Emotional Intelligence for Critical Thinkers
Are all of your needs met? Do you know why you make the decisions you do?
Our needs motivate our behavior. If you respond to life’s events from a low level of survival, it’ll be more difficult to succeed in a loving relationship or keep steady employment or even gain a level of self-esteem and confidence. Let alone being able to pursue your hobby and passions. [Read more…]
Boundaries are the rules we set up that dictate the people and experiences we allow into our lives. These rules also drive our decisions and behaviors, so that we can achieve a certain level of comfort and stability.
In other words, if you feel comfortable with someone, you share and give more of yourself. You can allow yourself to be more authentic, and feel vulnerable yet safe. These are the people you allow into what I like to call your “castle walls.”
If someone makes you feel uncomfortable, and they’re asking or pressuring you into doing things you don’t want to do, these are the people you keep out beyond the moat that surrounds your castle. You don’t let them cross the drawbridge, because if you do you’ll certainly compromise the integrity of your castle.
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The residue of negative emotions after a significant event happens in your life can become consuming and controlling. They can affect your perspectives, the decisions you make, the people you connect with, and even your health.
So why do we hold on to negative emotions of an event from the past? What keeps something like anger, sadness, and other negative states around for weeks, or even years? The answer is: [Read more…]
It’s truly challenging to be grateful for something until you’ve experienced inner appreciation first. After that, appreciation for everything else comes easier. When you’re in stress and overwhelm mode, however, it’s almost impossible to stop and appreciate anything. After all, once turmoil takes the stage, it steals the show!
We tend to focus only on what isn’t working in our lives instead of channeling our energy toward what is. One of the reasons we do that is because of our survival mechanism. We are conditioned to continuously monitor for danger. So our awareness focuses more on what could harm us, and less on what is harmless. [Read more…]
Image source: http://www.bumc.bu.edu/integrativemed/clinical-services/qigong/
In Tai Chi, there’s a movement exercise called Pushing Hands. The lesson to learn when doing this exercise is that force can be redirected. If you redirect a strike, it will never make contact. The strike won’t meet resistance; therefore, the flow of the motion is never interrupted.
Pushing Hands teaches the Tai Chi student about flow and resistance. The less resistance there is during the exercise, the more it flows. Another way to look at flow versus resistance is by comparing a dam to a boulder. Water will flow its way around a boulder, but cannot penetrate the resistance of a dam.
In conversation, flow and resistance work very similarly. Do you find that you can easily speak your mind, allowing your conversations to flow along, while feeling a general sense of well-being? Or, are you more defensive when you talk to people, feeling vulnerable, and on-edge? [Read more…]