How To Master Your Emotions: A Guide to Emotional Intelligence

welcome to today's episode of the mindset Mentor podcast I'm your host Rob dial today we're going to be talking about your emotional intelligence and how to develop your emotional intelligence and What Makes Us human and makes us different than almost all other animals is the depth of our emotions animals do have emotions but the difference between us and Them is the level and the depth at which ours can go and another really big difference between us and animals is how we can imagine a fake scenario a fake future good or bad and we can get

a emotional reaction from that fake future right now good or bad so like we can imagine starting a business and we're it's our first day starting this business and we can start to think about oh my God what if this business fails what if I what if this happens to me what if this doesn't happen to me and we can start to imagine a a future where the business fails and we will feel those feelings right now in this in this moment but we could also Imagine you know you guys have probably if you're out

there listening to me and you're human you've probably imagined some sort of sexual thought or sexual scenario right and you also notice from imagining that future your body still does something right so no matter what it is that you're actually imagining good bad sexual your body is going to have some sort of reaction to it and that's just internally now you also think about externally all the people that are around you that you deal with work everything all of that stuff is going to cause some sort of emotion inside of you what it really comes

down to is how do we actually regulate understand regulate and use our emotions for good because let's be real most people's parents were not psychologists that taught us exactly how to understand our mind understand our emotions and they probably didn't have really high emotional intelligence maybe they did if they did you're lucky but most people didn't really have that and so really it's something that's a skill that we need to develop and we're going to talk about like I said something called emotional intelligence which is really just the ability to identify understand and manage your

emotions and those could be our emotions but they can also be other people's emotions as well once you become more emotionally intelligent you can actually start to help other people become more emotionally intelligent if you have children or if you're a manager or if you have people that you surround yourself with it is very important for you to understand your emotions and up regulate your your emotions and your calmness and your emotional intelligence so that therefore you can help other people around you as well I think that this is a skill set and the reason

why I say it's a skill set is it's really something that you can improve at and it's really something I think everybody listening should want to be better at it helps you with better decision making manage relationships that you have conflict resolution and it's also really a key factor to your personal success but also your professional success so you need to understand your emotions and not act like they don't exist a lot of people like to just kind of not look at their emotions they throw them off to the side and like no those aren't

there I'm just I'm just a robot you have to really understand your emotions and some experts even say that emotional intelligence is more important than cognitive intelligence when it comes to overall success happiness and well-being and the good thing for us fortunately is that unlike IQ emotional intelligence can be developed and enhanced which is why I call it a skill set and so today we're just going to basically go through a really simple three-step process to help you develop your emotional intelligence cool so the first thing is self-awareness you wonder you need to understand your

emotions I feel like I talk about self-awareness almost every single episode and it might be the most important skill for someone to have because you cannot change something if you are not aware of it and so what you really want to do is start developing your own self-awareness a lot of people think they know themselves then they start reading books and they get into self-development and then they start or they go to a therapist and like holy I didn't know myself at all there's all kinds of things happening in the background you know there's my

five percent conscious mind there's my 95 conscious mind that's kind of running a program that has so much conditioning that was making me act a certain way that was making me feel a certain way that was making me think a certain way and I think that this is really something for us to think about is with all of the technology in the stimuli that we have all day every day we have phones we have TVs we have social media on our phones we have text messages we have computers we have emails we have other people

in our lives all of those things most people are really unaware of themselves because they are so busy doing things that they never take a step back and actually think they're too busy in the 3D realm of everything externally versus kind of taking the mirror and putting it on ourselves and saying well why am I this way what is it about like what what is it about my relationship with my mom that made me this way what is about my relation my dad that made me this way are there any traumas that I haven't gotten

past is there any uh people who died in my in my life that I didn't even actually grieve and so therefore because the fact I didn't grieve it it's like this this well of emotions that stuck inside of me that comes out only when I drink or whatever it might be for whenever I get angry and most people because they're so busy are really unaware of their deep unconscious reactions and and the the actions that we take and why we take them and so you could take two people who have the exact same life two

two twins and they could be two completely different people based off of the thing that happened to them but then also how they react based off of what happened to them and if you don't take a step back and actually start to look at this you don't really know how it's affecting you and when you don't know how it's affecting you also don't know how it's affecting other people and that's why I always say in the podcast when you're in the jar you can't read the label you've got to take yourself out of the jar

to be able to read the label you've got to take yourself out of your own head and start asking yourself really deep questions we've got to get out of the jar more we've got to calm ourselves down a little bit and say why did I act that way why why did I have such an emotional reaction to what she said to me why did I freak out on that person oh I just have a short fuse no you don't have a short fuse that is actually actually something that you've built up over years you weren't

