How Emotional Intelligence affects Personal Relationships in Your Daily Life [Episode #814]

This week’s topic is: How Emotional Intelligence affects Personal Relationships in Your Daily Life

This is a huge topic because our emotions, which are energy in motion, have a measurable effect on your physical wellbeing, on the systems in your body, including your immune system, endocrine system, digestive system, nervous systems, and more. Emotional intelligence started to come into the forefront in the nineties by an author named David Goldman, and what he found was that emotional intelligence was a better predictor of your overall life’s success, more than your IQ.

What this means is that even if someone is intellectually incredibly brilliant, they are not necessarily going to be successful in life unless they have higher emotional intelligence. And those that were higher in emotional intelligence did not necessarily have to have the highest IQ to be successful.

Why is this? It’s because when we have emotional wellbeing, when we are emotionally balanced, it means not only are our bodies balanced and able to come into the present moment, pivot, shift, communicate and deal with what it is that we need to deal with and communicate better, this creates more harmony in our relationships, including our relationships with our coworkers, with our loved ones, with our neighbors, and so on.

This is what breeds success in our lives. This is a really important topic, from an overall life success perspective. This is because your emotional intelligence, which is part of our Emotional Wellbeing Cornerstone here, is hugely important across your entire life and so I’m very excited to get into our show today.

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[Question Answered]

Jamie – San Diego

Kimberly, I have done a lot of work on myself in trying to become a more emotionally evolved person. How can improving your emotional intelligence affect my personal life and relationships?

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Transcript:

Note: The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate. This is due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.

Kimberly: 00:00 <silence> Namaste, love and welcome back to our Thursday q and a show where our topic this week is How Emotional Intelligence affects Personal Relationships in Your Daily Life. And this is a huge topic because our emotions, which are energy in motion, have a measurable effect on your physical wellbeing, on the systems in your body, including your immune system, your endocrine system, your digestive system, your nervous systems, and more. This is some of what is in my new book, which I’m currently writing, and I am astonished at some of the research that I am uncovering about really how our emotional wellbeing is a huge part of the core health and our life and also our quality of life. Emotional intelligence started to come into the forefront in the nineties by an author named David Goldman, and what he found was that emotional intelligence had a, was a better predictor of your overall life’s success, more than your iq.

01:20 So what this means is that even if someone is intellectually incredibly brilliant, they are not necessarily going to successful in life unless they have higher emotional intelligence. And those that were higher in emotional intelligence did not necessarily have to have the highest IQ to be successful. Why is this? It’s because when we have emotional wellbeing, when we are emotionally balanced, it means not only are our bodies balanced and able to come into the present moment and pivot and shift and communicate and deal with what it is that we need to deal with and communicate better and better, this creates more harmony in our relationships, including our relationships with our coworkers, with our loved ones, with our neighbors, and so on. And this is what breeds success in our lives, right? It’s not just something on paper like, yes, I can solve these equations, but in the real world, I shut down or I don’t connect with others.

02:27 So this is a really important topic, again, from a health and wellbeing perspective, but an overall life success perspective. Um, because your emotional intelligence, which is part of our third cornerstone here, emotional wellbeing, is hugely important across your entire life. So I’m very excited to get into our show today.

Q&A: How Emotional Intelligence affects Personal Relationships in Your Daily Life

There’s gonna be quite a lot of research, practical research I call it to, um, convey to you. When I say research, I mean that this is not just research for research sake, but it’s really, um, important to understand I think how big emotional intelligence plays. And when we see what’s been measured, it can help us to really be motivated to improve our emotional intelligence, which is the latter part of our show today where I will be offering some practical tips on just how you can do that.

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03:42 Before we get into our show further, I wanted to give you a little reminder to please leave us a review on Apple or Spotify, wherever you happen to listen to our show, which is a really wonderful way to support. So I thank you so much in advance. It could literally be a sentence, but it’s just the act, the gesture that means so much. And while you’re over there, please be sure to subscribe to our show so you stay in the flow of our Thursday shows, which rotate around our cornerstones, which again, our food body, emotional wellbeing, and spiritual growth. We like to keep that balance because we truly believe that when we live this holistic nature-based lifestyle, which is the core of so Luna, we live our best, most fulfilling lives or healthiest lives. And also our Monday interview shows, please also share the podcast with anyone that you think would benefit. It could be a loved one or a coworker. It could be a link or screenshot or whatever. But it’s a great way to share the love. And remember, if you’re looking to connect with us further every month, we are conducting a live zoom for the circle of our community, meaning anyone that subscribes to any of our sauna products, you automatically be invited into the zoom via email.

