Emotional intelligence first starts in your childhood when your parents display them to you. But if the parents themselves didn’t have their caretaker to teach them or they didn’t educate themselves, they would not be in a position to teach them to you. While the teenage years pass off with storming emotions and career deciding life choices, twenties is a time when you have the space, time, energy and resources to start building your emotional skills.
5 Must have emotional skills
1.Identifying your emotions
Even though it doesn’t seem like a skill, at any given point of time being aware and being able to tell which emotion you are feeling in which part of the body doesn’t come easily for everyone especially if you have been disassociated from your body for too long.
2.Regulating your emotions
Something I have noticed very often among my clients and friends is that for them friendship is about being there for emotional regulation. While as a society, we must have normalized them but seIf regulation of emotions is a very important skill to have so that resentment and emotional exhaustion doesn’t creep into relationships. A few others depend on drugs and other addictions to regulate their emotions which is also equally unhealthy.
3.Transmuting your emotions
Now that you are able to identify and regulate your emotions, you need to be able to transmute the emotions so that you are not stuck in the same loop forever. This is the step which will help in ascension of your consciousness.
Note: If you struggle with identifying emotions, you can join the workshop on emotions where I will teach you how to identify, regulate and transmute your emotions.
4.Boundaries
While you master the cycle of emotions, another trap which prevents your progress is not knowing where you end and where others begin. If you have porous boundaries, you might be absorbing others emotions and making them your own and hence feel emotionally stuck or low all the time.
If you want to work more on boundary setting, you can enquire about the workshop here.
5.Forgiveness
When you start to work on all of the above, one of the key sets of emotions which arises repeatedly is anger, guilt and resentment. You feel angry that you never knew any of these before. You feel guilty about all the times you dumped your emotions on another person to handle them for you. You feel resentment towards people who used you for their motives. The only way to move forward is to forgive and let go of the past to welcome a new beginning.
If you have difficulty with forgiveness, you can check out my workshop on self forgiveness.
If you are looking for personal 1:1 support, you can reach out to me here.
Happy building emotional skills!