Emotional Management

Introduction

If you go to the beach to enjoy a bit of surfing during your long-awaited weekend, and then you find yourself surrounded by sharks fighting for your life, that's when you will pray to have a healthy Emotional Management. 

This remarkable example is from the book Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves. Also, they describe our topic like "the ability to use awareness of your emotions to actively choose what you say and do", such as stop panicking and not being able to move during the situation with the sharks and instead being able to think and take decisions to save your life.

In this article we are going to study the topic from the point of view of living in a community, such as the Cortijo los Baños, the one that we have the pleasure to be volunteering in. This skill is one of the most important ones to be able to live surrounded by people, or even to work properly in a community.

Definitions

Emotional intelligence, that is the essence of emotional management, is composed of four skills: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management. Divided, as we can see into personal competence skills and social competence ones. Each of these can be widely studied, but we are going to give a general view. 

Broadly, we go from listening and understanding how we feel, what our emotions are communicating to us and why, being able to decide what to do with this information and know how to act, feeling, seeing and understanding what feels the people that surround us and be able to deal with that.

Interview to a community integrant

To get more awareness about the relation between emotional management and the community living lifestyle, we are going to share an interview we have been able to do to Gustavo Gomes, a young Portuguese that has been living here for more than 2 years.

Q: Thank you for letting us do this interview Gustavo, it is a pleasure to have you here with us.

G: I'm glad as well.

Q: We are centering our article on the importance of Emotional Management in a community like Cortijo los baños. Could you tell us your opinion about this topic?

G: Of course, it is a really important part. We are a group of a lot of personalities living together, with a lot of conflicts, personal and between us, also it can be difficult to fit in as individuals all the time… 

C: As we see it is a really important topic, but how do you manage to keep this ability well trained day by day? Do you use some specific tools or techniques?

G: Well, we consider it important to have an expert among us, also sometimes we attend or have different workshops about the topic. With these sources we manage to implement some tools, as can be “colistening”. And then we use them often, for example in the coordination reunions.

But most of the time we aren’t just that aware. The community just focuses mainly on general health, and believes that the emotional one will come along with it.

C: Most of us can´t help but ask ourselves if everyone in a community like this is conscious about this kind of personal growth and development. Are they?

G: Most of them are conscious, but the difficult part is to take action. It's really easy to just fall into old patterns. But the community is aware and it tries to remind individually in some situations.

C: We would like to know more about how you live the emotional management, maybe some personal experiences that you could share with us?

G: I think that in general I have good emotional management, it´s true that in the past I had some difficulties in the relationship with my parents, and that most of my management is based on my childhood.

Inside of the cotijo I hadn't personal conflicts, maybe partnerships, but that's it. All the time is more about taking decisions, people management, volunteers… 

C: Could you tell us how you manage all of these situations that arise?

G: I try to be thoughtful, also sport helps a lot in the management of my own emotions… And the rest is just about talking between us.

C: Finally, we wanted to ask, how would you create the perfect emotional management situation in a community?

G: You cannot simply ask for that to them. Everyone, we are just at our own point in the path of learning. We just need to assume that it is an internal process and we cannot blame the other person. We just need to be aware to communicate properly.

Personal reflection

Living here, with this huge amount of people, leads to way too many emotions, or at least, at the beginning with a group this big. It's not only about realizing them, understanding the reasons, accepting that they exist and dealing with the things that need to be done about it. It's about thinking about the others, respecting another point of view, even if it results to be just the opposite and accomplish being respectful and calm in any situation that can arise, and if not, be completely responsible about the consequences.

Because emotional intelligence is a responsibility, a skill you can, and need to improve. A duty that you need to respect if you want to live among others.

By Lev Shakhov. Volunteer ViTA Project, 2023.