04:53 And there is a new landing page for the Four Cornerstones over on our website@mysauna.com that has more information if you wanna check that out. Alright, let’s get into our show today. And again, we’re talking about emotional intelligence and first of all, understanding the depth in which this affects our health and the health of our relationships, and then how we can improve it to increase our success in life.

Question around the topic of: How Emotional Intelligence affects Personal Relationships in Your Daily Life: Kimberly, I have done a lot of work on myself in trying to become a more emotionally evolved person. How can improving your emotional intelligence affect my personal life and relationships?

Our question comes from Jamie, who lives in San Diego, sending you lots of love, Jamie, in a place that is not far from where I live when I’m on the mainland. I happen to be in Hawaii right now, but sending you lots of love. My California beauty. You write Kimberly, I have done a lot of work on myself in trying to become a more emotionally evolved person. How could improving your emotional intelligence affect my personal life and my relationships?

05:55 So I love how you put this, Jamie, this idea being emotionally evolved because we can think of children that come into the world and big feelings come in, big emotions, thoughts, there’s a lot going on in our bodies. And as children, we don’t always know how to handle ourselves and hence the onset of tantrums and throwing toys and um, screaming, crying, lots of things that we see children experience. And so we wanna continue to evolve and be aware, and that’s a big part of this emotional intelligence because we start to see that as adults, maybe we didn’t have the best tools at our fingertips and maybe we developed patterns that weren’t the healthiest. And so we continue to evolve. And research shows that neuroplasticity changing the neural circuitry, the network, the the patterns, our reactions between things that have been imprinted in our central nervous system, in our nervous system, in our amygdala, the emotional, um, the the part of our brain that responds emotionally to situations, um, and so on.

How Emotional Intelligence affects Personal Relationships in Your Daily Life: Relationship satisfaction and stability

07:21 It can shift and it can change. So I love this word evolve because no matter where we are today, if we consider ourselves to be highly emotionally intelligent, or if we definitely need work in this area, there is hope for all of us. We can all grow. So I love this question. And the second part, Jamie, where you say, how does this affect me? We’re gonna get right into that right here, right now, because I think this is one of the shows where the research is really important. So the first paper that I want to cite is published in the Journal of Family Psychology back in 2013. And it found that higher levels of emotional intelligence in couples were associated with greater relationship satisfaction and stability, more harmony, responding to each other’s emotions. So when we’re talking about emotional intelligence, part of that is being able to listen really well to other people.

08:25 And what that means is listening in a deeper sense instead of being in a conversation and seeming to listen, but really just be thinking of your, or paying attention to your own thoughts and thinking about what you are going to say next. This seems really basic, but I find that it’s a skill that’s actually lacking in a lot of adults. So we wanna start to practice really great active listening. And part of that means reflecting back to the other person to make sure that it’s clear to you. You could say things like, it sounds like what you’re saying is X, y, z. And I would like to say that a book that has helped me improve my communication skills a lot in my own relationships is a book called Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenthal, which was given to me by my friend and co-author, Deepak Chopra.

09:25 And Deepak had written a forward to one of his books and was a collaborator with him. And he handed it to me one day in his office, and I had never heard of it, I never heard of the author, and I read it and I thought, oh wow, there are ways in which we don’t mean to create this violence, if you will, which could, you know, is kind of broadly used here, but attacking others. And instead of first taking accountability and listening and sitting back, we can often be more forward, more about pushing our way and wanting us to be heard in conversations and communications. So first thing I wanna highlight is if we wanna be emotionally intelligent, we gotta really sharpen our communication skills and we really gotta sharpen our listening skills. So that is one book we’ll link to in the show notes that I definitely recommend.