born with a short fuse and self-awareness is really the Cornerstone of emotional intelligence it's the capacity to really start to to recognize and understand your own emotions your motivations your actions your patterns of behavior because we all have patterns we're just literally people that just go and do patterns all day long depending on what happened to us in our past you know if you have a parent who's very calm someone might cut you cut off cut you off in the road and you have no problem with it you're like oh that guy must have to

poop so he's really in a hurry so all right you cut me off but if you have a parent who has a short fuse or someone who freaks out at people when they cut them off and then you freak out when people cut you off that is a pattern and you've developed that pattern from somebody else how aware are you of your patterns and not really what it comes down to is being aware of what you're feeling why you are feeling that way and how those emotions can affect your decisions and your actions and then

also how your emotions affect other people around you as well and so let's talk about how to develop more self-awareness in your life few episodes ago I gave you a an example of something called Stress Management journaling and so it's creating something called a stress Journal which can be really highly effective for people for Stress Management so stress is an emotion and that is a pattern something that can happen to me could make me really stressed out some the exact same thing could happen to you and it doesn't stress you out at all and so

a stress stress Journal really helps with you identifying your triggers understanding your emotional responses and eventually help you develop coping mechanisms and the idea more than anything else is to learn yourself I always say knowing yourself is based in the past learning yourself is based in the present so you sit down you ask yourself when you start to have a heightened emotion what is it that's triggering you why do you feel that way how do you feel what can you do about it and you'll start to learn more about yourself than you ever have you'll

start to see triggers before they they actually come up you'll start to see oh okay I know that this thing right here really makes me anxious okay I'm starting to see that this starting to notice my feelings starting to notice my emotions I'm starting to notice my my chest get a little bit tighter okay I'm about to get into stressed anxious State okay why because oh yeah that's right I've been here before okay and what you do is you start to develop coping mechanisms to help you when you do get stressed and one thing that

I recommend is when you get triggered in some sort of way whether that's where that's pissed off whether that is sad whether that is angry whether that is you just have a full-on breakdown or you disconnect or you bypass any of those things when you get triggered in some sort of way the point of this this journal is to get curious and have it with no judgment instead take really compassionate and curious approach the same way that if your friend came up to you and said hey can I talk to you like I'm really dealing

with some stuff right now you know yeah absolutely okay well he said this to me and I just went off the rails and I don't like that I did that and I'm really trying to figure it out can you help me out you wouldn't be like oh well this and you wouldn't like throw judgment and shame and guilt at your friend but you'll do it to yourself so really what it is is try to be able to journal through these things with without emotion without judgment without guilt without shame because those things don't help and

so journaling this way can help you understand yourself and and it can also really be a great emotional release to dump all of your feelings onto a piece of paper and work through them because when it's in your head it's really hard to figure out like really hard to figure out you're feeling all a lot of times people are like Rob I don't know why I feel this way and I'm like yeah because it's in your head put it on paper because when it's put on paper it can be planned it can be worked through

and you can start to figure yourself out hey if you're loving this episode on emotional intelligence please do me a quick favor give us a like down below for the YouTube algorithm and if you have any ideas of stuff that you want me to cover in future episodes go ahead and put them down below in the comments and so that's a big tip that I'll give you to start to develop more self-awareness is to have a stress Journal have a a journal that you put your emotions down you start asking yourself how am I reacting

why do I feel this way then when you notice yourself in those moments slow down in the moment the subconscious brings up there's something called automatic thoughts they talk about in cognitive behavioral therapy where it's an automatic thought it's so automatic that you don't even notice the thought you don't even recognize it most of the time usually we don't recognize a thought we recognize how we feel we notice the emotion and so what you want to start to do is slow down in the moment when you feel that way and what am I feeling why

am I feeling this way and you start to actually work through those things and you just kind of slow yourself down chill out a little bit stop being so go go go go go go all the time another tip that I'll give you for being self-aware which I know most people listen as podcasts you're not going to do this because it scares the out of you because it's a hard one go to people who you love ask around what they notice about you they will tell you things I 100 promise you that you might not

notice about yourself you think that you know yourself a lot of times but you don't know yourself until you get feedback from people who know you well so you can sit down and ask your friends you can ask your family you can ask your spouse you can ask your children if they're old enough to be able to talk to you about it you can ask for colleagues for feedback about your behavior about your reactions and really once again I know most you guys are not going to do this but if you do it will absolutely

