How do I embody EQ?

Dear EQuipped Leaders,

Hi! How’s your spring going? What’s the weather like within you?

I woke up this morning and smiled when I remembered I got to write to you today. I’m typically pretty grumble-y first thing in the morning, but I think these breathing mantras are working for me. These ancient mindfulness practices might be on to something!

Today, I want to talk about emotional intelligence in real life.

What does emotional intelligence look like in your life, your story, your body today?

Something I’ve been learning (the hard way) is that emotional intelligence goes hand in hand with body awareness and acceptance.

This was bad news bears for me because I’ve spent a lot of time and energy pretending I don’t have a body.

It served me well in school and work to ignore my body. It did not serve me well in life.

I do have a body, and it’s been through a lot. I’m slowly learning to pay better attention to it, to me. To grow my self-awareness. To look inward and tend to what’s happening with me, gently.

I’ve been studying emotional intelligence since I was in my early 20’s. I diligently read Daniel Goleman and gobbled up anything I could on the subject throughout my early teaching career. But I was studying EQ, I wasn’t embodying EQ or applying EQ to my life. I would have to be aware of myself and accepting of myself to do that.

I’m doing a lot of good work around that now. I feel smiley and proud of the emotional work I’m doing.

I think something that makes this kind of work tricky is that EQ looks different in different people. This was incredibly disorienting for me. I can tend towards black and white thinking: those are good qualities and these are bad qualities. That’s a healthy person, and that’s an unhealthy person.

Unfortunately, EQ requires a lot more nuance. I guess that’s why self-awareness is really the first step to applying the SEL concepts to your life. Only I can be aware of myself. Only I have been in here for the full journey. And my body, story, and life are different from others. I can look to them as examples for inspiration, but I can’t copy other people’s paths. Their path isn’t my path. Their work isn’t my work.

I can learn to communicate my needs and feelings, so my dream team can help me and love me. But only I can offer myself true acceptance. Others can teach me about EQ, but only I can apply it to my life. Only I can truly embody it. Only I can do my emotional work.

When I see educators doing their own emotional work, I feel so inspired. I was just in a book club call with an elementary school, and the principal was incredibly brave and vulnerable with her faculty. She wasn’t just preaching how they should be applying EQ in their classrooms, she was embodying EQ for herself with her faculty in real time. She was sharing her struggles and exposing her humanity. She was really leading by example. It was powerful to witness.

When I was teaching, anytime I learned something fascinating, my mind would jump to how I could turn it into a google slide to share with my students. I jumped straight to my students without even considering myself. What do I need to learn from this? How can I embody this? It was so much easier to look at my students and what I thought they should be doing instead of myself.

I thought what I said and did was all that mattered in my classroom. I didn’t realize what mattered most was who I was being. How I carried myself, my body, my story. How I cared for myself and others. I thought as long as I said the right words and completed the right tasks, that was all that mattered. What I felt, thought, how I treated myself didn’t really count.

When we work with educators, we first try to nurture them and their EQ. We’re coming together over the students’ emotional needs, but really we need to first address the adults’ emotional needs:

When I was teaching and people would preach about the importance of “self-care” to me in PD or inservice, I would roll my eyes. “Self-care” that’s for other people. I don’t need that. I don’t have needs. I’m selfless. Underlying these thoughts was a strong streak of self-righteousness: I’m better than everyone else. Stronger. People who need self-care are weak.

Yikes.

I didn’t realize that having a healthy self would serve my students much better than my delusional goal of selflessness.

If I could go back and talk to baby teacher me, I’d tell her to get the emotional support she needs. To have a self, to take up space, to step into her own. To embody all she has learned.

I’m trying to do that now.

It’s okay for me to have this body I have. I’m no longer ashamed of it. It’s okay for me to have the story I have. I’m no longer denying what has happened. It’s okay for me to have the life that I have. It’s not perfect, but it is beautiful. And I vow to live it deeply.

Where does this land for you today? How do you want to embody EQ in a way that only you can?

Better EQuipped Together, Elizabeth