Do emotional intelligence skills imply brain fitness? According to Simon Evans, Ph.D. and Paul Burghardt, Ph.D., the answer is yes, and here’s what they say.

“1. Emotional intelligence (EQ). Your brain controls your mood and your ability to handle stress and respond to challenges. It controls your ability to read the emotions of others and respond appropriately. Your emotional intelligence, or EQ, it is the fitness aspect of the brain that has a huge impact on self-confidence, daily mood, and success in social settings, including career and family life. For the most part, a system in your brain called the cortico-limbic is responsible for controlling your emotional intelligence, and like most systems in your brain, you can improve it with a specific approach.”

First Emotional Intelligence Skill

So if we follow Evans and Burghardt’s line of thinking, the first emotional intelligence skill to work on is taking care of your brain.

That means keeping the brain rested, fed, exercised, relaxed, and yet challenged with new learning experiences.

When I routinely manage those kinds of basic health tasks, my brain, the master integrator of everything I do, including emotional intelligence, will be very plastic—in other words, it will be constantly rewiring and creating new connections due to changing emotional landscapes. around me, and that brain will also make new brain cells for my brain in the maximum daily amount allowed, which is called neurogenesis.

New neurons, from my reading of the research, routinely end up in the hippocampus, which is part of the corticolimbic system mentioned earlier by Evans and Burghardt.

There is a lot of information in his book, Brainfit for Life, about nutrition, sleep, and exercise procedures, and there is an excellent discussion of what new learning experiences can be.

Emotional intelligence happens internally and externally

Once the brain is in shape, we can now begin to discuss the discrete skills of emotional intelligence.

Once again, I must first work within myself, with internal dialogue.

As a domestic violence educator, I work with people who aren’t committed to emotional intelligence, or don’t know how to, and first teach basic self-talk skills.

When I address a group and I’ve done thousands of them, I need to reaffirm, with an internal dialogue, inside my head, that I’m going to listen respectfully, even if I have no idea how they’re going to talk to me. I suggest my clients do the same, commit to talking to themselves.

When I go home, I need to make another mental commitment to myself to listen to my wife, who will want to talk about her day and our children and her plans for the flower beds and the terrace, etc.

I know I don’t need to agree or disagree with anything he says, I just need to listen, which is a skill with discrete steps, and it’s very easy to learn.

When I listen, I give the Gift of Attention, which makes my wife and the people I listened to feel a little happy.

Remember, you don’t need to agree or disagree, just listen, maybe even turn your head to the side and pay attention.

When I make that internal declaration to myself that I will listen, I feel calm, and that calm affects the speaker, who can be very loud, which simply means that he wants to be heard.

So the first emotional intelligence skill is to say to yourself, quite often, and this will be quick, I’m going to practice emotional intelligence skills, like listening.

Why do you need to do that frequently? Because the human-oriented response will quickly drive you away. We are programmed to respond to movement in the environment, and when I look out the window where there was only a flash of light, I can forget about the commitment I had made and join the discussion because my very healthy brain processes the data at the same time. 7-bit rate every 1/18th of a second.

Change thoughts quickly.

The next emotional intelligence skill to pay attention to is managing my own feelings.

That involves the awareness that thoughts change feelings, so if I’m experiencing an unpleasant feeling, I need to change the thought to change the feeling, or take a deep breath, or do my heart rate variability biofeedback.

Again we are working on the personal aspects of emotional intelligence, so that it can operate effectively, cooperatively and affiliatively, in the external relationship.

It is my belief that emotional intelligence skills happen within me first, and need to be managed at the pace of my Central Nervous System and that is a very fast management.

I want to establish an experience of FLOW in my relationships, but that FLOW happens inside of me.