The best things in life – success, happiness, love – depend on our ability to create and maintain great relationships. Most of us do a good job with relationships at the start, only to stumble down the road. Why do relationships develop such challenging problems?
Oftentimes, relationship problems are due to a breakdown in the skills of emotional intelligence. Fortunately, it’s never too late to develop these skills and raise your emotional intelligence abilities. Once you’ve learned the five key emotional intelligence skills, you’ll be able to create and sustain secure, successful, long-lasting relationships.
The five key skills
Relationship help skill 1: The ability to manage stress
Stress shuts down your ability to feel, to think rationally, and to be emotionally available to another person, essentially blocking good communication until both you and your partner feel safe enough to focus on one another. This damages the relationship. Being able to regulate stress allows you to remain emotionally available.
The first step in communicating with emotional intelligence is recognizing when stress levels are out of control and returning yourself and others, whenever possible, to a relaxed and energized state of awareness.
Relationship help skill 2: The ability to recognize and manage your emotions
Emotional exchanges hold the communication process together. These exchanges are triggered by basic emotions, including anger, sadness, fear, joy, and disgust. To communicate in a way that grabs or engages others, you have to be able to access your emotions and recognize how they influence your actions and relationships.
However, your emotions may be distorted, numbed, or buried – especially if you’ve experienced early-life traumas such as loss, isolation, or abuse. Unfortunately, without emotional awareness, we are unable to fully understand our own motivations and needs, or to communicate effectively with others. In order to be emotionally healthy and emotionally intelligent, your must reconnect to your core emotions.
Relationship help skill 3: The ability to communicate nonverbally
The most powerful forms of communication contain no words, and take place at a much faster rate than speech. Using nonverbal communication is the way to attract others’ attention and keep relationships on track. Eye contact, facial expression, tone of voice, posture, gesture, touch, intensity, timing, pace, and sounds that convey understanding engage the brain and influence others much more than your words alone.
The way we talk, listen, look, and move will produce a sense of interest, trust, excitement and desire for connection – or they will generate fear, confusion, distrust and disinterest.
Nonverbal communication isn’t about words, but it’s not necessarily silent; tone of voice or a well-placed sigh can say a great deal. And, it is a visual language. If a conversationalist is standing stiffly, the message he sends may be quite different than if he is visibly relaxed. An obvious eye-roll or a subtle shrug can speak volumes—even without the person’s conscious intention. So, nonverbal communication is vital to keeping our relationships strong and healthy.
Part of improving our non-verbal communicant involves paying attention to:
• Eye contact
• Facial expression
• Tone of voice • Posture
• Gestures
• Touch
Nonverbal communication is the lifelong pulley that consciously or unconsciously sends either positive or negative signals to others. Nothing reveals more to others about us, or attracts others to us, than wordless communication.
Relationship help skill 4: The ability to use humor and play in your relationships
Playfulness and humor help you navigate and rise above difficult and embarrassing issues. Mutually shared positive experiences also lift you up, help you find inner resources needed to cope with disappointment and heartbreak, and give you the will to maintain a positive connection to your work and your loved ones.
Using playful communication in your relationships helps you to:
• Take hardships in stride. By allowing us to view our frustrations and disappointments from new perspectives, laughter and play enable us to survive annoyances, hard times, and setbacks.
• Smooth over differences. Using gentle humor often helps us say things that might be difficult without creating a flap.
• Simultaneously relax and restore energy. Play relaxes our bodies and recharges our emotional batteries.
Relationship help skill 5: The ability to resolve conflicts in your relationships
The way you respond to differences and disagreements in personal and professional relationships can create hostility and irreparable rifts, or it can initiate the building of safety and trust. Your capacity to take conflict in stride and to forgive easily is supported by your ability to manage stress, to be emotionally available, to communicate nonverbally, and to laugh easily.
