You may be considering avoiding a negative situation so you just don’t have to deal with it. Sounds good, right? I don’t recommend it. Here’s why.
Dr Noam Shpancer, from Insight Therapy, says. “Avoiding a negative emotion buys you short-term gain at the price of long term pain.”
Negative emotions will arise when it’s time to enter a negative or difficult situation. That’s normal, and to expect otherwise from yourself is being unrealistic.
If you want to be better equipped to handle negative situations and circumstances, then it’s time to develop your emotional intelligence.
Simply put, emotional intelligence is the ability to be aware of, express, and control your emotions and to handle interpersonal encounters and relationships with good judgement as well as appropriate empathy.
According to Daniel Goleman, whose groundbreaking work on emotional intelligence is lauded around the world, “Research shows that for jobs of all kinds, emotional intelligence is twice as important an ingredient of outstanding performance as cognitive ability and technical skill combined.”
That means it doesn’t matter how “smart” you are or how many technical skills you possess, your emotional intelligence level will drive your success. That’s particularly true in handling negative situations.
Goleman also says, “emotional intelligence emerges as a much stronger predictor of who will be most successful, because it is how we handle ourselves in our relationships that determines how well we do.”
Clearly, developing a strong sense of emotional intelligence is paramount to excelling in handling both negative situations and negative people.
I highly recommend Daniel Goleman’s book, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, as a great place start.