I get asked a lot about Emotional Resilience, what it is and how to do it. It is a frequently misunderstood concept.
Variously I hear Emotional Resilience (ER) being used to mean:
- Without emotion
- Emotionless
- The ability to cut off from your emotions
- Not being effected by your emotions, and several others.
People who are without any emotion are usually a) a liability to themselves and others, b) thankfully rare, c) boring and quite possibly d) dead.
Just think about what being without emotion would mean for a second or two. It would certainly mean that we would not get any feedback about what is dangerous in our environment. The emotion of fear is there to keep us safe, even if it does tend to overreact a bit. Fear is a really fast way of learning about the things that can hurt / eat us.
Just watch a child who gets burnt by something hot. You are unlikely to find that they need a formal lecture with PowerPoint slides, extra curricula classes, revision, months of study and an exam to learn not to touch it again. Just as well really as I don’t think the human race would have made it past 1st Grade. We would now probably only be found in the deep freeze section of a more emotionally intelligent dinosaur’s supermarket having been hunted and gathered ourselves.
Another thing to consider is Empathy, the ability to sense others emotions and ‘feel’ for them. Empathy and care also require some pretty decent emotions. Eating your young might prevent starvation but it is not exactly the best strategy for survival of the species (or staying out of jail) and that invitation around to a friends house for dinner could be final. Being without empathy is not a winner for deep relationships nor is it going to endear you to your friends - if you have any.
Being emotionless would also take all the fun out of…well everything actually. Imagine chocolate just being a way of not starving. It doesn’t bear thinking about really. Oh and sex would be for one purpose only. It’s not only useful for enjoying sex and chocolate. Taking an emotionless person or someone who doesn’t get affected by their emotions to share a movie, the ballet or theatre with is going to be a bit of a fruitless exercise really. They are not going to be a whole bag of laughs; weepy movies would just be stared at, horror movies wouldn’t raise their pulse one beat and even the thought of any similar event would not be seen as a treat. Without emotion the only fun will be in fundamentally boring.
You are walking down a dark lonely street at night and you start to get the feeling that something isn’t quite right … or you meet someone for the first time and you get that sense that you have known them before. Or you just ‘know’ you are about to get ‘lucky’ with the stunning chap or gal who has just walked into the room. All of these would just not be possible to ‘feel’ without emotion. Yes our intuition is also part of our emotional system.
So just say yes to emotions and yes to the causes of emotion.
OK so what is emotional resilience and why bother with it if our emotions are so damn useful and at times enjoyable?
Well sometimes we find that emotions kind of take over running our bodies and our minds just at the moment we want to be in control. I would much rather be cool, calm and collected and have my sense of humor when I am chatting someone up or doing a speech rather than being a shaking humorless geek who can’t get his words out properly and keeps missing his mouth with his food and drink. I don’t know about you but calm wins at moments like this.
Emotional resilience really comprises of two elements:
- The ability of an individual to register and accurately identify our own, and often other people’s emotions in the moment (Emotional Intelligence), and
- The ability and skill to change our emotional state, or reduce (or heighten) the effect of our emotions at will, if so desired.
Basically emotional resilience is the ability to be able to control our emotions rather than having them control us, or allowing them to sweep over us when we want, so let’s here it for Emotional Resilience. Rah!
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