Recycled Bullsh-IT

Teenage Dirtbag

Where are you on the Emo scale? By Emo I mean Emotional Intelligence, as I suspect you’re picturing yourself as a shoegazing teenage goth, wearing skinny jeans listening to sad music. Which some of us were, some still are, and some would love to be. So, why should you care about your Emotional Intelligence (also known as Emotional Quotient – EQ)?

 Complicated

For many of us who were born in the 20th Century, understanding and controlling our feelings was never talked about. Supressing rather than showing or sharing our emotions was expected of us, especially us Brits.  In these more enlightened times, psychological health is rightly gaining importance, and poor treatment of individuals and minority groups is totally unacceptable. So how can we traverse this mental minefield to understand, control and harness our emotions?

 Comfortably Numb

For most of my extensive and assorted career, it has been deemed unprofessional to show or even talk about my feelings in a work context. Businesses were rational, po-faced institutions, where logic and procedures ruled. Anger and inappropriate behaviour were tolerated as they were seen as an expression of power rather than abuse. Most of us were emotionally constipated or incompetent.

 I’m Not Okay (I Promise)

This bottled-up state of affairs started to loosen as we hit the 21st century and brought with it (inevitably) some cod-science self-help books and movements. Among these, the concept of Emotional Intelligence captured the zeitgeist, defined as “the ability to perceive, use, understand, manage, and handle emotions”.

 Somebody Told Me

Amongst the psychobabble that comes with the concept of EI/EQ, there are some useful lessons to look at in a work context:

• Awareness: Perceiving our emotional state can be difficult when we’re, er, emotional. However, the ability to identify and name one’s own emotions at any point is time is a powerful first step in working out what is driving our moods
• Understanding: If we can recognise our emotional state, we can try to identify why we are feeling that way and what has created or triggered these feelings (probably our Zoom colleague munching loudly into their open mic)
• Managing: With the insight from knowing what emotional state we are in and what may have caused it, we can attempt to regulate and control our feelings – or at least stop us sending that bitchy message to our private WhatsApp group (assuming it’s not fallen over again)
• Harnessing: Apparently if we’ve reached this level of enlightenment, we can use our emotional control to help solve problems, interact positively with others, achieve our goals, blah, blah, blah…

No Time to Die

Currently, there is little scientific evidence that managing your EQ will make us more successful. But even if we don’t reach our personal nirvana, we should be aware that talking about our feelings is now OK. Look at James Bond. He emotes for England in the latest movie, and even has his theme tune sung by a modern emo megastar.

John “Saving Emo” Moe