Insights Into Teens: Episode 161 ”Emotional Intelligence”

INTRO THEME]
[INTRODUCTIONS]
Insights Into Teens: Episode 161 “Emotional Intelligence”
My stable and mature co-host Madison Whalen

Summary
Similar to IQ, your “intellectual quotient” your emotional intelligence is a measure of how capable you are in handling your emotions. The difference between the two is that you can improve your emotional intelligence as you get older.
Today on Insights Into Teens we’re going to take a look at what Emotional Intelligence is, why it’s important and how to improve it.
But first I’d like to invite our listening and viewing audience to subscribe to the podcast.
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[TRANSITION]

[SEGMENT 1]

https://kidshealth.org/en/teens/eq.html#catbest-self
More Than One Kind of Intelligence
You may have heard people mention “IQ” when talking about intellect and how smart someone is.
IQ stands for “intellectual quotient.” It can help predict how well someone may do academically.
IQ is just one measure of our abilities, though.
There are many other kinds of intelligence in addition to intellect.
For example, spatial intelligence is the ability to think in 3D.
Musical intelligence is the ability to recognize rhythm, cadence, and tone.
Athletic, artistic, and mechanical abilities are other types of intelligence.
One important type of intelligence is emotional intelligence.

What Is Emotional Intelligence?
Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand, use, and manage our emotions.
Emotional intelligence is sometimes called EQ (or EI) for short.
Just as a high IQ can predict top test scores, a high EQ can predict success in social and emotional situations.
EQ helps us build strong relationships, make good decisions, and deal with difficult situations.
One way to think about EQ is that it’s part of being people-smart.
Understanding and getting along with people helps us be successful in almost any area of life.
In fact, some studies show that EQ is more important than IQ when it comes to doing well in school or being successful at work.
Some people have naturally good EQ skills.
Others need to work on them.
The good news is that everyone can get better.
Unlike IQ, people can actually improve their emotional intelligence — if they know what to do.

[AD1: SSE]

[SEGMENT 2]

Improving Your EQ

Emotional intelligence is a combination of several different skills:

Being Aware of Your Emotions
Most people feel many different emotions throughout the day.
Some feelings (like surprise) last just a few seconds.
Others may stay longer, creating a mood like happiness or sadness.
Being able to notice and accurately label these everyday feelings is the most basic of all the EQ skills.

Being aware of emotions
Simply noticing them as we feel them helps us manage our own emotions.
It also helps us understand how other people feel.
But some people might go through the entire day without really noticing their emotions.
Practice recognizing emotions as you feel them.
Label them in your mind (for example, by saying to yourself “I feel grateful,” “I feel frustrated,” etc.).
Make it a daily habit to be aware of your emotions.

Understanding How Others Feel and Why
People are naturally designed to try to understand others.
Part of EQ is being able to imagine how other people might feel in certain situations.
It is also about understanding why they feel the way they do.
Being able to imagine what emotions a person is likely to be feeling (even when you don’t actually know) is called empathy.
Empathy helps us care about others and build good friendships and relationships.
It guides us on what to say and how to behave around someone who is feeling strong emotions.

Managing Emotional Reactions
We all get angry.
We all have disappointments.
Often it’s important to express how you feel.
But managing your reaction means knowing when, where, and how to express yourself.
When you understand your emotions and know how to manage them, you can use self-control to hold a reaction if now is not the right time or place to express it.
Someone who has good EQ knows it can damage relationships to react to emotions in a way that’s disrespectful, too intense, too impulsive, or harmful.

Choosing Your Mood
Part of managing emotions is choosing our moods.
Moods are emotional states that last a bit.
We have the power to decide what mood is right for a situation, and then to get into that mood.
Choosing the right mood can help someone get motivated, concentrate on a task, or try again instead of giving up.
People with good EQ know that moods aren’t just things that happen to us.
We can control them by knowing which mood is best for a particular situation and how to get into that mood.

[AD2: ENTERTAINMENT]

[SEGMENT 3]

Emotional Work In Progress
Emotional intelligence is something that develops as we get older.
If it didn’t, all adults would act like little kids, expressing their emotions physically through stomping, crying, hitting, yelling, and losing control!
Some of the skills that make up emotional intelligence develop earlier.
They may seem easier:
For example, recognizing emotions seems easy once we know what to pay attention to.
But the EQ skill of managing emotional reactions and choosing a mood might seem harder to master.
That’s because the part of the brain that’s responsible for self-management continues to mature beyond our teen years.
But practice helps those brain pathways develop.
We can all work to build even stronger emotional intelligence skills just by recognizing what we feel, understanding how we got there, understanding how others feel and why, and putting our emotions into heartfelt words when we need to.

