Intelligence and emotion are often presented as mutually exclusive, but they don’t have to be. Emotional intelligence can help you develop better relationships, work harder, and manage your feelings. To hone it, recognise the value in your raw emotions.
Photo by bluemix
Brain Pickings presents an interesting point: sometimes our intellect can blind us to the wisdom of our emotions. As they put it, pain can put us in “raw, direct contact with the emotional truth of our being.” Citing the novelist Marcel Proust:
“I had believed that I was leaving nothing out of account, like a rigorous analyst; I had believed that I knew the state of my own heart…I had been mistaken in thinking that I could see clearly into my own heart. But this knowledge, which the shrewdest perceptions of the mind would not have given me, had now been brought to me, hard, glittering, strange, like a crystallised salt, by the abrupt reaction of pain.”
This isn’t to say you should let emotions cloud your better judgment and intellect. It simply recognises the wisdom in those emotions. We’ve discussed the power of emotional intelligence before, and it’s basically the ability to recognise and deal with your feelings. In other words, there’s value in your emotions, and pain is a powerful emotion can that can teach you a lot about yourself. For more on this idea, read the full post below.
Proust on Love and How Our Intellect Blinds Us to the Wisdom of the Heart [Brain Pickings]
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