Why Reacting Instead of Responding Is Hurting Your Emotional Intelligence and How to Fix It
We know emotional intelligence is important. It helps us empathize with other people so
We communicate better and fight less. It helps us understand our own actions so we can
be more productive and less reactionary. It’s not always easy, though, and this video
from the School of Life explains how it can go wrong.
Using the Androcles and the Lion fable, the video makes a really powerful point about
reacting vs. responding To sum it up, it’s easy to get angry, act like an ass, and take our
stress out on other people without realizing the root of our problem (the proverbial
thorn). We go on reacting like this instead of actually addressing the problem. Or we
know there’s a problem, but make one of the following mistakes:
- We diagnose incorrectly: instead of getting to the root of the problem, you blame something (or someone else).
- We ignore the pain. We tell ourselves it’s really not that big of a deal so we “suck it up” and ignore it.
- We came up with the wrong solution. As they put it, “We might come up with
unfounded, confused schemes to solve problems we don’t understand.”
For a long time, I ignored my issues with depression, for example, because I thought the
The best solution was to just suck it up and ignore the pain. This only made things worse.
worse. Or, I’d tell myself it was something else because I was afraid of the stigma. When I
pinpointed and admitted the actual problem, I could figure out how to work with it.
which was a lot more productive than pretending it didn’t exist. You can probably think
of a few of your own personal examples in each category. This is where introspection
comes in. Here’s how they put it (emphasis ours):
“Fortunately, there’s almost always information about what is really wrong. Our stream of consciousness contains a reservoir of muddled hints about our woes, which need to be gathered and decoded. The art of living is, to a large measure, dependent on an ability to locate our thorns accurately and in good time so that we will not forever be condemned to suffer our symptoms and terrify strangers with our roars.”
It’s easier to ignore the problem, but introspection is crucial to our emotional
intelligence, our relationships, and our productivity.
Author Kristin Wong , Gizmodo Media From lifehacker