[TRANSITION]

[CLOSE]

Closing thoughts shoutouts

[OUTRO AND CREDITS]

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Email us at:
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Hi-res videos on Youtube:
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00:00:01:21 – 00:00:41:13
Michelle
Insightful podcasts by informative hosts, insights into things, a podcast network. Welcome to Insights into Teens, a podcast series exploring the issues and challenges of today’s youth. Your hosts are Joseph and Madison Whalen, a father and daughter team making their way through the challenges of.

00:00:41:13 – 00:00:50:16
Michelle
The teenage years.

00:00:51:13 – 00:01:04:23
Joseph
Welcome to Insights into Teens. This is episode 161 Emotional Intelligence. I’m your host, Joseph Whalen, and my stable, immature co-host, Madison Whalen.

00:01:04:28 – 00:01:06:02
Madison
Hi, everyone.

00:01:06:08 – 00:01:07:12
Joseph
How are you doing today, Maddy?

00:01:07:20 – 00:01:08:25
Madison
I’m all right. How about you?

00:01:09:07 – 00:01:13:24
Joseph
I’m doing okay. Nothing exciting to talk about this week, right?

00:01:14:20 – 00:01:18:06
Madison
No, I really think so. You know, I’ve been kind of regularly banged up.

00:01:18:06 – 00:01:20:00
Joseph
That big history project, right?

00:01:20:04 – 00:01:20:23
Madison
Well, you.

00:01:20:28 – 00:01:22:08
Joseph
Kind of had fun working on that.

00:01:23:10 – 00:01:25:17
Madison
Fun? Yeah. Stress? Yeah.

00:01:26:03 – 00:01:28:23
Joseph
You stressed early on, and then we. We tackled most of it.

00:01:29:06 – 00:01:29:18
Madison
Yeah.

00:01:30:05 – 00:01:31:18
Joseph
Anything else going on?

00:01:32:15 – 00:01:38:10
Madison
Um, not much. I had my. Our club meeting yesterday.

00:01:38:12 – 00:01:39:19
Joseph
Oh, that go.

00:01:39:19 – 00:01:46:04
Madison
Well, we’re going to be doing a project. Basically, graffiti name, art thing, sculpture.

00:01:46:09 – 00:01:50:07
Joseph
Somehow, that doesn’t seem like something the schools should be sponsoring, But that’s just me.

00:01:50:13 – 00:01:57:18
Madison
I mean, they’re trying to turn what she said, basically turning something illegal and making it legal or putting it in a format in which it would be legal.

00:01:58:14 – 00:02:23:26
Joseph
Okay, I guess that works, but that is not what we’re talking about today. Today we are talking about emotional intelligence. Everyone’s heard of your IQ, your intelligence quotient, which is really a measure of how intelligent or how smart you are. I guess similar to the IQ, your emotional intelligence is a measure of how capable you are of handling your emotions.

00:02:24:23 – 00:02:55:05
Joseph
The difference between the two is that you can improve your emotional intelligence as you get older. Now, it’s worth noting the next several podcasts we’ve got set up in series takes this concept and kind of expands on it more and shows you where we can go with emotional intelligence and the effect that it has. So today we’re just going to kind of introduce the concept of emotional intelligence and kind of talk about it at a high level.

00:02:55:05 – 00:03:21:02
Joseph
But we’ll get deeper into it in the next few podcast episodes that we’ve got lined up. But first, I would like to invite you to subscribe to the podcast. You can find audio versions of this podcast listed as insights into teens. You can find audio and video versions of all of our podcasts listed as insights into things pretty much anywhere you get a podcast, Apple, Spotify and so forth.

00:03:21:28 – 00:03:40:24
Joseph
I would also invite you to write in and give us your feedback. Tell us how we’re doing. You can email us your comments and insights into things dot com. You can hit us up on Twitter at insights, underscore things, or you can find links to all that or more on our website at WW w that insights into things dot com.

00:03:41:02 – 00:03:42:09
Joseph
Are we ready.

00:03:42:18 – 00:03:43:05
Madison
Sure.

00:03:43:20 – 00:03:45:01
Joseph
Wow that was definitive.

00:03:45:09 – 00:03:45:23
Madison
I know.

00:03:45:23 – 00:03:47:24
Joseph
Right. It’s usually not wishy washy like it is.

00:03:48:01 – 00:03:48:18
Madison
I know.

00:03:48:27 – 00:03:49:26
Joseph
All right, here we go.

00:03:55:26 – 00:04:20:15
Joseph
So our friends at Kids Health that work serve as our source for this episode. And most of the ones that we’ve got lined up here, let me say that there’s more than one kind of intelligence you may have heard of. People mention IQ when talking about intellect than how smart someone is. IQ, as we mentioned earlier, stands for intellect, intellectual quotient or not intelligence, which is what I said earlier.

