Martine CHAILLET (TBS 1991) - Emotional intelligence and its myths

15 March 2021 Careers

There are a lot of myths around Emotional Intelligence! We will explore 3 of them through 3 different articles. Ready to begin? Let’s explore the first one!

Myth #1: At work, we have to leave emotions at the entrance of the company!

It is a sentence I sometimes hear from my clients. First of all, this is simply impossible! Furthermore, emotions are like alert messages on your dashboard.

Imagine that you are driving a car. Suddenly, you have an alert message telling you that you will soon run out of gas. You have 3 solutions:

You can go to the gas station and refuel.
Or you can ignore the message.
Or break your dashboard.

But this will not solve the problem. Sooner or later, your car will stop. It is exactly the same thing with emotions.

Emotions give you information about your needs: anger gives you the information that you need compensation (sometimes symbolic), fear that you need security and reassurance, joy that your are on your way and sadness that you need to be welcomed.

You can use this information to take your needs into account or you can ignore this information. If somebody tells you something that hurts you, you can use the energy of anger either to speak with that person or at least express this emotion. Or you can deny that you are angry and act as if nothing happened. But the anger will remain somewhere and one day, it will explode… or implode.

As a conclusion

Emotions give you useful information about your state of being and your needs. You can use them or ignore them but you cannot leave them behind you! If you need some advice or support to decrypt, accept and use your emotions, do not hesitate to contact us.

Article written by Martine Chaillet, Professional Coach and member of our Mutual Support Services

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