EQ Improvement: Give this Activity a Go…

Emotions are something we love talking about at UPPO, and they play a major role in our behaviour. A little about the science behind emotions is that the amygdala in our brain is responsible for identifying emotions based on how we are physically feeling. It loves to tag these experiences and store them as memories so that when our body feels similar experiences in the future, the amygdala can quickly recognise that emotion and will utilise it to respond without a lot of thought.

Understanding Emotional Intelligence (EQ) 

EQ starts by noticing and understanding the triggers that are prompting changes in how we are feeling, whether they are positive or not so positive. They’re useful flags of information that once we grasp them and take notice of them, we can also regulate them to prevent unnecessary or harmful, impulsive reactions that might negatively impact the people around us.  

The best way to start building emotional intelligence is with self-awareness, noticing how we're feeling and what's triggering us to change how we are feeling. And in order to do that, we need words to use that describe those feelings, taking it from those umbrella terms that we're all built with around happy, sad, anger, fear, and really understanding what it is that we are feeling.  

This is a time that we love to use the Emotional Culture Deck to give us vocabulary, to find what we are really feeling beyond those umbrella terms.  

Activity Time 

Our prompt to you is that over the next week or two at the end of each day, just take a couple of moments to go through the desired feelings and the undesired feelings and write down whether on a computer or in a notebook, how you've felt today.  

And when you notice different emotions, just make a little note to yourself about what was happening when you felt that particular feeling. At the end of that week or two weeks, go back through and look for trends. Were there particular situations, people, times of day that you noticed these changes and how you were feeling That awareness to what triggers changes for us then allows us to build the next piece around how we manage those changes to create space between the stimulus and the response to prevent unnecessary negative impacts on the people around us.  

Use this image below as a example on creating your own journal entry activity.

We’d love to hear how you find this activity, and whether you notice anything new. An activity like this is the absolute foundation for building our emotional intelligence. How do you feel? What changed? What prompted that change? What are the trends you’ve noted? You can then utilise this information to become more aware of how your feeling and why, using the journal entries daily to record your thoughts and progress.