selfesteem art

When you stuff your feelings, they quickly build into the uncomfortable sensations of tension, stress, and anxiety. Unaddressed emotions strain the mind and body. Your reason helps make stress more manageable by enabling you to spot and tackle tough situations before things escalate.

People who fail to use their mind are more likely to turn to other, less effective means of managing their mood. They are twice as likely to experience anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and even thoughts of suicide.

having difficulty asserting oneself. People with high SE balance good manners, empathy with the ability to assert themselves and establish boundaries. This tactful combination is ideal for handling conflict. When most people are crossed, they default to passive or aggressive behavior. Strong people remain balanced and assertive by steering themselves away from unfiltered emotional reactions. This enables them to neutralize difficult and toxic people without creating enemies.

emotional vocabulary. All people experience emotions, but it is a select few who can accurately identify them as they occur. Research shows that only 30%ish of people can do this, which is problematic because unlabeled emotions often go misunderstood, which leads to irrational choices and counterproductive actions. The strong master their emotions because they understand them, and they use an extensive vocabulary of feelings to do so. While many people might describe themselves as simply feeling “bad,” High SE people can pinpoint whether they feel “irritable,” “frustrated,” “downtrodden,” or “anxious.” The more specific your word choice, the better insight you have into exactly how you are feeling, what caused it, and what you should do about it.

making assumptions quickly and defend them vehemently. People with low SE form an opinion quickly and then succumb to confirmation bias, meaning they gather evidence that supports their opinion and ignore any evidence to the contrary. More often than not, they argue, ad nauseam, to support it. This is especially dangerous for leaders, as their under-thought-out ideas become the entire team’s strategy. Strong people let their thoughts marinate, because they know that initial reactions are driven by emotions. They give their thoughts time to develop and consider the possible consequences and counter-arguments. Then, they communicate their developed idea in the most effective way possible, taking into account the needs and opinions of their audience.

not letting go of mistakes. high SE people distance themselves from their mistakes, but they do so without forgetting them. By keeping their mistakes at a safe distance, yet still handy enough to refer to, they are able to adapt and adjust for future success. It takes refined self-awareness to walk this tightrope between dwelling and remembering. Dwelling too long on your mistakes makes you anxious, while forgetting about them completely makes you bound to repeat them. The key lies in your ability to transform failures into nuggets of improvement. This trains your selfsufficient muscle to pump your selfesteem up.

often feeling misunderstood. it’s hard to understand how you come across to others with low emotional intelligence. You feel misunderstood because you don’t deliver your message in a way that people can understand. Even with practice, high SE people know that they don’t communicate every idea perfectly. They catch on when people don’t understand what they are saying, adjust their approach, and re-communicate their idea in a way that can be understood.

not knowing your triggers. Everyone has triggers—situations and people that push their buttons and cause them to act impulsively. strong people study their triggers and use this knowledge to sidestep situations and people before they get the best of them.

not getting angry. Vulnerability is not about being nice; it’s about managing your emotions to achieve the best possible outcomes. Sometimes this means showing people that you’re upset, sad, or frustrated. Constantly masking your emotions with happiness and positivity isn’t genuine or productive. Emotionally intelligent people employ negative and positive emotions intentionally in the appropriate situations.

blaming other people for how they make you feel. Emotions come from within. It’s tempting to attribute how you feel to the actions of others, but you must take responsibility for your emotions. No one can make you feel anything that you don’t want to. Thinking otherwise only holds you back.

being easily offended. If you have a firm grasp of who you are, it’s difficult for someone to say or do something that gets your goat. high SE people are self-confident and open-minded, which create a pretty thick skin. You may even poke fun at yourself or let other people make jokes about you because you are able to mentally draw the line between humor and degradation.

As you train your brain by repeatedly practicing new intelligent behaviors, it builds the pathways needed to make them into habits. As your brain reinforces the use of these new behaviors, the connections supporting old, destructive behaviors die off. Before long, you begin responding to your surroundings better without even having to think about it.

on kids. The cerebral cortex is our rational, human brain, and the brain stem is, in the words of many scientists, our “reptilian” or lizard brain, the one that basically exists to keep us alive in times of threat. The limbic system functions as a connector, but remains primitive, often encouraging behaviors without giving the cortex time to process and encourage a different, frequently better course of action.

When we discipline, argue Siegel and Bryson, we often meet reactive, emotional limbic with limbic, or worse, the lizard brains take control in not just our child, who is raising hell and biting and hissing like a pissed off gecko, but in us as well, as we raise our voices and flail about trying to scare off the lizard by transforming into a bigger, meaner one. Will the Komodo dragon beat the gecko? In some ways, sure. But that little lizard learns one thing, and that is for it to win, it needs to grow stronger, get bigger, and bite harder. If, however, parents can channel their inner Steve Irwins and find ways to approach the lizard child with respect for how it is acting—which is ultimately in an adaptive and useful way to keep it alive in the face of danger and stress—then we might not only make contact with the creature, but teach it that it has nothing to fear so that it can back away, return to its cave, and let the less hissy, more rational kid come back out to play.