change your view on yourself because there's a lot of things are going to pop up and you're going to go oh my God they're so right I didn't even realize that I do this and so that's the the first tip is to make sure that you become self-aware of yourself the second thing once you become aware of your emotions is self-regulation so now that you're aware of your emotions now we've got to figure out how to manage those emotions when I say manage your emotions I don't mean push them away act like they don't exist

any of that stuff I mean manage them as far as how to start to work through them because an emotion is something that's coming up in your body your body wants to release this emotion if you just push it away it's like throwing something under the carpet you could throw it in the carpet eventually you're going to get some point where you've thrown too many things on the carpet you trip over it you hurt yourself you say something that you don't want to say you react a certain way and so really with with self-regulation I

think I've been thinking a lot about recently is self-soothing self-soothing is something that is naturally built into the human system when you look at a baby they know how to self-soothe it's pretty wild they know to suck on their thumbs or they suck on a pacifier or they will cry until their mother picks them up because they want to be soothed in some sort of way they have a heightened State and they're trying to bring themselves back to homeostasis just normal young children do the same thing as well young children will have a stuffed animal

that makes them feel like they're soothing or they'll have a blanket that they carry around that makes them feel safe as adults most adults that I know don't number one they don't know what self-soothing is number two they definitely don't have any form of self-soothing that they do for themselves and we're not taught how to do so because frankly most of our parents are not good at self-soothing on their own and they don't know how to do it in their own life so it probably wasn't taught to you self-soothing is really just a practice to

be able to get yourself from a heightened state to a calm relaxed State back to homeostasis and it's it's the ability to be able to regulate your emotional state regardless of your circumstances so how do you do it okay the first thing is this when you feel a heightened State bubbling on the side of you we all know the feeling of it just kind of coming up right what you want to do is you want to pause pause before you do any sort of reaction when you feel a real strong emotion especially a negative one

don't immediately react Victor Frankl who you've heard me quote many times in this podcast wrote an incredible book called man search for meaning he was in Auschwitz as a prisoner in the Nazi camps and he was a psychologist before and he has this quote of saying between stimulus and response between something happening and you reacting so between stimulus and response there's a space and in that space lies our freedom and power to choose our responses and in our response lies our growth and our freedom so if you want to be free what you want to

do is be able to emotionally regulate to choose your response that is where you're really trying to master yourself to pause and to notice your state changing and then make a conscious decision of what you want your next action to be and then what you want to do is you want to breathe our breath rate the depth and the pattern of it is the first thing to change when your emotional state changes there's been many studies on this there's a Japanese study that was done at shawwa University in Yokohama I hope I said that correctly

it indicates that 60 breaths in a 30 second period can help lower your heart rate and your blood pressure Dr Hubert Hubert Benson at Harvard Medical School coined some of those called the relaxation response and the relaxation response is stimulated through deep conscious breathing and so usually the very first thing to change is as soon as you start to feel the emotions Bubble Up is your heart rate goes up your breath rate goes up so you're trying to calm yourself back down deep conscious breaths to allow yourself to go from a heightened state to a

calmer State why because when your emotions are high your logic is low when you get really emotional your your brain actually starts to react differently you stop sending so as much blood to your prefrontal cortex which is the executive function functioning thinking part of your brain because you're thinking that it's actually fight or flight like shit's hitting the fan I got to do something there's no reason to be able to think through things like a math problem right so that's why you can say something when you're really pissed off and you're like yeah I probably

should have said that to her so when your emotions are high your logic is low breathe get yourself back to a calm State one way that's really good to train this muscle quote unquote muscle of going from heightened state to column State and allowing yourself to self-soothe is actually something that I do a lot when I work out so I work out at home we have one in our gym I'm sorry we have a gym in our garage and uh when I work out at home I'll work out really hard for the sets and get

into a heightened State and then what I'll do is I'll set a timer for my 60 seconds or 90 second rest and I'll close my eyes and I'll go from I will try to breathe and slow myself down as much as possible so I'm training my body and my brain to go from heightened state to calm state from heightened state to comp state from heightened state to comp state I'm trying to train myself to calm as much as possible this is not I want you I want to say this one more time this is not

bypassing emotions what it is is learning how to work with your emotions and working out is a really good strategy for emotional training so if you go for a run and you like running do a really quick Sprint a 100 yard Sprint get your your your breath up get your heart rate up close your eyes and then try to calm yourself down as quick as possible through deep conscious breaths that is actually training for your emotions so that's the thing that you want to make sure to do how can you develop some form of self-soothing

