35 Powerful Quotes on the Importance of Emotional Intelligence!

35 Powerful Quotes on the Importance of Emotional Intelligence and Literacy | There is no doubt that emotions are running high as we continue to face the global effects of COVID-19: fear, anxiety, disappointment, blame, frustration, anger, sadness, vulnerability and sometimes guilt. And how we manage to succeed in dealing with these emotions can ultimately depend on our Emotional Intelligence and Literacy.

Understanding Emotional Intelligence can help increase our self-awareness, self-control, motivation, empathy, and social skills. All of these help us with emotional regulation and understanding ourselves and each other.

Understanding Emotional Intelligence & Literacy

Emotional Intelligence is essentially recognising, naming, understanding and regulating our feelings and emotions. The importance of social & emotional learning can not be underestimated, as it affects everything from learning, decision-making, and creativity to relationships, health, and performance.

Interestingly, research has indicated that there are three main emotions people can identify in themselves and others: commonly bad, sad, and glad. However, the list of core emotions can more accurately be listed as follows;

Anger, Anxious, Belonging, Blame, Curious, Disappointed, Disgust, Embarrassment, Empathy, Excited, Fear,  Scared, Frustrated, Gratitude, Grief, Guilt, Happy, Humiliation, Hurt, Jealous, Joy, Judgment, Lonely, Love, Overwhelmed, Regret, Sad, Shame, Surprised, Vulnerability, Worried

Experts say that Emotional Literacy is vital for having and using a sophisticated vocabulary to describe the full range of emotions. Identifying and understanding the difference in emotions and their effect is also essential. A great example is the difference between shame and guilt, as described by Brené Brown in this article.

“Permission to Feel” – the RULER Method

Marc Brackett is a founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and author of “Permission to Feel: Unlocking the Power of Emotions to Help Our Kids, Ourselves, and Our Society Thrive.” He and his team have developed a system called RULER, a high-impact and fast-effect approach to understanding and mastering emotions. He advises that the first step is giving yourself the “permission to feel” and “it’s all about taking that breath, pausing and applying the RULER principles.” A summary of applying the RULER method is as follows;  

R – Recognition of emotions in oneself and others

U – Understanding the causes and consequences of emotions

L – Labeling emotions accurately

E – Expressing emotions appropriately

R – Regulating emotions effectively

If you want to learn more, this is a great podcast to listen to: Unlocking Us | Brené Brown – Dr Marc Brackett and Brené on “Permission to Feel” or one of my favourite books, “The Choice by Edith Egar.”

We are often taught and pressured to withhold or suppress emotions in life. However, this can have far-reaching and negative consequences. The true power is in understanding, feeling, and expressing them!

How You React Emotionally is a Choice

In summary, whether you’re a parent, grandparent, spouse/partner, manager, employer, employee, worker, teacher, student, or any combination of these. It has never been a more critical time to practice and learn about Emotional Intelligence and Literacy. It will help your emotional well-being in life, these difficult times, and your relationships with others.

I hope you enjoy my collection of 35 Powerful Quotes on the Importance of Emotional Intelligence and can be inspired to further focus on developing your own Emotional Intelligence!

Paula x

The Edit

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35 Powerful Quotes on the Importance of Emotional Intelligence!

“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.” – Viktor E. Frankl

“It is a choice. No matter how frustrating or boring or constraining or painful or oppressive our experience, we can always choose how we respond.” – Edith Eger

“We don’t know where we’re going, we don’t know what’s going to happen, but no one can take away from you what you put in your own mind.” –  Edith Eger

“My message for everyone is the same: that if we can learn to identify, express, and harness our feelings, even the most challenging ones, we can use those emotions to help us create positive, satisfying lives.” –  Marc Brackett

“How you react emotionally is a choice in any situation.” – Judith Orloff

“If your emotional abilities aren’t in hand, if you don’t have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can’t have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.” – Daniel Goleman

“You can conquer almost any fear if you will only make up your mind to do so. For remember, fear doesn’t exist anywhere except in the mind.” – Dale Carnegie

