Harvard Emotional Intelligence Class

Chapter 37 Learning to understand and express feelings (1)
Understanding feelings is the easiest of the four relationship skills to master.Understanding emotions represents our knowledge of emotions, and understanding emotions also includes appreciating the language that describes emotions and other sensations.

Emotions have their own steps like playing chess. Similarly, emotional games also have different levels of difficulty. There are simple chess games and master-level games.Emotional masters can often think of future steps and are able to integrate the entire "emotional" game into their understanding of the game.This chapter will help you become a master of relationships.This is not accomplished overnight, you have to constantly enrich your emotional knowledge and deepen your understanding of emotional laws, so that you can do better than before.

(The first section enriches emotional knowledge
"How are you?" "I'm fine. How about you?" "Me too." These are our basic emotional vocabulary.We all have a basic vocabulary for describing feelings as a foundation, but these basic vocabulary is not enough, you have to work hard to expand your emotional vocabulary.At the same time, you also need to have the basic knowledge of distinguishing and analyzing the types and causes of feelings, and predicting the development of feelings.

How many emotions are there?How should we describe each emotion?If we pursue simplicity, we can use the emotional model called "two factors", that is, emotions are arranged around a circle, which mainly includes two factors to describe the meanings represented by different points in the emotional space: the degree of comfort of feelings (cozy to uncomfortable) and energy levels (calm to extremely agitated).Linked with emotional vocabulary, then our answer can be that I am "happy" or I am "scared".This is just the beginning, and it's fairly limited and basic.

People who have gone swimming at the beach have common sense: when the sea is relatively calm and the microwave is beating against the shore, the lifeguard will raise a green flag to indicate a safe protection area on the seashore, and a red flag to indicate that swimmers are prohibited from entering. area.

Affection works similarly to these seaside flags.Emotions can tell us about impending danger or whether nothing will happen.But emotion is more subtle than these colorful flags fluttering in the breeze.No matter how much emotional training we receive, we can learn a lot about what emotions mean and the signals they send.

Anger doesn't have to be a "bad" emotion.Anger arises when you feel wronged or treated unfairly.When we feel that someone has treated us or others unfairly, without expressing feelings of outrage, we allow injustice, inequality and discrimination to exist.

But anger can also lead to destruction and violence when what we perceive as injustice may be a misunderstanding.Some people with ulterior motives can stir up other people's anger, making them irrational and ready to attack others at any time.

Here, therefore, there is a distinction between the rational and the unreasonable use of the emotion of anger.The rational use of anger can give us strength and motivation to overcome evil, can make us bravely fight against hegemony, and make this world a better place.But when we lose our ability to reason and think, when we get carried away by anger, anger is misused.This is called blind anger.We often get so angry we don't even know we're sabotaging, that we're getting mad at anyone and anything for no reason.

Anger also has a price.Anger can damage our health in many ways, but we believe that sometimes we have to pay the price for our families and our careers.If anger cuts a few hours off our lives, and your sacrifice is for someone else, that may be a sacrifice you are willing and able to make.

The ancient ascetics distrusted feelings of pleasure and pleasure, which they considered superfluous.Happiness can move us, make us close to others, accept others, so happiness is not irrational.

Successfully achieving goals can bring us happiness, and the presence of happiness can prove that we have done something good, or something that we think is valuable.We are happy when our values ​​are fulfilled.Happiness tells us that we achieved our goals and succeeded in doing things that we valued.

Worry, anxiety, and fear can tell us that something bad is happening or about to happen.These feelings are red flags of danger that must be brought to our attention.Fear often refers to future events, the foresight that something bad is about to happen.Feelings of unease are accompanied by feelings of fear.

Chronic, general fear creates anxiety.When people experience anxiety, they often feel that troublesome things are going to happen. It can feel like a slow mental breakdown.When there is no potential threat and we still feel anxious, when anxiety becomes a chronic state, we are no longer just experiencing the emotion.Back then, the symptoms of anxiety we felt were what psychologists called an anxiety disorder.

We are surprised when things don't go according to plan.Surprise can tell us that our plans will not be successful because something unexpected happened.Surprise focuses our attention on emerging problems.

Surprise functions as repositioning.When we are surprised, we drop whatever work we were doing to find out why.We'll keep our eyes open to see what's going on.

Things we love are taken away from us, and we grieve the loss.Grief can make us think that what we want won't be there anymore.

Sadness is an emotion that also exists in the interaction between people.When we are grieving, we are not a threat to anyone, and we need support and help from others when we are most critical.

Social feelings or derivative feelings are more culturally colored than basic feelings.In addition to knowing the basic causes of these social feelings, we must know the norms of the whole group or society, so that we can grasp the time and conditions of these feelings.

1.disgust

Disgust is a social or secondary emotion.Disgust draws the line between what we consider acceptable behavior and what we consider intolerable.Disgust has cultural origins, so we must recognize that what is disgusting to one person does not necessarily disgust others.