00:04:21:01 – 00:04:51:01
Joseph
IntelliJ Actual quotient. It can help predict how well someone may do academically. But IQ is just one measure of our abilities. There are many other kinds of intelligence in addition to intellect. For example, spatial intelligence is the ability to think in three day musical intelligence as the ability to recognize rhythm, cadence and tone, athletic and artistic and mechanical abilities or other types of intelligence.

00:04:51:23 – 00:04:56:28
Joseph
But one important type of intelligence is emotional intelligence. One can tell us about that.

00:04:57:14 – 00:05:36:08
Madison
So emotional intelligence is the ability to understand, use and manage our emotions. Emotional intelligence is sometimes called IQ or even for short. Just as high IQ can predict top test scores, a high IQ can predict success in social and emotional situations. IQ helps us build strong relationships, make good decisions, and deal with difficult situations. One way to think about IQ is that it’s part of being people smart, understanding and getting along with people helps us be successful in almost any area of life.

00:05:36:20 – 00:05:57:17
Madison
In fact, some studies show that IQ is more important than IQ when it comes to doing well in school or being successful at work. Some people have naturally good IQ skills. Others need to work on them. The good news is that everyone can get better. Unlike IQ, people can actually improve their emotional intelligence if they know what to do.

00:05:58:06 – 00:06:02:29
Joseph
So had you ever heard of it, you or emotional intelligence before?

00:06:03:18 – 00:06:10:25
Madison
I don’t think I’ve really heard of it before. I guess I could kind of assume that it stood, but I really didn’t know about it.

00:06:11:20 – 00:06:39:19
Joseph
Yeah, like, I kind of know the concept of it. You know, some people can deal with their emotions better than others. I was never aware of the actual term or the concept or a lot of the details until I started doing the research. So based on the on the, let’s say, definition that we just heard there, do you think you have a high, low or medium E, Q or intelligence quotient?

00:06:39:24 – 00:06:43:01
Madison
I definitely don’t think it’s high.

00:06:43:15 – 00:06:44:21
Joseph
Okay. Why not?

00:06:46:14 – 00:07:06:07
Madison
Well, I’m not always that great in social situation. And in a lot of cases, I, I kind of have issues when it comes to different social situations. I don’t think I’m horrible at socializing cause I can still socialize and connect with people. It’s just I feel it’s harder for me than most people.

00:07:06:26 – 00:07:27:03
Joseph
Well, let me ask you this. Do you think you are well, say, emotionally aware or are you aware of the emotions that you experience in those situations and in other situations? Can you label them? Can you describe them? Can you understand those emotions? Maybe it’s better to look at it from that perspective.

00:07:29:23 – 00:07:53:16
Madison
That most of the time I can kind of understand what the emotions are and like kind of comprehend them. Other times I kind of just don’t know what I’m feeling and have a hard time kind of comprehending it. Sometimes that’s when somebody gives me a compliment. I kind of find it a little difficult to understand that, hey, they actually kind of like a part about you.

00:07:53:16 – 00:07:57:19
Madison
And I’m like, Really? I didn’t notice that somebody would notice that.

00:07:58:00 – 00:08:05:17
Joseph
Is that really an emotional reaction to it, or is that more a modesty and self image type thing, though?

00:08:06:06 – 00:08:23:24
Madison
I guess it can be more that way, but other times I can kind of still be confused when it comes to social situations and sometimes I can even call it confused. I just don’t know what I am feeling. I can’t really put a label on it sometimes.

00:08:24:16 – 00:08:52:03
Joseph
So we talked about your your history project, and in the early stages of it, you kind of got stressed out over it and we we kind of had to ground you a little bit and steer you in the right direction. When that happens, we tend to refer to situations like that as breakdowns, right? Mm hmm. When you have a breakdown like that where you kind of lose control of your emotions, are you aware of the emotions at that point in time and just struggle to control them?

00:08:52:03 – 00:09:00:07
Joseph
Or is it where you’re just overwhelmed by the emotions and can’t really understand what they are, where they’re coming from, or how to control them?

00:09:01:06 – 00:09:24:25
Madison
Yeah, I can honestly be. That’s normally when I feel confused about my emotions. Sometimes I can understand their direct cause and direct reason of what I’m feeling and exactly and understand what I am feeling. All the times I can get overwhelmed by the emotion. I can cry for absolutely no reason that I wouldn’t understand what the reason was, but I’m just crying.

00:09:24:25 – 00:09:25:28
Madison
I don’t really know what to say.

00:09:26:24 – 00:09:47:11
Joseph
So it sounds like you’re at least emotionally aware that you’re experiencing these. Is this is this something that will say, you know, they refer to it as a skill that can be improved. Is this something that you would be interested in improving or is it something that you just don’t feel the need or the desire to bother with?