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” – Viktor Frankl

“When a man is prey to his emotions, he is not his own master.” – Benedict de Spinoza

“We are dangerous when we are not conscious of our responsibility for how we behave, think, and feel.” – Marshall B. Rosenberg

“Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.”- Elizabeth Gilbert

“Strong, negative emotions (fear, anger, anxiety, hopelessness) tend to narrow our minds—it’s as though our peripheral vision has been cut off because we’re so focused on the peril that’s front and center.” – Marc Brackett

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” –  Maya Angelou

“Perhaps the most liberating moment in my life was when I realized that my self-loathing was not a product of my inadequacy but, rather, a product of my thoughts.” – Vironika Tugaleva

“Emotion can be the enemy, if you give into your emotion, you lose yourself. You must be at one with your emotions, because the body always follows the mind.” – Bruce Lee 

“The strength of character and emotional intelligence to face your failures and learn from them are at the core of success.” – Robert Kiyosaki

“The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence.” – Oscar Wilde

“Today, when nearly every question can be handled instantly by Siri, or Google, or Alexa, we’re losing the habit of pausing to look inward, or to one another, for answers. But even Siri doesn’t know everything. And Google can’t tell you why your son or daughter is feeling hopeless or excited, or why your significant other feels not so significant lately, or why you can’t shake that chronic low-level anxiety that plagues you.” – Vironika Tugaleva

“Don’t let people who don’t care about you, manipulate your mind, feelings and emotions or control how you think about yourself. Never give that much power to someone else.” – Karon Waddell

“There are six elements of gravitas critical to leadership: grace under fire, decisiveness, emotional intelligence and the ability to read a room, integrity and authenticity (people don’t like fakes), a vision that inspires others, and a stellar reputation.” – Sylvia Ann Hewlett

“It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions.” – Oscar Wilde

“Emotional intelligence, more than any other factor, more than I.Q. or expertise, accounts for 85% to 90% of success at work… I.Q. is a threshold competence. You need it, but it doesn’t make you a star. Emotional intelligence can.” – Warren G. Bennis

“Always, emotional freedom involves choosing where you put your attention.” – Judith Orloff

“It is not depression or anxiety that truly hurts us. It is our active resistance against these states of mind and body. If you wake up with low energy, hopeless thoughts, and a lack of motivation – that is a signal from you to you. That is a sure sign that something in your mind or in your life is making you sick, and you must attend to that signal.” – Vironika Tugaleva

“Emotional intelligence is a way of recognizing, understanding, and choosing how we think, feel, and act. It shapes our interactions with others and our understanding of ourselves. It defines how and what we learn; it allows us to set priorities; it determines the majority of our daily actions. Research suggests it is responsible for as much as 80 percent of the “success” in our lives.” — J Freedman

“Never make a permanent decision based on a temporary emotion.” – Anonymous

“Any person capable of angering you becomes your master.” ― Epictetus

“Suppressing the feelings only makes it harder to let them go. Expression is the opposite of depression.” –  Edith Eger

“Whatever is begun in anger, ends in shame.” – Benjamin Franklin

“Each moment is a choice. No matter how frustrating or boring or constraining or painful or oppressive our experience, we can always choose how we respond.” –  Marc Brackett

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” – C.G Jung

“Hard times of any kind—financial, familial, or job-related—create more intense and often prolonged negative emotions that ultimately result in stress. In addition to the physical costs of stress, such as weight gain and heart disease, stress also taxes our mental resources.”  –  Travis Bradberry

“You do control the thoughts that follow an emotion, and you have a great deal of say in how you react to an emotion—as long as you are aware of it.” – Travis Bradberry

“Life is a series of experiences, each one of which makes us bigger, even though it is hard to realise this. For the world was built to develop character and we must learn that the setbacks and griefs which we endure help us out in marching onward.” — Henry Ford

“Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we have a clear picture of it.” — Benedict Spinoza

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35 Powerful Quotes on the Importance of Emotional Intelligence!