What is Emotional Sensitivity?
When I was young I was emotionally sensitive and I used to gravitate towards other people who were emotionally sensitive because I thought that they would be kind and caring, but I learned that emotional sensitivity is not the same as emotional awareness and understanding, and empathy. What I am referring to here as emotional sensitivity is fear-based hyper-vigilance and habitually operating from the primal emotional part of your brain (your limbic system). People who are emotionally sensitive may seem emotionally aware because they express emotion readily, but their behaviour is being driven by subconscious reactionary needs and wounds.
Emotional Sensitivity vs Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence is more than just the ability to express emotion, it is the ability to regulate your emotions from a place of objective self-awareness. It is being able to recognise, understand and manage your own emotions, and also identify and show empathy for other people’s emotions.
To put it very simply:
Emotionally sensitive people react to life emotionally
Emotionally intelligent people have a self-awareness circuit-breaker and respond to life consciously
Just because someone is able to:
cry and express their feelings
be kind and caring
compromise and let things go
feel concerned that someone is angry or upset with them
Does not mean that they are emotionally intelligent.
What is Emotional Intelligence?
Characteristics of being emotionally intelligent include:
- Being able to step back from your thoughts, feelings and behaviour and self-reflect
- Taking responsibility for your own emotional responses
- Recognising when you are mentally or emotionally triggered by something and seeing that as information for you
- Forgiving yourself and others from a place of personal power
- Saying sorry when you have made a mistake that has affected someone else
- Being able to receive critical feedback without getting defensive
- Choosing healthy ways to express and release emotions
- Being able to allow other people to express uncomfortable emotions (in safe ways)
- Actively developing mental and emotional resilience through self-care and personal growth
- Being able to work collaboratively with other people
- Genuinely celebrating other people’s successes and your own
- Being guided by your own values not external validation
- Setting healthy personal boundaries and holding them even when other people become difficult about it
The Link Between Emotional Sensitivity and People Pleasing
Emotional sensitivity often leads to people pleasing because of a fear or conflict and a strong need for emotional reassurance from other people. It can cause you to worry excessively about other people becoming annoyed or disappointed with you because you don’t know how to effectively manage those emotions, leading to you constantly compromising and abandoning your own wants and needs to keep the peace. Emotionally sensitive people tend to operate from a wounded place of blame and shame (I intend no judgement here, remember, I used to be in this unresourceful state. My intention is to provide information that will lead to clarity and growth).
Developing emotional intelligence helps you to understand your own emotional needs and triggers, and how to manage your emotions in healthy ways which can lead to more inner security and resilience and less need to please others.
How Do You Develop Emotional Intelligence
The concept of emotional intelligence (EI) was largely developed by American psychologist and science journalist Daniel Goleman. He identified five key components of EI: empathy, effective communication and social skills, self-awareness, self regulation, and motivation. Using these five components as a framework let’s look at how you can develop your EI.
Self-awareness and Self-Regulation
I believe self-awareness comes first, and also that in many ways self-awareness and self-regulation go hand in hand. They are different things, but they are strongly interconnected. It is through recognising and understanding our own emotions more effectively that we can then identify and understand emotions in others. It is hard to feel empathy for someone else if you are avoidant or blocked in terms of feeling your own emotions. Emotion is a language that is largely expressed through the body. We feel emotions through sensory awareness of the physiological response they stimulate. For example, your heart might race, your shoulders may tighten, your brow may tense, your stomach may flutter, or your knees might go weak. Noticing what is happening in your body helps you to identify the signs of emotions in yourself and also in others, and it helps you to become comfortable with allowing the expression of emotions as a natural physical experience rather than attaching mental or ethical judgements to them. There are no bad emotions. There are only comfortable and uncomfortable emotions, and healthy and unhealthy ways to express them.
Give yourself time to self-reflect and to notice what is going on for you mentally and emotionally. There are lots of ways to do this so just find what works for you. For instance, you can journal, meditate, sit in nature or go for a walk by yourself. The key thing is to be in your own headspace without distractions. Self-reflection requires quiet time alone with your own thoughts.
Learn emotional vocabulary. We can understand and explain our experience much more easily when we have words for it. Listen to or read texts that describe the richness of human emotions in a variety of ways to increase your ability to perceive and express your emotional landscape.
