Emotional Literacy - Intelligence with a heart
When people read about my programs or I talk about them, I am often asked “what is emotional literacy?” and why do I use it in my work.
What is emotional literacy?
Emotional literacy is the ability to understand and communicate your emotions. After studying and researching various methods I attached to emotional literacy because the elements provide clarity and sustainability on what I believe to be the world’s need.
What are the elements of emotional literacy?
Knowing your feelings - What you are feeling, why you are feeling those feelings.
Having a sense of empathy - The ability to be aware of another person’s feelings, be able to read another person’s feelings and imagine what it feels like to be the other person.
Learning to manage our emotions - Re-framing situation, finding a healthy outlet, communicating and meditation exercises.
Repairing emotional problems - Self reflection, using dialogue to prevent and repair negative situations.
Putting it all together: emotional interactivity - Putting stages together to problem solve and familiarize yourself with various emotions, so that you can manage emotionally intense situations in a skillful way. Reducing conflict and improving emotional health.
The order of the above is important, for example, your ability to empathize with others starts with your own emotional intellect. Your empathetic skills will be limited if you have a distant relationship with our own feelings. Empathy is about using your imagination of another person’s experience (feelings) and connecting to it. Your imagination will be limited without first hand experience or distorted experiences, this usually happens as a result of avoiding, suppressing and ignoring your own feelings. Thus making it difficult to empathize with others.
Progressing through each stage in order, helps you to manage the next stage and develop emotional literacy levels.
The benefits
I believe emotional literacy is missing from society and this is reflected in the toxic environments children grow up in at home, how systems operate (schools, prisons etc), levels of conflict, increasing prison population and divorce rates.
We could can improve dysfunction on a micro and macro level through the implementation of emotional literacy.
“To be emotionally literate is to be able to handle emotions in a way that improves your personal power and improves the quality of life around you.” - Claude Steiner
The inner and outer conflicts we experience
In school, we have groupings for each subject. Top and bottom groups for subjects such as maths, english and science, students are placed in a group based upon their capabilities in that subject. These groups are set for everyone to work at the same level and pace, creating a safe and comfortable space for all.
Putting someone from a bottom group in a top group, will have their anxiety going through the roof! Putting someone from the top group in the bottom group will ignite a high level of frustration. Hence why separating the groups into mini worlds makes the world of the individual and the group more harmonious.
Outside of school and in the “real world”, we are mixed, mixed with people who have varying levels of emotional literacy and this causes chaos! Arguments, fights et all! In school we create an environment for the best possible chance of academic development, yet we are reliant on chance to develop emotional literacy with people left to conflict it out.
Why not emotional intelligence?
Emotional intelligence focused more on the judgement of emotional intellect and examples of how you can demonstrate your level. Emotional intelligence has been developed with various thought leaders taking it in various directions but it is ambiguous in parts. Emotional literacy, is about development and specificity. Both are intertwined but emotional intelligence is a by product of emotional literacy and not the other way around. Similarly to how we develop literacy levels in English, we study to develop literacy levels, then take our exam to measure our level of intelligence within that subject. Due to the commercializing of the term and the success of Daniel Goleman’s book emotional intelligence, emotional intelligence has been the leader of the two. As mentioned emotional intelligence is still developing, and with its development becoming more like emotional literacy.
How can I develop my emotional literacy?
If you would like to improve your performance as a human being, then starting with the five points at the top of this page is the perfect start.
Thank you for reading ;)
Kevin George
#KGEmotionalLiteracy