00:09:48:05 – 00:10:00:20
Madison
Honestly, I would kind of look into fixing it cause I can be an emotional mess sometimes, and it’d be really nice to not have the constant breakdowns every other day or something similar to that.

00:10:01:18 – 00:10:43:07
Joseph
Okay. And I think that’s a fair point. So we’re going to take a quick break and we’re going to come back and we’re going to talk about some ways that we can improve our E to not equalizers our emotional quotient. We’ll be right back. For over seven years, the second Sith Empire has been the premier community guild in the online game, Star Wars, the Old Republic with hundreds of friendly and helpful active members, a weekly schedule of nightly events.

00:10:43:15 – 00:11:13:16
Joseph
Annual guild meet and greets and an active community both on the web and on Discord. The second Sith Empire is more than your typical gaming group. We’re family. Join us on the Star Forge server for nightly events such as operations, Flash Points, World Boss Funds, Star Wars, Trivia Guild, Lottery and much more. Visit us on the Web today.

00:11:14:12 – 00:11:20:25
Joseph
W w w start the second super and fire dot com.

00:11:26:14 – 00:11:55:12
Madison
Welcome back to insights into teens. Today we’re talking about emotional intelligence and now we’re going to talk about how to improve your IQ. Emotional intelligence is a combination of several different skills, some of them including being aware of your emotions. Most people feel many different emotions throughout the day. Some feelings like surprise lash, just a few seconds, others may stay longer, creating a mood like happiness or sadness.

00:11:56:05 – 00:12:03:03
Madison
Being able to notice and accurately label these everyday feelings is the most basic of all the IQ skills.

00:12:03:27 – 00:12:33:21
Joseph
Simply noticing them as we feel them helps us manage our own emotions. It also helps us understand how other people feel. But some people might go through their entire day without really noticing their emotions, practice recognizing emotions as you feel them. Label them in your mind. For example, by saying that yourself, I feel grateful or I feel frustrated and things like that make it a daily habit to be aware of your emotions.

00:12:34:18 – 00:13:00:10
Madison
Understanding how others feel and why is also an important skill. People are naturally designed to try to understand others. Part of IQ is being able to imagine how other people might feel in certain situations. It is also about understanding why they feel the way they do. Being able to imagine what emotions a person is likely to be feeling even when you don’t actually know, is called empathy.

00:13:00:27 – 00:13:10:26
Madison
Empathy helps us care about others and build good friendships and relationships. It guides us on what to say and how to behave around someone who is feeling strong emotions.

00:13:11:21 – 00:13:40:02
Joseph
Another thing is managing emotional reactions. We all get angry. I’m certainly guilty of it myself and my anger sometimes, especially when it’s technology related and inanimate objects can get the better of me. We all have disappointments, but it’s important to express how you feel. Never be afraid of your emotions. I think that’s really an important thing. Managing your reaction means knowing when, where and how to express yourself.

00:13:41:00 – 00:14:02:25
Joseph
When you understand your emotions and how to manage them. You can use self-control to hold or reaction if now’s not the right time or place to express it. Someone who has good IQ knows it can damage relationships to react to emotions in a way that’s disrespectful to and tends to impulsive or harmful.

00:14:03:22 – 00:14:30:01
Madison
And the final thing is choosing your mood. Part of managing emotions is choosing our moods. Moods are important. No side moods or emotional states that last a bit. We have the power to decide what mood is right for a situation and then get into that mood. Choosing the right mood can help someone get motivated, concentrate on a task, or try again instead of giving up.

00:14:30:20 – 00:14:41:08
Madison
People with good IQ know that moods aren’t just things that happen to us. We can control them by knowing which mood is best for a particular situation and how to get into that mood.

00:14:41:28 – 00:14:48:09
Joseph
So how good are you at labeling your emotions once you recognize them?

00:14:49:04 – 00:14:49:19
Michelle
Um.

00:14:50:09 – 00:15:11:07
Madison
I think that I can label my emotions to a certain extent. There’s sometimes I’m feeling a plethora of emotions and can feel kind of overwhelmed by them that I don’t really know what I’m feeling. It’s just inherently negative. And whenever that happens, like, like whenever you guys ask me what’s wrong, I just respond with, I don’t know.

00:15:12:06 – 00:15:23:19
Joseph
That’s an interesting way of saying it. Do you believe that emotions can be positive or negative? And if so, elaborate on that a little bit.

00:15:24:09 – 00:15:50:26
Madison
Yeah, I’d say so. Like, I mean, like a lot of them are can be positive, like being happy, being grateful. A lot of the stuff that kind of makes it feel better and then a lot of them can also be kind of negative, like feeling frustrated, feeling angry, feeling sad. I feel like there are a lot more negative emotions, or at least a lot more negative emotions that we can portray than there are positive.

