Developing Emotional Intelligence: How To Become Powerful, Strong, And Resilient

INTRODUCTION

Wikipedia states that emotional intelligence is “defined as the ability to perceive, use, understand, manage, and handle emotions.”

In other words, emotional intelligence is the way we deal with our emotions, either in a very expressive, storm of emotion, or in a very controlled, calm way. This controlled, calm, logical, and stoic approach to emotional control is what I personally define as emotional intelligence. It’s emotional maturity.

There are many benefits to becoming more emotionally intelligent. These benefits include but are not limited to more wisdom, maybe even more knowledge, better mental health, bettered self-identity, dealing with stressful situations much better, and more.

In order to reach emotional intelligence, there are a few key points: self-awareness, self-improvement, spiritual growth, and deep breathing. We will explore all of these key points in this article.

Self-awareness

Self-awareness is the knowing of yourself, knowing who you are, where you’re going, what you’re doing with your life, and much more about yourself. It’s integrating your emotions and understanding them, feeling the feelings, and then letting go of these emotions, not having to act on them.

Self-awareness is your internal identity and knowing yourself. If you don’t know yourself and are lying to yourself on a daily basis then you’re of course going to be far away from emotional intelligence. You’ve got to have no problem with yourself, and your perceived identity.

You have to be secure in who you are. Funnily enough, self-awareness (knowing oneself) requires you to be on self-improvement so as to induce spiritual growth and mental growth. The more you search deep into your conditioning, life, experiences, relationships, and purpose, the more you connect with yourself.

When you’re living a false life, only acting to please others, you often lose contact with yourself. You feel disconnected, you feel like you’re a piece of crap. But once you start working hard on meaningful projects, and you work on your growth in both the mental and spiritual areas of your life, that is where a good identity is built, and where confidence rises exponentially fast.

So, make sure you know who you are. And, to know who you are, I suggest doing the following activities:

Journaling

Journaling about your values, your goals, your relationships, your work, your purpose, and more, could help you get out of your head and onto paper concrete words and steps that can help define you.

Deep questions such as “What is my purpose in life?” or “What is the most meaningful relationship of my life?” can be asked, and you will not be judged by it because nobody sees it, since it’s your own personal journal.

Observation

Observe how you act in social interactions. To be accepted by “the tribe”, we like to even indirectly conform to others and sometimes even speak like them. If you’re around people with an accent, you’ll start developing this same accent. If you’re around people who swear a lot, you will begin swearing more.

Even unconsciously, your brain likes pushing you to become more like the person you meet in your day-to-day life, which means, you often start acting like them through a long time period of seeing them daily, at least if the exposure is high enough and you don't work on changing your conditioning.

You are the average of the five people you are with the most often is a real thing, and if you don’t take a look at how you act in social environments, you’re missing something. Observing, analyzing, and searching the conditioning behind the way you act socially is deeply important to understand yourself, especially when you acted “bad” (swear to conform, force an accent to be accept, “act” like the social group instead of being authentic, etc).

By seeing the underlying motivations and conditioning pushing your conscious or unconscious brain to do things you don’t want to do in social experiences will help you uncover much about yourself. Working on becoming more authentic is key.

Authenticity

This is not an activity, but a constant practice. Stop looking for outward validation and start living from the soul. You have a soul and it has much deeper objectives than simply the day-to-day life of work, grinding, eating, sleeping. Your soul has deep desires such as intimate connection, fulfilling purpose, and more. Listen to your soul for the deeper parts of your life.

Try to feel where your attention comes from. Right now, you are focused, but where does this attention, this life, come from? It has to come from somewhere, right? Your actionable step is to feel where this attention comes from, feel through this attention, and let it guide your life.

Meditation

Meditation will help you calm your thoughts and will allow you to connect deeper to who you are. It’s a practice, I think, that can help you connect more to your emotions, feelings, and thought patterns.

You start disassociating your identity with your thoughts, at least negative ones, from your mind. You understand that you cannot control thoughts, but you can try to influence positive thoughts, which already take off a mirage of identity you might have had (the thought of my brain repeats that I don't deserve anything so I don't deserve anything is gone or you don't listen to it anymore for example, so your identity shifts). You start digging deeper into your real self.

Also, you might be more prone to asking yourself deep questions during meditation, as you are in a relaxed, full-breathing state of awareness. In this way, you’re open to deep questions, since you’re not stressed, shallow breathing, with tension in your chest, moving from place to place in both mind and body. And, feeling more relaxed will help you take care of emotionally intense situations in better ways, especially if you're very conscious and present in the moment, of your emotions and more.

Strength and weaknesses analysis

Knowing your strengths and weaknesses can also help you identify what you’re strong at and identify what you’re weak at, in order to fix it, improve it, or simply accept it if cannot be changed. In this way, you get deeper into your real self, you understand yourself more.

It also helps as an ego-check and as a shower of humility. Understanding and knowing your weaknesses just makes you ultimately more humble. You realize your real edge in life. Once you identified your real edge, and your weaknesses, try to lean just beyond it. You should lean beyond it enough so there is discomfort that will push you to grow, but you should not lean too far, suddenly becoming overworked and falling into the void of fear, anxiety and stress.

All of these activities can help you become more self-aware, and this brings us to self-improvement.

Self-improvement

Even tho self-awareness is great, if you know yourself but your real identity sucks, then life is not that great. You want to be constantly evolving and working on yourself through key activities of self-improvement.

These include but are not limited to 1) working hard on meaningful projects, 2) exercising, dieting, and sleeping well, 3) meditating, 4) reading, and 5) connecting with people you love.

