SKILL 4
Emotional Expression
In the earlier version of the EQ-i, the questions that guide exploration of the level of effectiveness in emotional expression were included in the skill of emotional-self awareness. However, they are in fact significantly different skills, and are much better represented in the 2.0 version. Whereas emotional awareness is about how sensitive we are to our emotional energy and how well we can recognize our emotions, emotional expression is a measure of how accurately and effectively we can communicate our feelings to others. In addition to being about as different as listening is from talking, there is also the need for a well-diversified emotional vocabulary that allows us to translate our experience from sensory data into verbal expression.
For instance, when team members rate their team’s emotional awareness with the TESI, part of what they are capturing is how well the individuals notice team communication behavior relative to expressing feelings. In order to do this effectively, people need to have enough feeling words at their disposal to be able to accurately differentiate the wide variety of emotional states that constitute team climate. This includes not only major differences such as enthusiasm versus discouragement, but degrees of intensity within a specific feeling as well. Are the people happy to be there or passionately committed to succeed? Are they worried that the beta test might need to be finished a little later, or concerned that the product will never perform as promised?
WHY SHOULD I CARE ABOUT EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVENESS?
Emotions express values. Our bodies don’t go to the trouble of producing an emotional response unless there’s something valuable in the environment we need to be aware of. It could be a negative value to be avoided at all costs or a positive value that we really want to take advantage of. It could be something that is blocking us from a goal we are deeply committed to achieve, indicating that we need to supercharge our efforts to overcome the obstruction. It could be an opportunity to give, to help another person or group meet significant challenges they face but are unable to achieve alone.
HOW CAN WE BUILD EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVENESS?
Increasing our emotional vocabulary is certainly one of the most important steps to increasing our emotional expressiveness. If we lack the words that are able to communicate the nuances of what we are feeling, it will be hard for others to consciously understand specifically what we are feeling. It is critical to recognize, however, that our nonverbal communication is telling them at every level whether we are happy or unhappy, whether we feel threatened or are threatening.
Increasing our emotional expressiveness requires the confidence that comes from self-regard and the courage that is fundamental to assertiveness, so improving those two skills may also be necessary if we are going to express our feelings more openly and authentically.
Expressing emotions effectively also depends on using our nonverbal expressions more intentionally. Our posture, tonality, facial expression, gestures, the volume and rhythm of our voice, and other nonverbals communicate over 90 percent of the messages we send. Words account for only about 7 percent. Because our nonverbal communication is predominantly unconscious, we may unintentionally communicate our own fear, anger, or judgment in ways that make us less influential instead of more effectively engaging the attention and cooperation of those around us.
When something matters to your clients, suggest they express it with respect rather than stuffing the emotions. Suggest that they:
- Notice how they are feeling and why and silently tell themselves.
- Take a deep breath and become calm.
- Tell others “I feel ___________ because ___________.”
- For a stretch goal, they can then reciprocate and explore how the others involved are feeling and why.
Desire, fear, anger, and altruism are the four main types of motivations available to us as humans. They are what move us to action. We move toward what we desire in order to get it; we move away from what we fear or dislike; we move against the objects, policies, and people who obstruct us from obtaining what we desire. When we are motivated by our altruistic emotions, we move toward the people and situations that we care about in order to give the emotional and physical resources we have and wish to share with others. Understanding the relationship between emotions and motivation can help us read others more accurately and send more intentional messages that are more easily understood.
STAR PERFORMERAlthough any number of poets could easily have been chosen as star performers in expressing emotion, we chose T.S. Eliot for his eloquent use of emotional expression to communicate vast insight about life’s most subtle mysteries through mere words. His artistry in stringing their cognitive, practical, rational meanings together in ways that reveal far more than words were ever commissioned to do is breathtaking. But as he himself ranted in East Coker from the Four Quartets (1943/1971) it is never easy.
But in addition to that patience and determined perseverance, he also knew how to apply the most rigorous self-discipline, also called impulse control in the language of emotional intelligence. Later, from East Coker he writes of the need to wait without hope or love as they would be for the wrong thing, but rather to have faith “so the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”
REEL PERFORMERMovies show lives of other people that we get to try on if we are brave enough to do so. They give us a front row seat on how others weave fate, relationships, choices, and consequences into the most successful and meaningful lives they can create. We get to peer into them in a voyeuristic manner that is impossible in “real life.” Often, it is just sensational, but in Jack Goes Boating, it is as healing as it is encouraging and instructive. This is a brilliant fear-defying smorgasbord of lessons in emotional expressiveness. In it, two sensitive adults who deeply long to connect, to know and be known, to love and be loved by another give it their very best shot—even though they have almost none of the skills necessary to do so.
Jack (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Connie (Amy Ryan) are both the kind of introverts who make us wonder how such socially unskillful people could ever manage to live, let alone stake claim to space on life’s canvas and slowly begin filling it with beauty until the boundaries are pushed back to reveal robust and heroic lives. Although awkward and clumsy and plagued with bad timing, they are refreshingly faithful to that fragile spark of love that might, on a very long shot, flame up for them. And in being faithful, they provide critical lessons in courage and honesty to the couple who introduced them and whose own relationship is being torn apart by the unskillful choices that they have made and left uncorrected. No one who is brave enough to love life can watch this without learning a great deal about the most intimate nuances of emotional expressiveness.