SHOW NOTES:

EMOTIONS

If only they didn't always get in the way. This fortnight, we delve into our journeys unpacking the feel of life and exploring the clarity, meaning and direction our emotions can provide when we learn to cooperate with them.

"EQ vs IQ" - There is real value in our emotions. They need not merely be the recoil against life that we often give them credit for, if we can learn to read and understand them in ourselves and others, they can provide us with the ultimate clarity, meaning and direction. Ultimately, this requires us to develop our EQ - our emotional intelligence.

- (00:02:53)

"Resilience isn't feeling less emotion, it is feeling the emotion and just knowing what to do with it" - For many of us as students, our emotional development has only been a journey a handful of years long. It is very easy to yearn for the days where everything was easier, and nothing affected us as much. Our emotions cannot go away however, and this should not be our ideal for resilience.

- (00:08:36)

"Personal politics and emotional significance" - It is the relationship we have with our emotions that defines how our life feels.

- (00:13:35)

"Expression, emotional silence and perspectives" - When we adopt the councillor’s role, we often yield our role as an expressive mouth to be the set of ears others need us to be. This can lead us to sitting on this pile of our own problems, reflecting that the struggles shared with us pales in comparison to the severity of our own. What we often forget is that people are unlikely to share their deepest and darkest problems, they will often only share the ones that you can help with or that they are comfortable with you knowing.

- (00:17:17)

"These aren't obstacles, these aren't enemies" - Emotions aren't something to circumnavigate, they are something to work through, not run through, but to sit with slowly.

- (00:23:39)

"When it comes to emotions, things, for me, settle rather than are resolved, and it is once things have settled that you can see where you need to go" - Our emotions have a habit of presenting themselves in obscure ways, but it is the EQ - our emotional literacy and intelligence- which enables us to decode it and which enables our emotions to heal us.

- (00:25:57)

"We have these [emotional] feeders the whole time" - Our emotions direct us in the most obscure of ways, that may not be the 'this is not your path' we are looking for but rather a 'I have woken up in a bad mood', 'I have to revise again', 'I am inclined to be angry and shout at this person' or 'I am inclined to judge'. It is once we have invited it into the room and things have settled without us trying to alter or suppress them that we can take heed, decipher and redirect.

- (00:27:18)

"Is my emotional response in proportion to the severity of the situation?" - It is apparent how too large an emotional response can be unwarranted and destructive, however, contrary to the agendas of many of our coping mechanisms, too little of a response can be just as dangerous.

- (00:33:51)

"We need to dissipate our emotional energy" - A lot of our emotions are suppressed due to us deeming them morally unvirtuous. However, if not used to heal us, that emotional energy will harm us, it is up to us to define how we seek to release that pressure.

- (00:39:37)

"When it comes to our emotions, we are judge jury and executioner" - In how we process what is going on, we evaluate and we react, our emotional intelligence lends itself consulting those to the correct degree. We must ensure we have the full picture, are receptive to what actually is going on, and respond to the correct degree, to do this, we cannot suppress our emotional responses, but we must judge constructively.

- (00:50:47)