Further from my last blog yesterday on the skills needed to be able to use emotions, the next factor of emotional intelligence is the ability to be able to understand emotions. Our emotions convey a lot of information about ourselves, others and the situations we find ourselves in. The ability and skill with which we can think about and decode the messages our emotions convey are vital in our day-to-day lives.
Understanding emotions require a 6 core attributes:
- Emotional Literacy - having the ability to be able to decode, think and talk about our emotions,
- Understand how emotions can combine to form other internal outcomes,
- Know how our emotions can progress from one emotion to another,
- Understand how both yourself and others are behaving due to emotional reactions,
- Predict how people are likely to feel and act in different situations,
- The ability to be able analyse emotions and their causes both in ourselves and others.
As you can see these are quite a complex series of abilities. Emotional resilience and the ability to overcome fear often relies on these skills, particularly the ability to be able to predict and decode our emotions.
