How Emotional Intelligence Transforms Stress

How well do you understand and manage your emotions? In this episode of Transforming Stress with Dr. Ash, we explore the critical role of emotional intelligence in personal and professional growth. Learn how self-awareness, authentic communication, and social intelligence contribute to resilience, improved relationships, and overall well-being. Tune in now!

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Hello friends, and a very warm welcome to Transforming Stress with Dr. Ash. Are you ready to turn stress into your comfort? For over 30 years now, Dr. Ash has worked and gained education across three continents: India, the United Kingdom, and the United States in healthcare. He's witnessed firsthand how stress can impact our health and cause our happiness. But here's the exciting part. He's here to help you transform your stress into a powerful tool for growth and resilience. Each week, he'll share practical tools and life-changing insights from his books, including The Boiling Frog, to help you manage your stress, find balance, and live a life of purpose. Please join us every Friday at 5 pm and let's start turning stress into strength together. Now let's dive into today's episode.

SPEAKER_00 0:55

So welcome back, Funella. So we are going to speak about the emotional intelligence. Yes. That's an interesting one. How emotions are really the fuel which help us thrive. Yeah. And having the right kind of emotions. Yeah. So as we discussed yesterday, the first step there is to staying connected with our emotions. So like this morning, if I were to ask you, can you name three or four emotions this morning?

SPEAKER_02 1:28

That I'm feeling as we're coming to do this work. I think there's a sense of anticipation. Um again, I think we we had a slightly similar com conversation yesterday. I think there is a sense of thankfulness that gratitude? Yeah. We're able to come together to do this thing. Yeah. To share the work and to hopefully bring something that's useful and genuinely helpful to support people in their stress and their distress. Contribution. Contribution a meaningful contribution. So I also feel attached to doing something meaningful, to having purpose. Which we could talk about being a spiritual dimension. That's what whatever makes our life feel worthwhile and that we're living it to the full.

SPEAKER_00 2:16

So you're creating a meaning? Yeah. You're growing.

SPEAKER_02 2:18

Yeah, yeah. And there's connection.

SPEAKER_00 2:21

And there is purpose and there is connection.

SPEAKER_02 2:23

Yeah, a sense of connection.

SPEAKER_00 2:24

So what I'm trying to demonstrate here for the listeners is to connect your em to your emotions and be able to name your emotions at any point of time. Of course. Because it's not all the time you're going to have positive emotions. So emo emotions are like a data that how you as a person is communic communicating with the environment, with your own self, with other people.

SPEAKER_02 2:55

Yeah. And I think I've heard this analogy that we could look at it as the warning lights on a car, perhaps. Yes, yes. Something's I feel angry. I feel sad. Something is going on. What can I do with this? Where is this coming from? And I think that's also where we bring in, again, self-awareness first and then self-reflection, which you can do on your own. You can use those journaling moments, you can use the techniques that we spoke about in self-management. You might go to your coach, you might go to your mentor. Sometimes we really need to scope what is this? What's happening? Is this coming from the situation that I'm in? Yes. Is it coming from somewhere else? Does this situation feel like something that happened to me previously? So I feel angry because of that? Or is there something going on here? Is there a boundary I need to put back in place? And you might really need a little bit of time. Somebody could come to you in the workplace and say something. You could feel an overwhelming negative emotion. And it's okay to step back. It's okay maybe to say, hmm, I need a bit of time to process what you've said there. I'll get back to you. You can have strategies that allow you some time to just slow down and go away and find out what it is. What do you need to communicate to the other person? How can you communicate it? If you blow up, if your emotions take hold, if that adrenaline is coursing through you, you might say something that you regret that doesn't communicate what it is that you need, what the shift is that you require. And the other person may not understand what's going on, they might feel alienated. So you really need to go and check out what is it that's happening here. And then if you're going to communicate about that with them, you need to be able to do it in a way that's clear and quite precise and also non-violent, that that's gentle. So instead of saying something like, When you said that, you made me such and such, you might say, When you say that to me, I feel, so you might explain that and you might just deconstruct that for the other person and explain about your boundary or explain about the the need that you have.

SPEAKER_00 5:07

So Funella, what you are saying that if there is a trigger in the environment, first of all, you are aware of what emotions that trigger has caused. Exactly. And the next step is, and this is something I get into more details in the fourth chapter about the adaptive response, is that between the stimulus and the response, there is a space. Exactly. And in that space, how you choose the response will decide your direction. By Victor Frankel from Man's Search for Meaning, very, very empowering book. I have read it several times and is a foundation of a lot of uh growth in my life. But first, you are aware of the trigger, and secondly, when you respond, it is a measured response. Yes. Coming back to emotional intelligence, yeah. First of all, you are intelligent about your emotions. Yeah. You are aware about your emotions, that is self-awareness. You are aware about what kind of emotions you are feeling, because there are emotions like gratitude, joy, meaning. Those emotions are high frequency emotions, and there are certain emotions like blame, shame, anger, guilt, resentment. Not only are they not helpful, but on a chronic basis, they get your sympathetic nervous system, stress responses, your fight or flight. Your fight or flight responses. So they are not helpful from a stress management point of view, as they're not long-term mechanisms.

unknown 6:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 6:57

Yeah. I remember you showed me a beautiful color spectrum of the emotions. Yes. And the yeah, I'm trying to think how it worked. I know that there was a level where we get into those places we we don't want to go to much. We those aren't the optimal emotions, but these are things that we will feel. And we need to know how to recognize those emotions in ourselves and in other people. And yeah, how actually how to cope when other people's emotions come at us. And if we can deconstruct our own emotions and take that time, we can start to develop that skill when we're dealing with how other people feel. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 7:33

Uh so what you mentioned about that chart, it's from the book Power versus Force, uh, the but uh inspiring work done by David David Hawkins. Okay. And um it helps us to see where we are, so that as I mentioned to you earlier, emotions are like data where you are it's energy in motion. Emotional energy in motion. Yeah. And if you do you feel more energetic when you are joyful, when you are blissful, when you have meaning, when you have purpose, or you feel and when you have got guilt and shame and anger and resentment, it's like the baggage. That's why it's called the emotional baggage, because those lower frequency emotions are heavy. You feel a heaviness. Now, all this is very important for your long-term resilience. Also, it's important for social intelligence, which we are going to discuss next, Funilla. Yeah. And this overall leads into the next section which we will be talking about, which will be the environmental management. Yeah. It's very well. So this is see how these things are linking to each other.

SPEAKER_02 8:50

They absolutely are. As we said before, people are an environment, the people that we work with, the people in our personal life. Yes. And um, yeah, I don't want to say too much about social intelligence because we're going to take a deep dive into that. Um, but yeah, there are choices that we can make. Let's say that.

SPEAKER_00 9:06

So if I refer you back to the to the illustration we have created for this chapter, there are two sets of frogs or people. One they're hiding behind the masks, and like inside they are feeling angry or grumpy, but they are smiling. Yeah. But on the other hand, other set of frogs, you could see they are trying to have authentic communication with each other.

SPEAKER_02 9:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:33

And to be to be honest and transparent. Now, all the time it might not be possible, but we have to see that on a day-to-day basis where we are living, are we able to have more authentic communications? Yeah. Or are we just wearing a mask?

SPEAKER_02 9:54

Yeah. And I think when we start to work into social intelligence, we'll see how crucial that communication is.

SPEAKER_00 10:00

Yes. But in your experience, how do you think people can evolve or develop their emotional intelligence as a skill?

SPEAKER_02 10:10

I think that there are muscles that you need to keep exercising. And once you become aware of something, you can spread that awareness to other emotions that you feel and other situations. I'm thinking specifically of a client who was running their own business. And they were in a really bad place when costs went up in their supply chain because they've really struggled to communicate to their customers that they needed to charge more for their service. And they were delivering a great service, and this had them really tangled up inside. They would try and steal themselves for those conversations and then feel upset and angry when they couldn't have them and even feel a sense of resentment beginning towards the customers. We had a conversation, and it turned out that in that person's background, they had been raised to not really recognize their own needs or to feel that being good was something about suppressing what you needed and not being demanding. And so they were looking at this real necessity that they had for communication as something that might be wrong, that they might come across as demanding, that they couldn't do that with their customers. But when we reframed what they were feeling and we started to look at that word need, I need this, and it's perfectly legitimate to need something. And there was certainly reason and logic behind that and a recognition of that place that they were coming from, that I somehow feel embarrassed or I feel ashamed of saying I need something and expressing that, that was a huge insight for them. And they began to question other things and to see that mechanism at play.

SPEAKER_00 11:48

Very insightful. So they became more assertive and they were more aware of their own boundaries with self and others, which was much more empowering for them.

SPEAKER_02 12:01

Indeed. And they worked from that motivational place of being able to recognize I need this, and it's absolutely okay to ask for that. And I can ask nicely, and I can give the context for that, but I need to ask for it, and that's okay.

SPEAKER_00 12:15

Well, thank you for sharing that, Funella. You're so good. I think we'll take a deeper dive about this into our next chapter of social intelligence. Amazing. And uh we'll see how that links into the bigger picture of resilience and environmental management. I'm looking forward to it. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_02 12:35

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 12:38

If you enjoyed today's episode, we'd greatly appreciate it. If you could leave a five-star review, a like, or subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Your support helps us reach more people looking to transform their stress into new comfort. We'd love to hear your thoughts, so don't forget to comment and share. For more tips and updates, please be sure to check out our social media links in the description box below. We can't wait to have you with us next time as we continue this journey towards turning stress into resilience. Remember, it's not the stress itself but how we rise above it that defines our strength. So stay resilient and keep thriving, and we will see you next time.