Identify your triggers. You can be triggered emotionally by your own thoughts, or by what someone else says or does, or by an experience. Triggers occur when your mind associates a train of thought or current experience with a similar unpleasant, painful or scary experience you had in the past. Due to your brain making the connection it sounds a danger alarm which stimulates a stress response in you and a cascade of fearful thoughts and emotions. Developing emotional intelligence is learning to notice what is happening, taking a power pause (doing something physically to calm the stress response) and then more rationally reflecting on what is being triggered, and whether there is really anything to fear in the situation you are currently experiencing.
Empathy and Effective Communication and Social Skills
I think that effective communication and empathy are also closely intertwined. Empathy is having an understanding of where the other person is at. It is identifying and accepting what they are experiencing mentally, emotionally and physically at this point in time. Some of that you can pick up from visual clues. For example if they are smiling, they are probably feeling positive, and if they are talking fast and fidgeting, then they are likely feeling uncomfortable for some reason. To clarify these physical clues, we need good communication to check our assumptions and the two key components of good communication are asking effective questions and actively listening to understand.
One of the best ways to become better at communication is to learn to ask effective and empowering questions because this helps you to gain accurate information and it helps the person you are communicating with to feel seen and heard. Asking questions is also a great way to start a conversation with someone and to establish rapport. We can think of good communication as being a balanced and respectful exchange of ideas and information.
How to Communicate with Empathy and Emotional Intelligence
- Be Present: Direct your focus to the conversation and the person you are talking to, reduce distractions, and create time and space for a meaningful connection. If you cannot do that, then be honest with yourself and the other person and if necessary make another time to connect.
- Ask Open-Ended Questions: A great general open ended question to develop communication is: “Tell me more about that”. You can also ask questions focused on ideas around who, what, where, how, did, would, might, or can to create opening for more in depth responses rather than just yes or no answers.
- Observe: Notice the other person’s and your own body language and tone of voice as additional communication
- Allow pauses and space: Learn to see silent pauses as beneficial spaces for mental and emotional processing rather than as something to be feared and filled. Some people need quite a lot of time to process in order to express, or fully express, themselves. A slower pace is also calming for your nervous system. Try taking a full breath after the other person finishes speaking before you speak. This gives processing time, relaxes you, and can help prevent interrupting or speaking over the other person.
- Check they feel heard: When someone tells you a story it can feel tempting to respond with a story of your own that relates to what they have said. When you do that you shift the focus of the conversation from them to you and that can leave the other person feeling unacknowledged. Asking at least one question about what the other person has said gives them space to fully say their piece. A really good question to ask to help someone feel fully heard is: “what was important about that for you?” or “what does that mean to you?”You can also use a phrase like, “It sounds like your saying . . . is that right?” to reflect back or summarise what the person has said. This demonstrates to the speaker that they have been heard, and enables you to check that you have understood them correctly.
- Manage Your Own Response: Remember that it is not your job to save, correct or fix anyone else, or to solve all their problems. Your primary role in effective communication is to listen with curiosity and to clarify. If you do have an idea that you think would be helpful rather than saying “You should do this” you could frame it as a question like, “Have you thought about doing . . . “.
Motivation: Growth Mindset and Resilience
Motivation fits into emotional intelligence in terms of ongoing growth as a person and developing resilience around challenges and stress. One of the biggest aids to cultivating self-motivation is develop a growth mindset. Learn to see failure as feedback rather than as a final judgement. Open to see how obstacles could be opportunities. Live intentionally and consciously as the creator of your life. Take responsibility for and own your thoughts, decisions, feelings and actions. Understand that is all you have control over in life, but in taking ownership of that you step into your personal power.
Living Intentionally Through Emotional Intelligence
Many people assume that being emotionally sensitive means being emotionally intelligent, but the two are not the same. Emotional sensitivity is often driven by fear, hyper-vigilance, and unconscious emotional reactions, while emotional intelligence is the ability to understand, regulate, and respond to emotions with self-awareness and intention. Understanding the difference between emotional sensitivity and emotional intelligence can be life-changing, especially if you find yourself overwhelmed by emotions, caught in people-pleasing patterns, or constantly reacting rather than responding to life.
If you want to learn more about developing emotional intelligence and living life intentionally then you can read my book The Great Life Planner.
Aroha nui, much love
Janine
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