Joe defines emotional intelligence not as reading the room — which the science shows is uncorrelated with reading yourself — but as the capacity to understand and fall in love with your own emotions. The more you welcome your emotions, the less you resist others’ emotions and the more you can see them and yourself clearly.
The hidden cost of avoiding emotions is to decision-making. Neurologically, removing the brain’s emotional center leaves people unable to decide anything — even what color pen to use — no matter how high their IQ. And since most of our decisions are made to feel better or avoid feeling worse, the emotions you won’t feel become the solutions you can’t reach.
“Until you can learn to enjoy and welcome all these emotions, you have a very limited amount of solutions that are available to you.”
If you’ll never risk feeling like a failure, you’ll never take a chance — never say hi at the bar, start the company, or ask for the raise. A single avoided emotion, which is just “a set of sensations that comes and goes,” can quietly close off whole regions of a life.
“I so much don’t want to feel just a single emotion, which is just a set of sensations that comes and goes.”
Related Concepts
- All decisions are emotional, never purely rational
- Suppressing emotions impairs decision making
- One negative emotional experience can close an entire channel of life
- Joy requires welcoming all emotions
- Willingness to feel any emotion is the key to clear decision-making
- Emotional avoidance creates blind spots in life
- Feeling your life produces clearer decisions than figuring it out
- Fear of consequences is really fear of emotional states