How Emotional Intelligence affects Personal Relationships in Your Daily Life: Communication skills

10:23 So the next piece of research I wanna highlight is this study in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships from 2020 2001 <laugh>, which revealed that individuals with higher emotional intelligence became more, uh, skilled at recognizing interpreting nonverbal cues. This led to better mutual understanding and fewer misunderstandings. So this is important to be really aware, and we’ve all heard research around how most communication is non-verbal. This is where I will say that my husband is incredibly emotionally intelligent. If I have a thought in my mind, something that’s a little bit distressing or stressful, as soon as I walk in the room, he says, what’s, what’s wrong? What’s going on? He can feel my energy. And if you start to get really present with yourself, you meditate regularly, you tune into your breath, you’ll start to be aware of other people’s states as well, their energy.

11:25 So just practice, you know, again, being really present with yourself and then you’ll feel it because everybody does emit energetic vibrations. There’s frequencies that are measured by quantum physics. We’re all connected in this quantum soup, this field, if you will. And so we wanna not just pay attention to what someone is saying, but you know, their body language. Are they fidgety? Are they looking around? Are they, when you look in their eyes, do you see a deep sense of fear or calmness or anger despite what people are saying, we need to really learn to read energy. And it’s not as esoteric as it sounds. You just wanna be really aware and feel intuitively in your heart what is going on with this person right now, which isn’t always so linear, it isn’t just about the words that they’re saying.

How Emotional Intelligence affects Personal Relationships in Your Daily Life: Conflict resolution

So the next thing that I wanna point out comes from the study in the Journal of Applied Psychology, which found that supervisors with higher emotional intelligence were more skilled at handling workplace conflicts constructively.

12:40 So this means of course, that this leads to better work outcomes and in general, better work success project success. And so when it comes to, you know, hiring staff, and when it comes to a business working, it’s not just which business has the best products or the best services, but the team and the harmonization, which is created within. And again, this shows the practicality. When we are emotionally intelligent, we listen, we can see what another person’s needs are, which is a big part of conflict resolution. What is the need underneath someone seems like they’re really mad about one thing. Maybe it’s because an another need like being listened to or there’s something earlier that happened, which is really their need, that’s why they’re getting upset. So you wanna really start to discern what is the need here? And then we can start to create win-win situations, which means, oh, this is my need, this is your need.

13:41 Where’s the connection point where we can bring it together? And again, part of that means we need to be self-aware, we need to be open to hearing how, you know me, we might have trampled on another person’s needs or maybe we came across in a way that we weren’t meaning and it hurt someone’s feelings, or we overlooked someone else’s need or whatever it is. But when we can really listen and see another person’s need, so much conflict can start to be resolved. And it’s really powerful, um, when we always look to create win-win situations instead of pushing our way, which can really limit success and limit the piece and the understanding, which is to be found in any given situation.

How Emotional Intelligence affects Personal Relationships in Your Daily Life: Increasing intimacy and trust

14:35 So the next part is increasing intimacy and trust. And this was found in the research, um, in the, sorry, the Journal of Educational Issues. That emotional intelligence was able to build that beautiful intimacy and trust within relationships, which allows us to feel close to someone, whether it’s a friend, a loved one, a neighbor, you know, even a work colleague. And why is this? Because when someone is emotionally intelligent, it means that we can trust them. It means that they feel safe, that the, um, in general we can expect more calm, clear responses instead of irrational behavior or erratic chaotic patterns playing out. And so when we feel safe with someone, we open up more to them and closer relationships close, beautiful unfolding friendships. Deepening is part of what makes life so amazing when we have this rich tapestry of relationships. So we can see how important it is to really work on our emotional intelligence.

How Emotional Intelligence affects Personal Relationships in Your Daily Life: Parent-Child Relationships

15:53 And you know, in some of the ways that we talked about, we’ll continue to talk about some more of these tips, but it comes down to also pausing more, slowing down, being more aware of how we may come across, and being aware of patterns that we may be repeating unknowingly, certain reactions. There’s emotional charge, which isn’t really from that particular situation, but from something that came long ago, we can start to build more intimacy and trust. The more self-aware we become, the more emotionally intelligent we become. Fosters more positive parent-child relationships as well. This is from the Journal of Child and Family Studies found that parents with higher emotional intelligence we’re better able to create, uh, healthier relationships with their children. Of course, this is no surprise, emotional intelligence is a huge foundational key of building close families. It doesn’t mean, again, we’re emotionally imbalanced.

