Emotional Intelligence

Fear is the biggest reason why people never reach their full potential. There is a perpetuated lie that one can get rid of fear. You can't get rid of fear as this emotion is in place to keep you safe. It is called your internal fight or flight mechanism that would in any life threatening situation allow you to defend yourself or flee from harm. The problem with this mechanism is that people are not intune to there emotional intelligence. I define emotional intelligence as the ability to recognize how my environment influences my behavior and taking the necessary action to unlearn behaviors that do not serve me. As children, we are being programmed uninhibitedly until about 7 years of age. This means that you have received without your consent programming and conditioning from your environment that can shape your future. Pay close attention that I used the word, can, I know as an adult if you know why you do what you do, then you can go to work to unlearn certain programming. Everytime an event has happened in your life you have attached a meaning or an emotional response to the event. Your subconscious mind can't discern between don't and want. It only can discern between the emotion you attach to any given situation. For example, some people attached the same meaning to being eaten by a tiger as they do to speaking in public and your brain only responds to the emotion and can't tell if there is a real threat or not. Your subconcious mind remembers these feelings and will sabotage you from a speaking events even though there really is no real danger as it feels it is keeping you safe, therefore if you had dreams of becoming a CEO, you can kiss that dream goodbye. Your subconcious mind is your sabotager and deliberately does it because of the training you have given it. So depending on the emotional program installed, this will determine your successes and the lack thereof in your future. Your subconcious mind has programming that is there to sabotage you and it certainly is not the director of your happiness.

Lack of emotional intelligence is why so many highly educated people either never reach success or if they do are still miserable. It is also why you see siblings who were raised by the same family turn out so vastly different as they have attached diiferent meanings to the events that have happened in their lives.

If you don't have a strong emotional intelligence, you will have hardships along your road to success, then if you do obtain success you will have a had time enjoying it. There is good news, you can improve your emotional intelligence and it begins with awareness. You have to understand why you do what you do so that you can reprogram the software or in this case, learn to attach new emotional meanings to past events. This takes what my mentor would call doing some intense self reflection and getting rigorously honest with yourself. The challenge that impedes most people during this step is reflecting on your upbringing and feeling like you have to blame someone or admit your parents didn't do so well. Guess what, this is not a blame game and your family did the best they could in the environment in which they had you in at the time. Remember every human being is conditioned up until age 7, then we go through life responding to events in this way so really no one is at fault. As an adult you have to take full responsibilty for your actions, and this means going to work to unlearn some of these behaviors especially if you seek success and want to savor what life has to offer you. Environmental influence is so strong, but it doesn't have to own you. Once you attach new meanings to events that happened in your past, you will begin to recognize when new events occur that trigger these old emotions and you are now equipped to recognize and respond by attaching an appropriate emotional response and this is how you build your emotional intelligence muscle. Once you build your emotional intelligence muscle, you have to maintain it. The old saying, "You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with" is so true and so important. Make sure you are choosing your tribe wisely and choosing people that are like-minded, that will encourage you to dream, and that will lift you up on this journey called life.