00:15:51:25 – 00:16:12:00
Joseph
So yeah, and I think I might disagree with you there. I don’t think a notion emotions themselves are, to use your word, inherently negative or positive. Think of give me a negative emotion, anger, anger. All right. Show me. Give me an example of how anger is negative.

00:16:13:03 – 00:16:25:10
Madison
Well, it can cause you to kind of lose a lot of friendships, to get angry at something that can cause you to be violent. You can break something, you can harm somebody. You could harm a relationship and a relationship through anger.

00:16:25:19 – 00:16:49:27
Joseph
All right. So I’ll give you a positive way. Anger works if you see an injustice. Ah, you see someone who’s oppressed or you see someone who is bullied and you get angry over that, that could actually spur you to take positive action on that person’s behalf. So the anger, that point in time is not negative. The actions it’s making you angry or negative.

00:16:50:13 – 00:16:51:21
Joseph
Give me a positive emotion.

00:16:52:00 – 00:16:52:19
Madison
Happiness.

00:16:53:11 – 00:16:54:05
Joseph
Give me an example.

00:16:55:05 – 00:17:15:17
Madison
Basically, when you feel happy, you feel more positive, you are more outgoing. You can tend to have a nice good sense of your life. You, you know, feel joy at that moment. You see the world in a much better light than you would if you weren’t happy.

00:17:15:24 – 00:17:39:17
Joseph
Or positive things. Here’s a negative way that happiness can be bad. You’re watching the news and you see some unfortunate family out there whose house burned to the ground and they have nothing. And your immediate reaction is you’re happy that that wasn’t you? Should you be happy? It’s somebody else’s misfortune because it didn’t happen to you that would make that happiness a negative, wouldn’t it?

00:17:39:21 – 00:17:40:11
Madison
Fair enough.

00:17:40:22 – 00:18:06:02
Joseph
So it’s important to not ascribe positive or negative because that’s an intent. A positive or negative is really you’re ascribing intent to emotions and emotions have no intent. Emotions really are feelings that we get from outside stimuli. So I think it’s important probably to step away from that positive or negative, because you can turn each of those either way for all emotions that are out there.

00:18:06:29 – 00:18:25:01
Joseph
What about how others feel? You know, we talked about empathy in the past. How do you think you react? Do you do you detect do you sense how other people feel? Very well? Do you kind of feel their emotions? And how is it how do you feel that? What’s the effect?

00:18:25:23 – 00:18:47:02
Madison
Well, I can tend to understand if somebody is going through like something because I can pick up on their body language and kind of their reactions. Like whenever you or mommy are upset, I can kind of detect that by either you’re not really looking at me, you’re not really talking, you’re not you’re kind of using a different tone in your voice.

00:18:47:12 – 00:18:55:14
Madison
I can clearly tell that something is wrong and thus I can empathize with the emotions you might be experiencing, even if I don’t know it.

00:18:55:24 – 00:19:05:11
Joseph
It’s a very good, good expression of that. Do you think empathy is important and if you do, why is it important? If you don’t think it’s important, why don’t you think it’s important?

00:19:05:28 – 00:19:28:09
Madison
I do think empathy is important because kind of like how it it’s stated here is it can really help you bond with others. You have a better understanding of what other people go through, and thus you can help gain better connections with them. You can connect with them more, you can understand the situation more and hopefully they can learn to understand your situation too.

00:19:29:02 – 00:19:37:26
Joseph
Now, do you think the people that you surround yourself with tend to be empathetic and can read your emotions and respond to them in constructive ways?

00:19:39:01 – 00:20:04:06
Madison
Yeah, I say so. Some of my friends, whenever they’d I that those and all of the times, whenever I’m with my friends where like if I’m not feeling great on that day, they’re you know they’re sometimes they give me a hug if I’m willing to have one. And you know, even if they might give me advice that I don’t really feel like is necessary, I can at least appreciate that they’re letting me just let it out.

00:20:05:20 – 00:20:21:10
Joseph
Have you ever been around anyone who is empathetic in that? They can read your emotions, but they take that information and they use it in a negative way. Like, for instance, somebody manipulating you in your if you’re in certain emotional states.

00:20:22:04 – 00:20:29:03
Madison
Mm. I don’t know if I have a specific example specifically for that.

00:20:29:11 – 00:20:54:27
Joseph
Um, because there are situations that I’ve run into where people will sense that you’re vulnerable. Maybe you went through a breakup or maybe you had a death in the family, or maybe you had an argument with your parents or a friend, and they sense that you’re vulnerable and they try to take advantage of you because of that vulnerability, because your defenses are down at that point in time.

00:20:55:21 – 00:21:25:00
Joseph
This happens a lot with con artists. You’ve heard the term catfishing. That’s where that sort of thing tends to happen there. There are con artists who find people who are coming out of a rough relationship. They know that they’re lonely, they know they’re trying to find someone, and they’ll use that vulnerability that they’ve sensed empathically to manipulate them, to get them to give them money or do things that they wouldn’t normally do.