17:03 It doesn’t just mean that there’s chaos and screaming and impatience on the other end. It can mean that one is not connected to feelings and emotions. They’re not connected to their heart. So they can be more surface, they can be more disconnected, they can be hard to connect to, right? It means that you don’t, you feel like someone can’t really hear you or understand you or see you. And so we wanna work on that, especially if we are about to become parents or we wanna deepen our relationship with our children, or they’re transitioning to being teenagers. And we need even more emotional resilience. These are all wonderful skills to build at any point in your parental

Kimberly: 17:48 Journey. And this quality of building your emotional wellbeing and your, um, intelligence will also help to create more fulfilling friendships. There is so much research around this. And again, all of this research is in the show notes over at mysolluna.com.

How Emotional Intelligence affects Personal Relationships in Your Daily Life: Friendships and Social Networks

So if you look around your friendship circle and you think, you know, I would like to meet some new friends, or I would like to deepen my relationship with my current friends, I’m looking for more depth right now, right? Sometimes we, we notice that that’s missing or we wanna, we want more of it than being able to, to build your emotional intelligence is within your own power. And as you build it within yourself, you start to attract more of those deeper friendships and you can go deeper in your current ones and transform relationships. So it’s very fulfilling. It’s, it’s wonderful. And this is something that I have personally experienced with friends that I’ve had for many years.

19:02 And you know, one of them moved, my dear friends moved from New York to LA and it just gets more deep and spiritual and connected and, you know, whereas in New York we used to go out a lot and it was fun and we’d have dinners and things like that. Now it’s taken on a different level of depth. So it shows that we can evolve within relationships as well. And sometimes friendships are really meant to grow together. Sometimes it’s meant to grow a bit apart and you might spend time with new friends or different friends as you change and shift. But either way, as we learn to listen and be more self-aware to the foundations of emotional intelligence, we will deepen our friendships. And it’s a really beautiful thing.

How Emotional Intelligence affects Personal Relationships in Your Daily Life: Empowerment and Conflict Avoidance

20:08 And so another part of this is being able to avoid conflict. Such a, a real key ingredient in living a peaceful life and living a happy life is having harmony. And there’s, you know, so many misunderstandings come when we’re emotionally charged, when we’re not hearing another person clearly when we’re not hearing ourselves clearly. And so we really want to understand how we can best improve our communication in this way. This means we can navigate difficult conversations without allowing conflict to escalate. So imagine the stress. This saves. Imagine the drama, this saves. We don’t need more stress and more drama in our lives, <laugh>, because there’s so much that’s out of our control. There’s so much happening around us, but within ourselves we can improve these skills. This is something that’s so empowering to know, and this in turn will increase our overall relationships. It increases our ability to flow through life amongst other people and to feel really anchored, to feel really safe, to be a safe person that other people can get close to. So it’s really wonderful.

21:23 And I have to say that emotional intelligence is something that I’ve been working on for years. This was brought to the forefront for me some years ago, probably about seven years ago. Remember ’cause E was very young. I started doing some neurofeedback trainings and there was a lot of, you know, a lot of the training was based in increasing emotional intelligence and being able to forgive more easily and listening. And there was a lot of talking aspects of it. And so I started to really see myself and see that wow, there were things that I really needed to work on. And I continued to work on my own patterns as well, which I think is really important for all of us. Because if we don’t, then we attract a lot of the same relationships, whether that’s romantic or in friendships. We may attract continually limited situations at work.

22:20 But what I found is that the more we increase our intelligence from within, which comes from the heart, it comes from really going beyond the linear mind and having a wider expanse of solutions and access to higher intelligence, right? Emotional intelligence to me is, you know, of higher intelligence. It’s not just looking at the linear facts or this person said this, but like we said, it’s reading energy, looking at potty language, using discernment, deeply listening, really asking more questions, perhaps to understand someone’s need beyond what they’re actually saying out loud to you. And the more that we can do this, the more that we expand our lives, our abundance, our success at work. And as Jamie asked in her question, we are able to really improve all our relationships throughout our lives throughout our day. And this in turn, makes life more wonderful and rich and fulfilling.