You need to grow physically and mentally to develop emotional intelligence. You need to be proud of yourself and love yourself ON TOP of knowing yourself, or else you’re not going to go very far.

Loving yourself leads to believing in yourself, and self-improvement paves the way to spiritual growth and to growth more broadly. Reading often can provide huge sources of inspiration and philosophical thoughts. Reading meditations by Marcus Aurelius for example could help you learn about the value of leadership or authenticity (click here to order it on Amazon).

So, always improve. Become better every day, learn new things every day, train hard most days, and you’ll see that with time, you will get immense results. Don’t neglect the physical aspect of your life by chasing the mental or spiritual aspect of it, remember, mens sana in corpore sano. (a healthy mind in a healthy body).

Spiritual growth

Spiritual growth is a MAJOR aspect of developing emotional intelligence. It’s not the ONLY key to it, as you could be emotionally intelligent without it, but it’s a major booster.

When I say spiritual growth, I mean two things: growth in who you are, deeply, from your soul, and growth from religion, believing in a higher power. Growth in who you are, from your soul means that you’re growing as a person with a soul, growing in your authenticity, love, humor, and power.

That’s for me the original meaning of spiritual growth, at least what I intended to say here: growing as a person, discovering the deepest parts of yourself, understanding you have a soul, chasing only what is pure and important, such as fulfilling work, great relationships, etc.

You’ve probably lived these moments in life, either in days of extreme joy or extreme sadness, where you suddenly stop giving a crap about everyday life problems.

Suddenly, you realize that everything is futile and that you should rather focus on engaging and fulfilling, purposeful work, loving relationships, and contributing to the world. What truly matters are the simple yet deeply important parts of life. It’s not whether or not Karine sent the document to your boss or if she forgot about it and you have to go back to the office to send the report back to the boss and blah and blah.

It’s about the higher things in life. Now sure, lower things in life such as day-to-day problems still play a huge role in forming who you are, and it’s real life after all, not every time can be spent thinking about the higher things. You can keep thinking about higher, important, existential things in mind, of course, but little problems of everyday life are part of life experience, and they contribute to your growth.

But really, spiritual growth is reached when you grow in your soul, in who you are, in your confidence, and in your energy (masculine/feminine). It’s when you grow in wisdom and power in the world. It’s when you suddenly become more emotionally mature. That’s what I’m trying to convey here.

Now let's speak about growth and religion. A religion can help you connect with other people and it can help make you humble, especially in monotheistic religions. When you believe in a higher power that is stronger than you, you start seeing the futility of your life, hence the article I wrote called “See your life as an ant” (click here to check it out)

You see the futility of everyday problems but also the importance of deeper problems, you start being more humble too, and you build humility, understanding that you are only an ant in the succession of ants, and that is why it’s particularly important to focus on your work, purpose, relationships and intimacy, the things that truly matter, because you’re only here for a short time and a few hundred years after your death people would have probably forgotten about you, except if you did something truly extraordinary, such as saving humanity.

Deep Breathing

Deep breathing is super important, especially if you practice it all day long. When you catch yourself in the moment not deep breathing, force yourself to take a deep breath.

People seldom understand the importance of deep breathing, but it truly is a powerful tool in your arsenal. Not only can it help you connect with the moment, being fully present, but it allows you to circulate energy in your body.

This might get a little spiritual here, but if you shallow breathe, your energy gets stuck during the day. You become tighter, more stressed, more angular. But, when you deep breathe from the nose, and you relax fully, trying to repeat this as much as you can throughout the day, then your energy can flow freely.

And, it’s not necessarily about taking super deep breaths. Simply open your belly, as it is a special place of power to revitalize you and your energy. Take a deep breath through your nose, open your belly, and then exhale.

Being present in the moment through meditation and frequent deep breathing is also a key to living better and discovering more about yourself. When you’re not constantly worrying about XYZ you can start asking yourself deep questions, and you can focus on what matters. You can be powerful in the moment.

Emotional intelligence and integrating emotions

You should, especially if you’re a masculine man, integrate your emotions. You should integrate, understand, and deal with your emotions. Instead of repressing these emotions as most men do, you should instead accept them, understand them, find their roots, search the conditioning behind it sometimes even, and deal with them. Dealing with them can mean crying and opening up in front of your friends or partner. That’s not the problem.

If you’re a feminine woman, integrating your emotions is important, but still use the power of emotions as it’s your feminine nature. The feminine nature is emotions, like the ocean waves, it never stops. The climate changes and the waves too. It never stops for the feminine, this is why feminine women tend to be more emotional, and that’s OK. No masculine man wants a woman who is stoic and doesn’t show her emotions. That’s repulsive.

Now, common sense plays a role too. Feminine women naturally have another sense, a sixth sense, an emotional sense, maybe even another nature than we men do. They are way more sensitive to emotions than us. However, there is a limit. It’s not because a feminine woman can show their emotions much more than a man and it's more socially accepted that they have to suddenly scream in the middle of the supermarket or jump on cars, that’s autism.

Common sense still plays a role here of course. But, generally, the feminine is way more emotional and it’s okay, and it’s her man's job to love her so powerfully that she ends up calming down. Explanation and logic don’t work at calming down women most of the time. Love does, if you want her to grow in her feminine radiance and happiness.

Conclusion

Being emotionally intelligent will help you be more emotionally resilient, it will help you overcome challenges with impeccability and it will help you induce more spiritual, mental, and physical growth in your life.

Remember that improving yourself is at the root of developing emotional intelligence.

I hope this article was of help to you, thank you for reading, and as always, I’ll see you next time.

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