Sooner or later, stuff around “emotional intelligence” inevitably comes up in my work with individual clients and teams. How could it not? Most people pay attention to five emotions, max: happy, sad, mad, good and bad. Out of a huge range of possibilities, this is all we track (and good/bad aren’t even feelings, they’re thoughts).
So I have two basic recommendations that will ultimately help you both at work and with your loved ones at home.
1 – Expand your “feeling” vocabulary. You might have 15-20 feelings in a day. Can you name even a quarter of them?
2 – Your feelings give important pieces of information, kind of like the alerts on the dashboard of your car, so don’t try to ignore the painful ones. Even those negative ones – especially the negative ones – will help you enormously in figuring out the needs most up for you. So they’re diagnostic, you could say.
Take a look. What feelings generally come up at work? Any from the top part of this list – or are most of them from the bottom half?
Feelings and Needs Lists – Printable Version
credit: Earl J. Wagner – Copyright © 2014-present Google, Inc. – Inspiration from lists by NYCNVC