Originally created to keep us from eating poisonous things, disgust has evolved into a complex emotion that can have many causes.Actions that disgust us are contrary to our main idea of ​​what is appropriate and inappropriate.Disgust keeps our social values ​​intact: when we no longer feel disgusted about something, it means our values ​​have changed; Changes have taken place, and behaviors that were once acceptable are no longer acceptable.

2.shame and guilt
Shame means that you are not living up to your own personal ideals or values, so there are similarities between feelings of shame and guilt.But there are also important differences between the two senses.When we fail, we feel guilty; however, we attribute the cause of the failure to ourselves, and when we are ashamed, we have the consciousness of shirking responsibility.Another fundamental difference between shame and guilt is the focus of attention: when feeling guilty, people place the emotional emphasis on the action: "Look what I did." On personal failure: "Look, what I did".

3.embarrassment

We experience embarrassment when we realize we have violated social norms or taboos.We understand this, we are waiting for punishment, and at the same time, we hope to calm the anger of the offended person through humility. This is the feeling of embarrassment.Embarrassment is another complex emotion that combines many simple feelings, including shame and guilt.Guilt becomes self-evident when feelings of embarrassment arise, and embarrassment also includes some surprise when your mistakes are discovered.What does feeling embarrassment, shame or guilt do?Such feelings can make us feel bad, and so can others around us.But feelings of embarrassment play an important role—preventing violence and arguments from happening.If we inadvertently say or do something that upsets or hurts another person, the person we hurt may become angry with us.We know that anger can lead to arguments or violence, which are far worse mistakes, so we need to show that we recognize the mistake, regret it, and sincerely apologize.Embarrassment is an obvious apology to the victim involved.

Feelings can be thought of as mathematical equations containing X and Y, or more precisely, events as X and feelings as Y.Emotions contain information and data that reflect our relationship to our surroundings.The information here, then, can tell us about the event that aroused the emotion.

Our ability to associate emotions with various events provides us with an emotional link between cause and effect.If we hear that a co-worker has lost a large sum of money, we assume that he must be feeling bad right now.If we later heard that the colleague's money was stolen by another co-worker, we would assume that he must be very angry now.

The accumulation of emotional knowledge begins with the most basic question - to understand the root cause of emotion.The accumulation of emotional knowledge and the improvement of ability level require you to have a keen insight into the codes and values ​​of team, organization and individual behavior.

Suppose you keep losing jobs. After each loss, you will be first shocked, then sad, and finally angry.Unless your former colleagues don't meet with you, as long as they are together, they will talk about this topic carefully.In order not to trigger your emotional outburst, they talk as if they are attending a funeral.

But the experience of losing a job can translate into an emotional disenchantment.Check out the story below:

★Mood after being fired
"Many years ago, I was surprised when I received my dismissal letter. I had a hunch that something was going to happen, but I didn't expect that the unfortunate person would be me. When the boss told me that my position had been terminated. I was doing my best to keep my emotions in check when I got fired. I didn't want him to see how I felt because I was happy. Happy to be fired? Not really. After nearly a year During the period of time, I felt mediocre in my job, so I planned to leave the current industry and return to my old job to be a psychological counselor. I took two refresher courses in counseling services to work in counseling services As a part-time job, and started to collect data. It was being fired that gave me the motivation to redo my decision.”★
Another example concerns the feeling of anger.Definitions of what can cause anger vary from person to person, and people's judgments of unfairness or injustice in the same behavior can vary.For example:
★Danielle's Ascension

Harry's co-workers were very angry and resentful when they heard that the newcomer Danielle had been promoted and Harry had not.They said, "Harry knows the business best, and this new guy doesn't know anything."

"It's just for a change of taste—she's a woman, a minority, so she gets promoted." Colleagues all ran to Harry's office to complain, but everyone was surprised to hear Harry say : "Guys, calm down. I'm not unhappy at all. She's the right person for the job. The boss and I had a long talk about it last week. Danielle is very qualified in this .”★
The key to becoming an emotionally intelligent person is to detach yourself from your own thoughts and personal experiences.

How do you know what the things that arouse strong emotions are?To find out, you need to start by analyzing your own feelings.For example, think about what makes you feel irritable or sad?Try to think about the last time you felt this way, and describe it as follows:

1.Describe something that made you feel this way.

2.What happened before this?how do you feel

3.How did your feelings change as things unfolded?
4.Write down what you hope or expect to happen.

5.How did you feel when things were over?
6.Try to recall how your feelings changed after the event that upset you, and describe how you felt before you felt better or felt a little more positive.

You can ask yourself similar questions about other relationships.If you are good at observing others, you can also discover their love and hatred.Think about if you've ever noticed your co-workers worry, and then recall an event that caused you to notice their worry.Instead of explaining these things yourself, consider whether your colleagues have a different worldview than you.

(End of this chapter)