are making me jealous."
  
  
• Use your feelings to help you make choices. "How will I feel if I do this?" "How will I feel if I don’t?"
  
  
• Show respect for others’ feelings. Ask "How will they feel if I do this?" "How will they feel if I don’t?"
  
  
• Feel energized, not ashamed, guilty, apathetic, sad, afraid, envious or angry. Use the energy of so-called “negative” emotions to energize yourself to take productive action.
  
  
• Validate others’ feelings. Show empathy and acceptance of other people's feelings.
  
  
• Practice getting and giving value from your emotions. Ask yourself: "How do I feel?" and "What would help me feel better?" Ask others "How do you feel?" and "What would help you feel better?"
  
  
• Don't command, control, criticize, judge or lecture yourself or others. Instead, just listen with empathy and non-judgment.
  
  
• Avoid people who invalidate you. Spend less time with them, and give them less power over you.

The single, most important factor in developing your ability to work effectively with your feelings is to always remember that your feelings are your interpretation of whatever you can sense and intuit about a particular situation.

Read more articles from Mind Your Own Career: Your Guide to Right Working for Right Living.