23:28 So let’s review some of the key things to focus on in emo with emotional intelligence. Number one, I would say even before we get into this, is to learn more about emotional intelligence. You can read books. There’s the David Goldman’s, you know, classic emotional intelligence book, which contains different quizzes that you can self, you know, create self-assessment scores and see where you’re at. There’s the Marshall Rosenthal book that I recommend. Non-violent communication and many other ones that are around this topic. See what you’re drawn to. Number two is to really become aware of your triggers. And when you become overly emotional, emotional intelligence means that you start to see yourself more clearly. So should you start to get into a trigger notice if your heartbeat is, you know, quickening or your breath or your voice is changing, or you feel some sort of, you know, feeling in the pit of your stomach or whatever it happens to be, you wanna start to become more and more aware.

24:35 You wanna listen actively and really listen with your heart instead of trying to color over or assume what that person is saying. And then next, as we mentioned, you wanna start to see what is the need of this other person at the root of what they’re saying. And at the same time, you wanna understand what your need is. So let’s say someone’s annoy, you know, feel great annoyance at someone. Why is it that you’re annoyed? What is a need that’s not being met? Maybe it’s a need to for you to be heard, for you to be respected. Maybe it’s that that person an reminds you of someone from your past, right? So that trigger goes onto you. That’s really something that you need to learn to digest. But it’s really important that we understand our needs. We understand people’s need, other people’s needs, and that we find win-win solutions.

25:33 The next part of emotional intelligence is that we learn to regulate ourselves. We manage ourselves before we react. We wanna be calm when we respond. So if we find ourselves emotionally charged, we’re in a fear response or anger or jealousy or some kind of charged emotion, we wanna take some deep breaths, maybe go for a little walk, you know, let our eyes scan the room horizontally, which is something that I read in a trauma book just to ground ourselves into this room, into this moment. Another, um, interview that I did, I believe it was, um, which doctor was it? I can’t, oh, Dr. Alejandro Ger talked about feeling the bottom of your feet to really bring you into this moment. Instead of going on and on in your mind and letting the thoughts start to run. Whatever it is that takes ourselves, you know, a moment to calm down, to regulate, then we can be more proud of our responses. And we don’t say something in anger that we later regret. And of course that happens sometimes. And we wanna clean up the mess. We wanna say,

Kimberly: 26:42 Sorry, okay, I, I reacted there, whatever it is. But the more we can learn to calm ourselves down, the less it happens, right? No one’s expected to be perfect, but we wanna continue to work. And then the next part is to notice repeated patterns. This is part of our emotional intelligence is to digest and process and clear ourselves of the past. So we don’t always have to just keep reacting in the same way. We wanna learn to digest experiences, we want to notice what it is so we can become free of it. And there’s other podcasts that really go into this topic and some of it is, you know, veers into trauma. We have some trauma experts. And if you feel that you have deeper trauma, that you’re having an issue coming, you know, processing yourself, please do seek professional healing and support, whether that’s a therapist, a counselor, a psychologist, an intuitive healer, whatever you feel drawn to so that you can help free yourself of trauma, which are automated responses from situations and events that you weren’t able to fully process at the time.

27:58 And it really does get lodged in your body, in the nervous system, in your nerves. And so it’s important that it becomes addressed. So once again, we will link to all of this research and resources over in the show notes at mysolluna.com, including other podcasts that I think that you would enjoy. And please do not hesitate to reach out to me with other questions around this topic or our other cornerstones. You could leave them for me over at, um, same site, mysolluna.com. There is a podcast tab. I truly hope that this podcast helped to bring more awareness around emotional intelligence. And I encourage you to keep going further into addressing this core part of our wellness, this core part of our health. Because when our emotions are more balanced, so is our health. So is our energy, so are our relationships, and so is the quality of our life. So thank you so much for tuning in. As always, thank you so much for being part of our community. I appreciate you so much. I look forward to connecting you with you more and I send you so much love. I’ll be back here Monday for our next interview podcast. They’ll then take great care and Namaste.