00:21:26:09 – 00:21:46:02
Joseph
So it’s important to be aware of people around you who are empathic and can understand your emotions because sometimes you might not want to show those emotions because it does make you vulnerable. But from a relationship standpoint, showing vulnerability kind of is unavoidable if you want to have close relationships with people.

00:21:46:07 – 00:21:46:17
Madison
Yeah.

00:21:47:23 – 00:21:56:16
Joseph
Let’s talk about emotional reactions. How good are you at controlling your emotional reactions? That’s me and not you. I’m sorry.

00:21:57:24 – 00:22:15:26
Madison
Well, in such in certain situations, when I know an emotional reaction would not be good. Yeah, I can manage it. I can normally, you know, contain myself at a point. I can contain myself that if, like I was mad at a friend or for I was mad in general, I wouldn’t lash out at my friend.

00:22:16:16 – 00:22:28:06
Joseph
If you sense empathically somebody is upset, does that influence how you react to their emotions?

00:22:28:06 – 00:22:46:06
Madison
Yeah, sometimes. Most of the time I kind of like try to be, you know, always friendly and try to have some sort of a sense of humor with them. But then I realize that they might be going through something. I kind of turn that off, turn that off, and kind of just make myself available to talk to them.

00:22:46:23 – 00:23:10:03
Joseph
Yeah. And it’s important to kind of know this is almost about situational awareness as well as emotional awareness. You know, if you know your friend is down in the dumps, they might not be willing to accept you joking around or something like that. Sometimes people just want to be miserable. So you kind of have to read that and react to it.

00:23:10:03 – 00:23:30:27
Joseph
If you can’t if you lack the emotional intelligence, because emotional intelligence isn’t just about your emotions, it’s about other people. Yeah. And if you can’t read somebody else’s emotional state, you lack the emotional intelligence to do that. You could interact with them in a way that is not going to help the situation.

00:23:31:05 – 00:23:31:14
Madison
Yeah.

00:23:32:08 – 00:24:04:08
Joseph
And then the last thing I wanted to touch on was moods. You know, some people wake up in a bad mood, they’re 4 to 5 days a week. I think I wake up in a bad mood these days. But, you know, when you wake up into a mood, it could be because of the way you feel, because of Haggard days gone, because of something that happened the day before, when you wake up in a bad mood or in a mood that that isn’t conducive to you interacting positively with people.

00:24:04:24 – 00:24:15:25
Joseph
Do you recognize that? And do you actively try to change that? Or is it just I can’t wait til those days are over type thing?

00:24:15:25 – 00:24:30:04
Madison
Well, I don’t say I’d change it. It’s just if I did wake up in a bad mood, I wouldn’t really say anything about it. I would just like, you know, silently hope the day be over. I won’t complain to anybody. I would probably just leave it to myself half the time.

00:24:30:14 – 00:24:39:22
Joseph
Okay. Why is that? Why don’t you want to actively make a change to that move?

00:24:39:22 – 00:24:48:18
Madison
I don’t know. I guess I just never really felt I had the capability to do it. It’s just like, okay, it’s going to be a bad day. Oh, well, I guess.

00:24:48:18 – 00:25:09:04
Joseph
Okay, I’ll give you an example. Yesterday was a I don’t say all. I’ll say it was a bad day, but I kind of was in a bad mood because of some interactions I had at work. And when I got home I was tired. I was hurting because of the weather. I was just frustrated and I just knew I was in a bad mood.

00:25:10:23 – 00:25:28:07
Joseph
But Mommy was in a good mood and you were a good mood. You needed my help. And it was one of those I really just wanted to come home, eat dinner, and just just go veg on the couch and be left alone. But I couldn’t do that because you had a project that you needed help with. So I knew I had to turn my mood around.

00:25:28:24 – 00:25:58:11
Joseph
So interacting with you helped me turn my mood around. That was why we sat for as long as we did to study, because I had to kind of get myself in the right mindset that, okay, we’re working on this project today, I need to overcome this. So I, I actively recognized the bad mood and knew that I had to change that in order to accomplish what we had to accomplish.

00:25:59:06 – 00:26:23:05
Joseph
And you were instrumental in helping me to change that mood. You know, your enthusiasm, your energy, all that helped me to change my mood so you can change your mood. If you don’t like the mood you’re having, you’re in a bad mood or you’re cranky or you’re whatever, you can change your mood. Is that something you would be interested in learning how to do?

00:26:24:06 – 00:26:36:09
Madison
I mean, yeah, I kind of realized that the reason I normally can’t change my mood is the fact that I constantly seem to have the feeling of just I just want to go home and sit alone and not deal with this.

