Coping With Your Past - Emotional Intelligence and Your Emotional Heritage

My wife and I were blessed to go to Greece with some friends this month.  It was a great trip for us.  Seeing this part of the world - parts we have heard about since our school days - kind of completed a cycle for us.  We could trace the links back to the source.  We understood some roots of democracy more completely.  The setting of Greek myths were now completely vivid.  Elements of the beginnings of our faith made more sense.

I had a little episode in downtown Athens in a pastry shop.  My friends and my wife were teasing me a little - it was harmless - or so they thought.  But it triggered me into a little emotional spiral.  It was small but obvious - the romanticism of being in an Athens bakery was interrupted by my potent and negative response to the teasing.

Trying to show more emotional intelligence, I traced back my emotion back to its source.  I sorted out what it was linked to - which had little to do with my traveling cohorts.  After feeling a little embarrassed (since I claim to be an emotional intelligence expert), I addressed it with them through an apology.

That is what emotional intelligence is - it is not always stopping emotion before it is inappropriately and negatively empowered and expressed.  Having emotional intelligence involves being able to trace the emotion back to its source - back to our emotional heritage - the good and bad.  All of us have interesting and complex history which inform our present reality.  Learning to manage that history in your present is completely possible through emotional intelligence training.