Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence impacts all aspects of your life. When you have the appropriate motivation and follow through we can accomplish anything and be successful in any area of our lives. The reality is, we may feel confident and competent in one area, however lack it in others, or we may feel discouraged and incapable in many aspects of our lives. We can feel confident and successful in all areas including our performance at work or school, our health choices that impact our physical and mental health, our emotional health, our cognitive abilities and our relationships.

Our physical health can only be as strong as our emotional health. Our emotion governs how we react in situations often before our minds are aware of what is occuring. Have you ever experienced a situation where you react and immediately regret what happened? This type of reactivity changes, allowing better outcomes in stressful or difficult situations as our emotional intelligence improves. We can also improve our motivation to make good choices. Often we are use to feeling a particular tension or negativity in our physical and emotional state so that we may not be motivated to make healthy choices in relation to our food, eating habits, choosing intoxicants, sleep hygiene, physical movement, relationships choices, communication, and living habits. As we improve our emotional intelligence the healthy choices become easy.

Our bodies and minds are resilient. Our reactive behaviours and patterns we develop are protective. They provided security and helped us to survive through difficult and even traumatic events in our lives. These experiences develop patterns and ways of thinking that narrow our focus and our lives. They are helpful and have been helpful in the past when developed, however, they prevent us from moving forward and expand our lives.

When we improve our emotional intelligence we modify our perspective and can broaden our experience in the world, improve creativity, originally and flexibility in thinking, improve problem solving in all aspects of life, and improve social acceptance and improve how we relate to others. Consequently, we can have increased energy, vitality, immune function, wellbeing, and quality of life. We can more effectively reach our goals, and step into the person we want to be.

Emotional intelligence can be learned anytime. Lifestyle type activities may be applicable as well as self-discovery techniques. Both of these approaches allow us to understand ourselves better, shed our limiting beliefs, and change our perspectives and approach to life. We can build our emotional intelligence through several key skills including self awareness, self-regulation, and social-interactions.

Self-Awareness

Self-awareness is the ability to know yourself and be able to realistically and effectively assess your strengths, weaknesses and present limitations. It includes the ability to know what we want and know what we do not want. It can be summarized in the terms of ‘being authentic’.

People who are self-aware report that they have a feeling of freedom and peace, can feel immense joy, feel empowered, self-confident, fulfilled, self actualized, secure, self-confident, motivated and much more.

When you feel secure in yourself interactions become more authentic and can flow easier. It is easier to have improved communication, improved conflict management, better negotiation, and consequently overall improved relationships in both our personal and professional lives.

Self-regulation

As our self-awareness improves, we can then also change our self-regulation. Self-regulation includes the ability to control impulsive feelings and behaviours, manage your emotions in healthy ways, take action to follow through on commitments and adapt to changes.

When we feel relaxed and in control it can be easy to make clear, healthy decisions that align with our best selves that we strive to be. Our emotions can help us to make constructive decisions about our behaviour. However, when we are under stress, feeling overwhelmed and out of our comfort zone this is not as easily accomplished.

Our emotions provide useful information about ourselves and can be used as a tool to gain understanding and develop our control over our thoughts and actions. With practice, we can develop the capacity to change our seemingly ‘automatic’ reactions that occur when we are feeling stressed, anxious, overwhelmed, numb, or shut down. We can learn to manage our emotions in positive ways, take initiative and behave in ways that do not allow stress to override our thoughts and self-control

Social interactions

Our interactions in the world demonstrates our emotional intelligence. We need relationships and interaction to further learn how we react to situations, and to practice responding differently. We cannot challenge and grow to our full extent in isolation. Relationships that feel difficult are those that challenge us the most, and those which can help us grow the most. If you are always in a comfortable place there is no need for changes. When we have developed our self awareness and self regulation we can test out our developing emotional intelligence by putting ourselves in the world and interacting with others.

There are a variety of techniques that can improve our self-awareness, self-regulation, and change our social interactions- all of which improve emotional intelligence. These in-office techniques include: neural emotional technique, acupuncture, hypnosis, psych K, family constellation, holistic counselling, bio-field tuning and guided mindfulness.

These techniques can help you break through limiting beliefs that hold you back from health, the life you are seeking, and success in both your personal and professional lives.

Neural Emotional Technique (NET)

NET is a holistic approach that is focused on correcting imbalances in the physical body and release unresolved negative emotional blocks. It is based on a premise that tension in the body which can result in physical discomfort or pain, physical susceptibilities or weaknesses in tissue, and maladaptive behaviours can be anchored in emotional blocks. Releasing these blocks can have transformative results in terms of improving emotional intelligence, changing physical symptoms, improving motivation and inspiration, improving empathy for yourself and others to name a few.

Hypnosis

Also known as hypnotherapy is a therapy that guides you into a restful state with heightened focus and concentration. You will be guided into a relaxed meditation where you feel safe and calm. You are then provided verbal suggestions in various ways that are aimed at helping you gain insight, modify or control underside behaviours, and meet your goals - whatever they may be. Hypnosis, as any of these therapies, can be used to reach goals of smoking cessation, improve insomnia, change eating behaviours, and overcome places you feel ‘stuck’ in your life.

Psych K

Psych K stands for Psychology Kinesiology. It is a tool that focuses on changing beliefs in subconscious mind that may cause stagnating or self-sabotaging behaviours. From personal and clinical experience we have seen psych-K programs change the way people feel about themselves, how people interpret aspects of their life. Consequently, it can influence change in behaviours, interactions, and performance.

Holistic counselling

Holistic counselling practices consider the physical and mental experience of your life. It provides guidance to gain a deeper understanding of challenges that then allow you to uncover limiting beliefs that can cause suffering both emotionally and physically.

Biofield tuning

Biofield tuning is a sound therapy that uses tuning forks placed on different points along the body to provide targeted balance to the nervous system. Biofiels tuning aims to correct blockages and imbalances in the electromagnetic energy that surrounds the body also known as ‘Chi’ (or Qi). It can alleviate a wide range of health issues and clinically. Click here to read more: https://www.eileenmckusick.com/single-post/2019/05/15/Biofield-Tuning-How-Sound-Therapy-Can-Unlock-the-Hidden-Causes-of-Illness

Guided mindfulness

Mindfulness practices have many benefits and are a foundational lifestyle activities that can easily be incorporated to improve emotional intelligence. A sensations-based mindfulness practice can lead to improved self-awareness. There are many mindfulness based activities based on science, research, clinical and personal experience that can be used to improve emotional intelligence and change your life.

Check out Dr. Karthaus’s mindfulness videos. She goes through steps of mindfulness, research, stories, and drawn diagrams to help bring understanding to mindfulness based practices and guides you through various exercises. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyENKFLicVqAz_OpnYM4Axw