Though emotional intelligence has become the gold standard for emotions (especially in the workplace), it comes with a number of issues.
One of the main issues with emotional intelligence is that it teaches you to mentalize your emotions. You don’t learn to process your feelings; instead the best you can hope for is controlling and managing them.
Imagine a highly successful executive named Alex. Alex has excelled in their career by mastering emotional intelligence. They’ve learned how to control and manage them in the workplace. But something is missing. Despite all the success, there’s a lingering feeling of emptiness and a yearning for something deeper.
In our left-brain society, we’ve been taught that emotions are scary and to be feared. That they’re second-class to our logical and rational brains.
The problem is that emotions are not left brain. Approaching them via the left brain is the reason we struggle with them.
This is where emotional wisdom comes in. It takes a more holistic approach to understanding and managing emotions. While emotional intelligence focuses on recognition and regulation, emotional wisdom delves deeper, fostering self-reflection, insight, and integration of emotions.
Unlike our left-brain society, which deems certain emotions like anger and jealousy as “bad,” emotional wisdom offers a fresh perspective. It sees emotions as part of your feedback system, guiding you towards patterns, beliefs, and conditioning that may be holding you back in your personal, professional, and spiritual growth.
For example, meet Sarah, a high-performing tennis player. Sarah used to believe that emotions like anger and jealousy were “bad” and tried to suppress them. But through emotional wisdom, she realized that these emotions were actually messengers pointing her towards underlying patterns and beliefs that were holding her back. By deeply listening to her emotions and understanding their messages, Sarah gained incredible insights about herself and her conditioning that ended up giving her new ease in her performance.
When you tap into emotional wisdom, you open the door to a whole new level of self-awareness and understanding. It’s a transformative journey that brings more freedom, choice, ease, and personal fulfillment into your life. Imagine tuning into your emotions, and experiencing profound “aha” moments that change your perspective and set you on a path of empowerment.
This is vastly different from relying on will power to grow – which is what most personal development is based on. When you process emotions, growth becomes more natural and effortless. It’s about going beyond “doing” and stepping into a state of “being” or “becoming.”