Emotional Unintelligence (EU)
By Harry Petsanis and Donna McCance
Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize, understand and control one’s own emotions. It is managing and disciplining yourself through emotional awareness, allowing logic to guide your thoughts, words, and choices even in the most extreme emotional situations. Emotional intelligence is also identifying the emotions in others and reacting logically. Emotional unintelligence (EU) is the opposite of emotional intelligence.
Emotionally unintelligent people are always in a heightened emotional state, so when they hear things, they immediately take it to the highest level of emotions, like a car revving in neutral at 200 mph. As soon as they allow something to set them off, which is mostly everything, they immediately slam the car into drive. They’re also like a time bomb ready to explode at any second.
Emotionally unintelligent people are insecure, and insecure people are unstable. They live in a constant state of anxiety and uncertainty where fear and doubt creep into every thought, word, and choice. This instability is what doesn’t allow them to create a foundation that they can build upon in a positive way because they are constantly changing directions based on their emotional reactions, like a leaf in the wind.
When someone is insecure, there's nothing you can say or do to alleviate that insecurity, although they will come to you with that impossible goal in mind. The more you try to help them, the more time you’re wasting because 5 minutes later, they’re still insecure.
Self-awareness is the ability to look inward at yourself objectively to evaluate and understand your feelings, character traits, desires, and how you relate to others. In order to be self-aware, you need to make a conscious effort to know yourself.
If someone tries to help a person by pointing out their insecurity, it often exasperates their emotional unintelligence even more. Being around an insecure person is draining because you spend most of your time trying to calm them down to ease their insecurities as they become easily agitated and angry.
Even if a person is aware that they are insecure, it means nothing if they’re not willing to follow their awareness up with action. They don’t choose to solve it on their own, they come to you for a quick fix. Most people try to hide their insecurities by guarding themselves psychologically because they don’t want a social stigma attached to them, viewing being called insecure as one of the worst personal insults anyone could say about them.
There isn’t one thing in life that matters if it’s not followed by action. Inaction is an action. Confronting someone is an action and walking away from them is an action. Words mean nothing without action. Making decisions about what we will choose to do is an action. Deciding not to do something is an action, because it’s a choice and making a choice is an action. Everything we do or don’t do is a decision from which we make our choices.
Insecure people shoot down every single thing that’s told to them about them that’s truthful because they feel it doesn’t reflect well on them. Therefore, they do not take action to improve themselves, because they don’t want their insecurity (which they think they are hiding) brought to the forefront.
Insecure people are confused about their place in life. They have a void within them that they keep looking for someone else or something else to fill externally.
A void can be caused by many things, such as too much of something, or not enough of something. It can be caused by a combination of upbringing and human nature. Whatever the void, it needs to be identified. That void is the root of insecurity. The question should not be “how can I fill it,” the question should be “how can I identify it and eliminate it.”
Insecure people need to develop the skill set to self-evaluate, which is a skill they can learn from the right individual. However, that individual cannot self-evaluate for them. The goal is to help people learn to help themselves to improve from within, not from external sources.
There are many steps an insecure person can take as temporary solutions to their emotional unintelligence and low self-esteem, such as staying around positive people, focusing on their own self-worth, stepping away from negative situations, however, these steps are only temporary. Until the void within that person is addressed, these actions are only band aids which do not resolve the main issue.
In order for a life-altering change, a person must acknowledge first and foremost that the way they are doing things and the way they are thinking, isn’t working. The next step is to seek help from a professional who thinks in a different way to help them learn to identify and accept the internal flaw that is bleeding into everything in their lives and how they can change it.
And remember…
About the Authors
Harry Petsanis is a philosopher of human nature, mindset specialist, and lifelong fitness and wellness advisor. He is a writer and author, with three published books: “The Truth is A Lie,” “The Logical Path To Life,” and "Knowing Me from A to Z, A Child's Mindset," which he co-authored with Donna McCance, M.Ed.. Harry has a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism. He has an intense passion for psychology and the human condition.
Donna McCance, M.Ed. is a business administrator, writer, author, licensed teacher and principal/vice principal with over 20 years experience teaching in elementary education and educational leadership. She has a Masters in Education, Masters in Human Services Management, Bachelors in Business Administration and Associates in Business Administration.
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The Truth is A Lie" and "The Logical Path To Life"
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to order Harry Petsanis's and Donna McCance's newly published book
"Knowing Me From A to Z, A Child's Mindset"
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