Life doesn’t always go as we think. The unpredictability of events is an integral part of being in the world and knowing how to manage them is a determining factor that distinguishes successful people from those who surrender easily. Overcoming difficulties and injustices is an important sign of determination and resilience and it’s evidence of high emotional intelligence. Yes, because going beyond an injustice or an unexpected event is not just a matter of cold planning of the next steps or rational analysis of the facts: first of all, it means knowing how to manage our emotions appropriately.
Receiving and making good use of the emotions we experience in front of life events is the most effective measure of our personal success. Our success in life is not given by coldly scientific factors such as the intellectual quotient, but it’s driven mainly by our emotional intelligence. The ability to not succumb to emotions is what allows us not to give up when we feel frustrated or sad, to go ahead and not forget our medium and long term goals. It allows us to be constant and effective in front of adversities. And unlike logical intelligence, emotional intelligence is much easier to train and increase with experience, therefore it represents a fundamental tool on which we act to improve the quality of our life.
Let’s see together a couple of effective suggestions of general validity to manage injustices and unexpected events. When we experience an unpleasant event that has negative and unfair effect on us, two are the emotions that we mainly feel:
- Sadness: it is natural to be sad if someone does something wrong to us or if the fortuitous cases of life make it difficult for us to achieve our goals. Sadness is the emotion that allows us to focus on ourselves, redo the point of the situation and regain control and self-esteem, temporarily putting us “on pause” to better listen to what we have inside. In front of an injustice, for example, it helps us to understand if we may have been a direct or indirect cause of it and if there is something that we can change in ourselves to prevent it from happening again.
- Anger: being treated unfairly makes us angry, it’s completely natural. Anger is a normal emotion for our functioning and, if managed correctly, it is useful to get us out of moments of difficulty. Anger gives us the energy to take action, the determination to change things, if necessary to rebel. It is the driving force that move us from the current situation to a new one, with the aim of fixing things that didn’t work.
So how do we react when we suffer an injustice or come across an unexpected event that we didn’t deserve? The secret is to allow both the above emotions, sadness and anger, to coexist in the right balance within us, because we need both. If we let sadness expand without limits and leave no room for anger, we will end up getting closer to depression and we will not have the strength to get out of it alone. If we let the anger explode and we won’t allow the sadness to stop and listen carefully, we will move on too quickly and the reaction will not be effective.
If we see in a balanced way anger and sadness, we will be able to take the best of both. Thanks to sadness we will have time to understand what we want and what we can change within ourselves to get closer to our goal, whereas from anger we will take the necessary energy to get out from the shell at the right time and go back to fight. The most important thing is to be balanced, recognize every emotion we feel, accept it with indulgence and allow it to exist within us as long as it makes our action effective. Excess is always dangerous, balance is what determines our success.
It is a balanced and effective way of managing difficult moments o four lives. It may take a little initial effort to develop the ability to react automatically in the good way, but once you reach that level of emotional intelligence, it will help you in any life situation.
This article was translates from here by Zulfee Akhter