so self-soothing to get shoved from a heightened State down to a calm state and then the last part of that is adaptability and being more flexible in your emotional responses emotional training is just like training a muscle the more that you train it the stronger that it's going to get you are not going to be able to train the change the world around you I think that a lot of people Stress and Anxiety comes from them wanting the world to be different but the world is not different and they're not going to change the world

and so we need to get better at reacting to the world around you you're not going to be able to train your mom into being different she's been that way for 70 years or 60 years or whatever it might be 80 years and so instead of trying to change somebody what I want to do is change myself around that person I got to get better at adapting instead of being like Oh well she's not that way now I'm pissed off I bet you can think of someone that you know that no matter what happens to

them cool as a cucumber right they're always just calm that right there is a skill and it's a muscle that's been developed over years and years and years in how to how to really start to develop it is to start being okay with change start being okay with the world not being the way that you want it to be the only thing constant in this world is change so instead of resisting changes and just white knuckling your way through life and holding on as tight as you can try to view that as an opportunity for

growth and see it as okay this is the way that it is I remember I had a coaching client like seven years ago and she had this boss that was just terrible she used to tell me stories about how she would come in and yell at her and the stuff that she would say and she's like Rob I don't I don't know what to do like she's just insane I was like okay well you could quit and she's like I can't really quit right now and I was like well if you can't change your circumstances

the only thing you could change is you and so you want to get better at your emotional responses why don't you see it as like a challenge every time you walk in the door you're going to have this boss that's gonna do some crazy stuff she's going to say some crazy stuff why don't you view this as like walking into the dojo for your emotional intelligence for calming yourself for remaining calm and keeping you know homeostasis no matter how crazy it gets and so what she did is she started going into work and her boss

was just a complete nut bag and she was just trying to no matter what happens she's not going to disturb my peace because your peace is something you can your piece is yours that's something that you decide that you're going to be in if somebody quote unquote somebody gets you out of your piece you chose to get out of your piece so how can you actually use it as training some of you guys hate going home holidays things coming up you're like I don't know if I can do it my parents are crazy okay why

don't you see it as a challenge another thing you do besides embracing changes learn from your mistakes because you are human you are going to this up over and over and over and over and over and over and over again you will not be perfect so when you blow up at somebody and you say something you didn't mean or you react in a defensive way and you're like man I really screwed that one up how can you learn from it how can you learn to adapt and go you know what yeah I need to adapt

myself I need to change how can I react better next time don't guilt and shame yourself use it as a lesson and a chance to get better next time rather than dwelling on all of your mistakes and then making yourself feel worse about this thing use all of them as learning opportunities analyze what went wrong what you could do differently adapt and then move forward because really what it comes down to is we're all in community with other people and especially if you're a parent this is something that you should definitely try to work at

you know your children have you're in Walmart and your children has just a child has a meltdown in the middle of the ice cream aisle okay this is my chance to to calm myself this is my chance to to try to Center myself and from there what you're realizing is that you're not just helping yourself you're also helping your children around you the people around you understand themselves and a lot of times this is what tends to happen with people I hear this all the time is when you start to work on yourself and you

start to get closer and closer and closer to Mastery of yourself the people who are around you start asking questions hey I notice you're getting really calm like what are you doing I'm starting to get really anxious recently and that's when you can really start to help people you can't change them you can change yourself and be an example of what they could be and then hopefully they can come to you and start to ask you questions you can help your children through this you can help your friends through this you can help your family

members through this you can help your spouse through this but really what it comes down to is you realizing that your emotions are what make you human how can we match them how can not bypass and deflect them off somewhere else how can we Master them how can we work with them and how can we use them to our benefit in our lifetime so that's what I got for you for today's episode if you love this episode please me if you ever share it on your Instagram stories and tag me in at Rob dial Jr

Rob d-i-a-l-j-r and if you're out there and you love this podcast you'll also probably love my new book it is called level up how to get focused stop procrastinating and upgrade your life it is currently number one in a few different categories on Amazon and new releases that's number one in neurology it's number one in Psychology it's number one in business and it's also number one in self-development as well so if you want to get it go to robdial.com book or however you listen and find books and read them go to rob.com book if you're

listening to this before October 3rd it is still on pre-order and anybody who pre-orders the book only people who pre-order the book will get a free class a video series for myself on how to stop procrastinating absolutely free and you'll get entered into a drawing over for twenty five thousand dollars in cash and prizes so once again if you want to get that it's Rob dial.com book and with that I'm Gonna Leave the same way I leave you every single episode make it your mission to make somebody else's day better I appreciate you and I

hope that you have an amazing day