00:26:36:09 – 00:26:55:20
Joseph
And I think that’s probably not the most constructive way to deal with it. Probably not. And that’s where we kind of have to work on this, because you situation here where we have to teach you how to do these things, you know, there’s lots of different ways to do it. You could be meditation, it could be reading, it could be just coming home and cuddling with the cat.

00:26:55:20 – 00:27:16:23
Joseph
Sometimes, you know, that helps to change your mood, You know, me coming home and hearing how Mommy’s Day was and how your day was that interacting. And it helps to re-energize me when I’ve had a bad mood. So there’s all kinds of different things. It’s really a matter of figuring out what does what works for you. So that’s certainly something that we can work on.

00:27:18:00 – 00:27:26:13
Joseph
We’re going to take another break. And when we come back, we’re going to talk about how emotion is a work in progress. We’ll be right back.

00:27:35:20 – 00:28:06:22
Michelle
Insights into entertainment, a podcast series taking a deeper look into entertainment and media. Our husband and wife team of pop culture fanatics are exploring all things from music and movies to television and fandom. We’ll look at the interesting and obscure entertainment news of the week. We’ll talk about theme park and pop culture news. We’ll give you the latest and greatest on pop culture conventions.

00:28:07:21 – 00:28:37:19
Michelle
We’ll give you a deep dive into Disney, Star Wars and much more. Check out our video episodes at YouTube.com, backslash insights into things, our audio episodes and podcast insights into entertainment dot com or check us out on the web at insights into things dot com.

00:28:38:00 – 00:29:06:28
Madison
Welcome back to Insights into Teens. Today we’re talking about emotional intelligence and now we’re going to talk about emotional work in progress. Emotional intelligence is something that develops as we get older. If it didn’t, all adults would act like little kids expressing their emotions physically through stopping, crying, hitting, yelling and losing control. Some of those skills that make up the emotional intelligence that make up emotional intelligence develop earlier.

00:29:06:28 – 00:29:34:09
Joseph
They may seem easier. For example, recognizing emotions seems easy once we know what to pay attention to, But the IQ skill of managing emotional reactions and choosing a mood might seem harder to master. That’s because the part of the brain that’s responsible for self management continues to mature beyond our teen years. But practice helps those brain pathways develop.

00:29:35:14 – 00:29:49:25
Madison
We can all work to build even stronger emotional intelligence skills just by recognizing what we feel, understanding how we got there, understanding how others feel and why, and putting our emotions into heartfelt words when we need to.

00:29:50:15 – 00:30:18:26
Joseph
So emotional intelligence because you can improve it. It’s kind of like a muscle, you know, you have to use it, you have to practice it, you have to work it out intellectually in order to improve these things. Do you find that in your day to day activities you have a chance or an opportunity to kind of practice some of these scenarios and some of these emotional control exercise and stuff?

00:30:18:26 – 00:30:40:18
Madison
Sometimes, like whenever my friends would be in a bit of a rough patch and whatever, I myself might be in a rough patch and know that I can’t like just out have outright outbursts. So occasionally, not as much as I probably should, but occasionally.

00:30:41:12 – 00:30:56:20
Joseph
Do you ever find yourself deliberately engaging in challenging situations so that you can improve, or are you more likely to kind of stay away from those things and stay in your comfort zone?

00:30:57:11 – 00:31:09:18
Madison
Probably stay in my comfort zone. I normally don’t like anything even more challenges onto myself and with outside forces kind of influencing all that, it’s kind of just, you know, I’d rather not.

00:31:10:12 – 00:31:21:22
Joseph
Are there people in your life that challenge you and force you to challenge yourself or are most people just kind of accepting for who you are and what you want to do?

00:31:22:25 – 00:31:48:00
Madison
Oh, I mean, sometimes there might be things like peer pressure, like my one of my friends would like, want me to, you know, hang out or like, do stuff with them and like, you know, that kind of can challenge, like, some of my social things. Mommy also tends to challenge myself all of that because, like, she wanted me to join the club.

00:31:48:00 – 00:31:56:10
Madison
She wants me to do more social things. So yeah, I’d say, like certain people still kind of challenge my comfort zone.

00:31:56:10 – 00:32:09:22
Joseph
Now. Do you think those challenges and those expectations are beneficial to you? Have you found them to be beneficial or have they been bothersome and have they been detrimental to you?

00:32:10:17 – 00:32:27:04
Madison
Most of the time they’ve been beneficial. I’ve gotten more social when it comes to clubs. I really enjoy the table top gaming one because I’ve actually made a decent amount of friends there. So I’d say that most of them have been beneficial.

00:32:27:10 – 00:32:53:29
Joseph
That’s good. I’m glad to hear that. I think Mommy was kind of right on par. They’re trying to get into some of those things, assuming you want to improve your emotional intelligence and your empathy and your emotion. Control all the stuff that we talked about today. Right now, what avenues do you have to pursue improvement in those areas that you’re aware of?

