Lots of men don’t to emotion!
They pride themselves on their capacity to fix, solve and pragmatically respond to their lives and relationships.
Hey! There is nothing wrong with that!
Or is there?
For some men, expressing emotion drops down the pecking order of priorities and their mental health, and relationship health suffers.
Understanding the value of emotion in life is a key factor in high emotional intelligence. Naturally this gets tested as life throws you the proverbial curve ball straight where it hurts!
What is Emotional Intelligence?
Emotional Intelligence includes the ability:
- To identify and understand your own emotions and be able to communicate with others about how you feel
- To understand other people’s emotions and be able to identify and interact with them when they are emotional
- To regulate your own emotions (including controlling, expressing and modulating emotion) in a culturally and situationally appropriate manner
- To use emotion in your life in order to achieve your goals.
What’s the fuss!
When a bloke struggles to identify, observe and accept his feelings it has a massive impact on his mental health.
His moods, behaviour and capacity to cope with the stress and strains of life are severely tested.
Your Emotional Intelligence:
- Allows you to have awareness and control over what you do
- Results in lower levels of stress, which are associated with better health
- Enables more satisfying friendships and lasting intimate relationships
- Helps to soothe and calmly focus, concentrate and think when you are faced with a challenging situation
- Makes you more resilient. This means change and stress are easier to deal with.
Indeed, the research highlights that Emotional Intelligence is a better predictor of life satisfaction than IQ!
It’s all in the family!
As a child your level of emotional intelligence emerged through those early years.
Your degree of EQ is a result of interactions between your own innate temperament and the emotional environment in which you grew up.
Your parents and caregivers will have naturally influenced you, for better or worse!
They will have done so by how they:
- Modelled expression and regulated their emotions
- Reacted to your emotions
- Discussed and coached you about emotions
- Created the type of experiences they gave you and the emotional climate they exposed you to
What do the experts say?
Dr John Gottman is a psychologist and relationships expert with 40 plus years of breakthrough research on marriage, relationships and parenting.
He has written numerous books on the topic of healthy emotions/healthy relationships such as The Heart of Parenting and Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child. I highly recommend them.
He and other researchers found how positive and negative emotions are managed and coached/taught by parents form a crucial part of emotion socialisation.
They also found that how parents managed stress, being too busy, distracted, and overwhelmed combined with their own temperament and background, significantly shaped their responses to their children.
You and I were the beneficiaries of all this!
Through the research, John Gottman and others developed one of the most powerful parenting styles that enhance kids Emotional Intelligence.
They called it Emotion Coaching.
A guide for Life!
Emotion Coaching provides a great guide for blokes to recognise emotion and build closeness and intimacy in relationships.
They also help us develop a high degree of emotional intelligence, a happier more content life and long term secure relationship.
Here’s a quick guide: