Empathy - Emotional Literacy

In a previous post, Empathy - The Secret to Building Relationships, I mentioned that empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else's position and feeling what they feel. Doing this is part of emotional intelligence, or the ability to be aware of, recognize, and understand emotions.

Yet, before we can be emotionally intelligent, we have to be emotionally literate.

What does that mean? It means having the vocabulary - the words - to describe emotions. There are other facets of emotional literacy, but a good place to start is having a common language with respect to how we talk about emotions.

So why do we care? A lot of recent research has indicated that emotional intelligence has been identified as a major factor in business and career success. If we can identify when we, ourselves, are getting more emotional that we'd like, we can take steps to address the issue(s) we are dealing with before they become liabilities. Additionally, if we can identify, at least to some degree, the emotional state of our colleagues and/or customers, we can know if it is a good time to bring up certain topics, or whether it might be better to wait. A previous post about attention as a resource lends itself to being a good example of this - if we are able to tell that a person is frustrated, it might be better to wait to ask a favor of them, vs assuming they should just be able to deal with their own problems and treat you the same regardless.

One could go into much deeper detail on emotional literacy, but at a high level, the following table gives some examples of the five primary categories of emotions (top row), and words we are all familiar with to describe different levels of intensity of those categories.

                    Happy        Sad            Angry        Afraid        Ashamed

High            Ecstatic      Miserable   Enraged     Fearful       Disgraced

Medium      Satisfied     Somber      Frustrated   Insecure     Embarrassed

Low             Pleasant     Moody        Annoyed    Worried      Regretful

To me, knowing that something like being frustrated is a form of being angry is really helpful. For example, if we hear someone say they are frustrated, we can now know that we have to deal with that person differently then if they were, for instance, embarrassed about making a mistake. Anger is often dealt with by letting the person vent and speak their mind, whereas if someone is embarrassed, they may need some subtle words of encouragement to help them regain their confidence.

Like it or not, we as humans are emotional creatures first, and rational creatures second. Our emotional center is deeper in our brain stem than our prefrontal cortex, so everything is processed through emotions first, and logic second. Knowing this, and knowing what emotions are stirred up in various situations that we encounter throughout our day, is a powerful tool to helping us not suppress our emotions (which doesn't work), but to deal with them in a productive, and constructive, way.