Would you trust the emotional guidance of a crying baby? Be guided by the emotional ramblings of a teenager? Or perhaps, accept the angry feelings of a partner or boss as having the final say in your choices? Would you trust highly emotional people to give you useful and sound advice to guide your life? When you are highly emotional, do you make your best decisions?
On 12th August, there was an article giving advice to Gen Z from the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence that stated: “But here’s the truth, especially in today’s fast-paced, high-stakes environments: emotions run the show.”
But here’s the real deal, while emotions do give us incredible power, they provide zero insight, guidance or direction. Emotions do not run the show, anymore than gasoline directs a car, batteries manage your phone, or rain chooses what gets wet. Emotions are power, not intelligence, yet even the most brilliant people still confuse, overlap and comingle emotional power with cognitive intelligence. Oh, the fun oxymoron of emotional intelligence.
Because emotions just give us power, “What sets successful professional apart isn’t that they don’t feel, it’s that they work with their emotions, not for them.” It’s important to recognise that “emotions affect performance and relationships, whether we acknowledge them or not. The good news? You can learn to manage them like any other skill.”
It is useful to learn emotion regulation skills to manage our emotional powers. Emotions are just a mindless, innate, power that we harness, much like using gas in a car or batteries in a phone. “It’s about developing emotion skills so your feelings fuel your performance instead of hijacking it.”
The chaos comes from believing that emotions are “data, helping you understand what matters, what’s working, and what’s not. But they’re not always instructions to act. The trick is knowing how to read the signal without blindly following it.”
The struggles and dysfunction of embracing emotional intelligence lies in the confusion of thinking power and intelligence can be the same thing. That sometimes gas can steer the car. A phone’s battery could play an app. That rain can intentionally chooses what gets wet or not. Because emotions are just mindless power, they can be harnessed to take us anywhere, “Anxiety can motivate preparation or cause micromanagement and burnout. Frustrations can help you speak up or shut down collaboration.”
So learning emotion regulation skills is the key to healthy and enjoyable living, relationships, and work . “Skill is what changes things.” To develop “the ability to pause, process, and choose a response that aligns with your goals and values….” It is important to see emotions are power, which allows you to “Give yourself and others permission to feel. There are no bad emotions!”
Wait! I’m confused. If “emotions run the show” and “There are no bad emotions” Then any and all emotions can run the show. Yet, “The trick is knowing how to read the signal without blindly following it.” and “It’s about developing emotion skills so your feelings fuel your performance instead of hijacking it.” Doesn’t that imply that emotions don’t really run the show and that following some emotions is bad? That you have to think and evaluate how to manage emotions?
And that is the chaos from believing the myth of emotional intelligence – emotions are good to follow unless they aren’t good to follow. That emotions are useful guides but only up to a certain point. Beyond that point, they are horrible guides. So, dealing with emotions it is important to develop and use your mindfulness and emotion regulation skills to manage your emotional powers. “Now it’s time to take the next step: emotional mastery.”
Emotional mastery is all about harnessing your emotional powers. “The research is clear: emotions aren’t the enemy of business – they’re the engine. High performers and high-performing organisation win not by ignoring emotions, but by managing them as strategically as budgets and timelines.“
Now, I have a confession to make, every quote used in this article for emotional power or against emotion intelligence was from the Yale Center of Emotional Intelligence article that I mentioned. This rather conflicting presentation of perspectives and insights is a common feature regarding the chaos of emotional intelligence. Every article and book I’ve ever read about emotional intelligence switches between how emotions are viewed and managed. Between emotions as power or intelligence. If they like the emotion, then emotional reasoning, which is a cognitive distortion, is used to justify their actions based on their emotions. Other times, emotions, thoughts, actions, memories, skills, abilities or experience, are combined, overlapped and comingled and just lumped together and labelled as “emotions”. In contrast, when they don’t like an emotion, then mindfulness and emotion regulation skills are used to manage and harness the emotional power.
It’s very confusing to think that power and intelligence are the same thing. Here’s another quote revealing how emotional power is blamed by combining with intelligence and actions. “The difference between a great day and a disastrous one often comes down to how you handle one difficult feeling.” Notice, it is not about how you feel. It is about how you handle your feelings; what you think about them and do with them. That is the chaos of emotional intelligence.
Recognising that emotions are just power brings a clarity and consistency of how all emotions can be viewed, validated, embraced, managed and harnessed. Emotions as power brings insights into seeing how emotions don’t run the show, they power the show. That emotions are neither good nor bad, but are the gas and engines that power our lives to drive anywhere we want to go. Understanding emotions as power reveals the importance of developing our emotion regulation skills. “In today’s workplace, emotion regulation isn’t a perk – it’s a cultural advantage and a performance multiplier.” To choose clarity over chaos, embrace your emotional powers.
Dane Jorento, MSW, LICSW is a speaker available for keynotes, seminars, and workshops on mental health, emotional well-being, trauma, ADHD, self-esteem, relationships, and sexual health. His expertise includes BCA Holistic Therapy, EMDR, and DBT approaches.