Conflict in relationships can be a deal breaker and a heart breaker. Two people can’t possibly always have the same needs, opinions and expectations—and that needn’t be a bad thing! But when conflict is resolved in a healthy way, it can be a cornerstone for trust between people. When conflict isn’t perceived as threatening or punishing, it fosters freedom, creativity, trust and safety in relationships.
Resolving conflict in a positive way involves:
• Staying focused in the present. When we are emotionally present and not holding on to old hurts and resentments, we can recognize the reality of a current situation and view it as a new opportunity for resolving old feelings about conflicts.
• Choosing your arguments. Consider what is worth arguing about and what is not. Pick your battles wisely.
• Being able to forgive. If you continue to be harmed protect yourself. But if not conflict resolution involves releasing the urge to punish.
• Ending conflicts that can't be resolved. It takes two people to keep an argument going. If you can’t find common ground, let the argument go.
Once you know how to remain emotionally present, and manage stress, you can avoid overreacting or under-reacting in emotionally charged situations. And with the aid of nonverbal communication and humor you can catch and defuse many issues before they escalate into conflict.
by Carna Zacharias-Miller
We all experience severe heart break at some time in our lives. For many it happens in childhood or adolescence, the time when we are most vulnerable. A cold mother, an absent father, being different in any way from our peers and ostracized for it - these are some of the reasons for the early feeling that something is wrong, inadequate and utterly disappointing about us. For others, it happens later, when a spouse betrays our love and trust, a child is hurt, or our dream of making it big in the world is shattered.
It happens -sooner or later- to everybody, yet strangely enough, we tend to believe that other people have heaps of money, great careers, excellent health, and are blessed with devoted spouses and perfect children. Even if common sense tells us that this isn't true, we behave as if it were. We hide behind our painted faces and empty phrases, as if our wounded heart was a rare, shameful thing that had to be hidden at all costs. Even if we are the light of every party, our real self never shows up. We withdraw and disconnect while telling pretty lies in appearance, word and deed. Thus our hearts shrink and harden, and we live lonesome, inauthentic lives deep within the fortress we have built from pride and fear.
From this point on, two things can happen: either we become depressed or cynical enough to believe that staying in this barren place and turning into dust is our only option, or we listen to the cries of our exiled hearts and become seekers. If you belonged to the first group, you would not be reading this article. So let's start the search for our true selves. In the following imaginative exercise, you will begin to restore the lost connection to your heart. You may feel some resistance reading these words. Won't this lead to an emotional breakdown, or to an eruption of pain and anger? It depends on your intention.
If you want to explore your childhood or other severe emotional trauma, there are medical and psychological professionals who are trained to guide you through that sensitive process.
What we want to achieve here is to find and free our spiritual hearts. There is the heart, and there is the true heart. There is our “pink” heart, and there is our “golden” heart. There is our low heart, and there is our high heart.
Qualities of the low heart: Passion, Extremes, Volatility, Attachment, Emotion. Qualities of the high heart: Compassion, Balance, Patience, Unity, Spirit, Soul.
Again, our intention is to connect to the high, the spiritual heart. This may happen instantly, at the first try. If it does, it is a profound, awe- inspiring experience, and you will recognize the level of truth instantly. You will realize that there is, behind your physically sick or emotionally broken heart, a heart that is completely whole and strong and wise. However, establishing this pathway could be a much longer process. You might connect to “pieces” of your heart at a time. Perhaps you will first experience an acute awareness of your heart's imprisonment, or your inner space may remain silent for a while. Take it easy. Whatever happens is just the right thing to happen for you at this point.
EXERCISE: LISTEN TO YOUR HEART
Sit or lie down comfortably, making sure you will not be disturbed. Close your eyes. Breathe. Relax. If relaxation does not come easily to you, visualize a thick, golden liquid pooling in your head. Slowly, slowly, like molasses, it flows down into your whole body, making it slack and heavy.
When you feel relaxed, shift your attention to your chest. Imagine breathing through your chest. In-out. In-out. In-out. Do this as long as you want to. When you are ready, focus your attention gently on your heart.
