You know that moment in a meeting when everyone becomes quiet all of an and you can feel that something is not right but you do not know what it is exactly.
That is the area of emotional intelligence of people and most of the time you just do what you think is best.
You nod your head you make faces like the people you say what you think is the right thing to say and you hope that it is well received.
The thing is, emotional intelligence of people sounds like a science that’s easy to understand but in real life it is you trying to figure out what people feel and you hope that you are not completely wrong about it.
Emotional intelligence of people is really, about guessing what people feel.
Understanding feelings
One minute you are fine then someone says something and it bothers you. Now you are feeling annoyed. Maybe even hurt.
You do not really know why you feel this way. Your emotions are over the place but you try to act like everything is okay. You tell yourself you are just stressed or tired.
A lot of the time you have no idea what is really going on inside your emotional world. It is like your emotional world is doing flips.
You are trying to keep up. You are supposed to be, in control of your emotions like there is a guide that explains how to deal with them.. The truth is, managing your emotional world is not that easy.
Reading social cues
You walk into a room. Tell a joke.. Then there is this really uncomfortable silence. It is so bad that it could be the start of a movie. People say that being able to tell how others are feeling is a thing to do.
It is really not that easy. It is more like trying to understand a language that is not working right. You do not have any help to figure out what is being said.
You look at peoples faces and their body language. You listen to the way they talk.. All of these things can be hard to understand.
Your own feelings and thoughts can get in the way. You might be. Feeling insecure. So you try to understand cues.. You are not as good at it as you think you are. You do not really get what is going on with the people, around you.
Remember the time you went over a conversation in your head trying to figure out what that raised eyebrow meant. Was the person confused or were they judging you or was it just that their contact lens was drying out.
This is the problem with cues. You do not just see them you think about what they mean based on your experiences and those experiences are not always right.
If a friend crosses their arms it might be because they are cold not because they are mad at you.. Your brain likes to think of the worst thing, the thing that is most exciting.
Social cues like this are tricky because you have to think about what the other person’s really trying to say not just what you think they are saying.
The thing, about cues is that they can be confusing. You have to consider what the other person means by what they do like when someone raises an eyebrow. You have to think about what that means and it’s not always easy to know for sure.
Because here’s the tricky part, you rarely check your assumptions out loud, you just operate as if they’re true. You change your tone, over-explain, apologize too much, or double down, all based on a guess about what someone else’s face supposedly means.
And most people are doing the exact same thing with you. So in a lot of social situations, it’s basically one slightly confused human trying to decode another, while both act like they totally know what they’re doing.
