No Hard Feelings

Emotional intelligence, regulation and agility are useful skills.

People with emotional intelligence manage conflict and lead more successfully. They recognize their emotions and know when to share them. Fosslien and Duffy explain that “emotional regulation” means having control of how your emotions affect your life. Learning to appraise an emotion to determine if it is relevant means being able to reframe a situation. The authors make the case that, by shifting where you direct your attention, you can compartmentalize an emotion that isn’t serving you. That enables what Fosslien and Duffy regard as a crucial skill: “response control,” the ability to change how you respond, such as learning not to laugh at or explode at a colleague.

What the authors term “emotional agility” requires noticing emotions most people prefer to ignore. Label those feelings and expand your vocabulary for emotions. Malu, for example, is an Indonesian word of the Dusun Baguk people that acknowledges feelings of awkwardness around those with authority and power. Identifying a feeling enables reflection on why it arose. Then you can articulate the need that feeling reveals. This, Fosslien and Duffy avow,  keeps you on track to improvement and success.