Your high heart, your true heart, your spiritual heart.
Now, and possibly for the first time, greet your true heart. Express your gratitude for its continuous, life giving service, its protection and guidance.
When you have established a connection, you might want to ask questions. Then be quiet and listen.
Listen to the voice of your heart. This voice might express itself in words, in feelings, in images, in sounds, or just as a “knowing”. Learning to recognize the unique voice of your heart may take time, so relax if you can't “get it right” at first.
We all experience severe heart break at some time in our lives. For many it happens in childhood or adolescence, the time when we are most vulnerable. A cold mother, an absent father, being different in any way from our peers and ostracized for it - these are some of the reasons for the early feeling that something is wrong, inadequate and utterly disappointing about us. For others, it happens later, when a spouse betrays our love and trust, a child is hurt, or our dream of making it big in the world is shattered.
It happens -sooner or later- to everybody, yet strangely enough, we tend to believe that other people have heaps of money, great careers, excellent health, and are blessed with devoted spouses and perfect children. Even if common sense tells us that this isn't true, we behave as if it were. We hide behind our painted faces and empty phrases, as if our wounded heart was a rare, shameful thing that had to be hidden at all costs. Even if we are the light of every party, our real self never shows up. We withdraw and disconnect while telling pretty lies in appearance, word and deed. Thus our hearts shrink and harden, and we live lonesome, inauthentic lives deep within the fortress we have built from pride and fear.
From this point on, two things can happen: either we become depressed or cynical enough to believe that staying in this barren place and turning into dust is our only option, or we listen to the cries of our exiled hearts and become seekers. If you belonged to the first group, you would not be reading this article. So let's start the search for our true selves. In the following imaginative exercise, you will begin to restore the lost connection to your heart. You may feel some resistance reading these words. Won't this lead to an emotional breakdown, or to an eruption of pain and anger? It depends on your intention.
If you want to explore your childhood or other severe emotional trauma, there are medical and psychological professionals who are trained to guide you through that sensitive process.
What we want to achieve here is to find and free our spiritual hearts. There is the heart, and there is the true heart. There is our “pink” heart, and there is our “golden” heart. There is our low heart, and there is our high heart.
Qualities of the low heart: Passion, Extremes, Volatility, Attachment, Emotion. Qualities of the high heart: Compassion, Balance, Patience, Unity, Spirit, Soul.
Again, our intention is to connect to the high, the spiritual heart. This may happen instantly, at the first try. If it does, it is a profound, awe- inspiring experience, and you will recognize the level of truth instantly. You will realize that there is, behind your physically sick or emotionally broken heart, a heart that is completely whole and strong and wise. However, establishing this pathway could be a much longer process. You might connect to “pieces” of your heart at a time. Perhaps you will first experience an acute awareness of your heart's imprisonment, or your inner space may remain silent for a while. Take it easy. Whatever happens is just the right thing to happen for you at this point.
EXERCISE: LISTEN TO YOUR HEART
Sit or lie down comfortably, making sure you will not be disturbed. Close your eyes. Breathe. Relax. If relaxation does not come easily to you, visualize a thick, golden liquid pooling in your head. Slowly, slowly, like molasses, it flows down into your whole body, making it slack and heavy.
When you feel relaxed, shift your attention to your chest. Imagine breathing through your chest. In-out. In-out. In-out. Do this as long as you want to. When you are ready, focus your attention gently on your heart.
Your high heart, your true heart, your spiritual heart.
Now, and possibly for the first time, greet your true heart. Express your gratitude for its continuous, life giving service, its protection and guidance.
When you have established a connection, you might want to ask questions. Then be quiet and listen.
Listen to the voice of your heart. This voice might express itself in words, in feelings, in images, in sounds, or just as a “knowing”. Learning to recognize the unique voice of your heart may take time, so relax if you can't “get it right” at first.
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