How Emotionally Intelligent People Deal with Opinions
Separate Fact from Fiction
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Opinions are not facts. Opinions are plentiful. Like other things, everyone has one. Opinions are easily owned and fueled by whatever the holder feels is appropriate.
Opinion, if repeated enough and constructed carefully, becomes a perceived “fact.”
What’s more, these opinions passed off as facts, are designed to stir emotions. Those presenting these ideas want to elicit an emotional response.
Citing the University of West Alabama: An emotional experience is comprised of three components: a subjective experience, a physiological response, and a behavioral or expressive response.
Does this sound familiar? It may also feel similar, but we cannot confuse emotions for feelings. The key for emotionally intelligent individuals is recognizing the response they are experiencing.
Emotional Recognition
Those pesky human emotions interfere with many things. I suspect many of us, myself included, wish we had a little more of Spock in us. An innate ability to suppress our emotions would do a great deal of good.
Or, let’s take the Star Trek reference one step further and think of how Lt. Commander Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation was able to turn his emotion chip on and off, (Star Trek: First Contact is still one of the best films in the franchise.) I digress.
All science fiction aside, employing our emotional intelligence gives us an advantage. This is how leaders and successful individuals get ahead.
They control their emotions. They employ their own “emotion chip.”
In our situation involving opinions, the shared opinion presented as fact is the subjective experience.
We then have our physiological responses such as increased hear rate, changes in breathing, and muscle tension. Whatever it may be. This is human. This is natural.
The difference for emotionally intelligent people comes at the end of the cycle: the behavioral or expressive response.