00:32:53:29 – 00:32:59:27
Joseph
What do you think you can do? Who can you turn to? Who can you ask questions of that type of thing.

00:33:00:20 – 00:33:16:07
Madison
And I guess I have my guns counselor that I see. So I suppose if I wanted to, I could go talk to her about it. So and then I guess just still involving myself, the clubs could also still help.

00:33:16:17 – 00:33:42:24
Joseph
Okay. Have you looked into any kind of counseling? I know we’ve talked about the benefits of counseling in the past. Have you looked into any kind of counseling? Maybe. Maybe any kind of online resources, even podcasts? You know, we’re not professionals, but what we do here, but we kind of try to keep things real and say legitimate sources about these things and kind of expand people’s knowledge.

00:33:43:09 – 00:33:51:11
Joseph
Is there anything else out there like that that you’ve used or that you’re even aware of that maybe you could recommend for someone else?

00:33:52:29 – 00:34:13:15
Madison
I’ve not really been able to look through that kind of stuff. Occasionally there’s like videos that I could relate to possibly, but most of them didn’t really revolve around the idea of emotional intelligence. I’ve kind of wanted to seek out like actual professional counseling, but really we haven’t really done that.

00:34:13:15 – 00:34:46:09
Joseph
So is there anything that you would caution people to stay away from? Are there any resources out there? Are there any and I don’t want to get into stereotyping, but is there any other is there a type of person out there or a type of activity that you would recommend stay away from social media. You know, stuff like that or anything like that that you would recommend to prevent the situation from getting worse?

00:34:46:09 – 00:35:15:07
Madison
I guess there’s like certain dating coaches I certainly wouldn’t recommend because they do not know how emotions work with other people. They do not understand empathy. They just see people or like the people they’re trying to date as objects almost. So I’d stay away from them because they have no idea what to say. So yeah, I would definitely recommend to, you know, not watch dating coaches most of the time or, I don’t know, like actually go to professionals.

00:35:15:07 – 00:35:19:11
Madison
If you’re going to worry about that stuff, don’t listen to the people online that do it half the time.

00:35:19:27 – 00:35:31:02
Joseph
Now I specifically call out social media. Have you are you involved in social media in any way that you could render an opinion on how it affects this type of thing?

00:35:32:07 – 00:35:58:20
Madison
Only thing that I really get from social media is really YouTube. I don’t really have anything else, but, you know, I can still become aware of that kind of stuff. I’m I like know kind of what to avoid. There’s like certain emotional coaches that really do not know what they’re doing. And I kind to caution people to stay away from cause again, they have no idea what they’re talking about.

00:35:58:20 – 00:36:04:12
Madison
They seem to give the exact wrong advice. If there was any good advice that they could give.

00:36:05:04 – 00:36:10:12
Joseph
I think that’s a fair point. I think there’s a lot of people out there I would recommend you stay away from when it comes to that stuff.

00:36:10:16 – 00:36:11:02
Madison
Yeah.

00:36:11:12 – 00:36:30:13
Joseph
Which is why, you know, we always offer the disclaimer that are not certified experts here. We we consult with with notable resources and we have a talk about it. You know, this is really what we try to do. We try to keep it real and have a discussion about what the experts are saying. I think that was all we had.

00:36:30:16 – 00:36:35:24
Joseph
We’re going to take a quick break, come back and we’ll get your closing thoughts and then we’ll finish up with the business of the podcast.

00:36:35:27 – 00:36:36:13
Madison
All ready.

00:36:36:18 – 00:36:43:17
Joseph
All right. Here we go.

00:36:43:17 – 00:37:05:27
Madison
All righty. So to everybody out there, I just wanted to say that, you know, take your IQ into perspective. IQ is something that a lot of people tend to talk about when it comes to people in your intelligence. But it’s also important to realize that there’s plenty of other different intelligence. Is it different types of intelligence out there?

00:37:06:16 – 00:37:20:28
Madison
And one of them, probably one notable ones being obviously emotional intelligence, know that it’s something that you can improve and it’s not something like IQ that you can improve. There’s always hope that you can get better with it.

00:37:21:12 – 00:37:24:10
Joseph
All right. Sage advice, as always.

00:37:24:16 – 00:37:25:07
Madison
Thank you.

00:37:25:27 – 00:37:34:10
Joseph
So this is was a relatively short podcast, but like I said, we’re going to be expounding on this over the course of the next, what, eight or nine podcast?

00:37:34:15 – 00:37:34:26
Madison
Yeah.

00:37:35:11 – 00:37:59:13
Joseph
Different aspects of it. So be sure to tune in to the next series of podcast we’ll be doing. Before we do go, though, I want to once again invite you to subscribe to the podcast. You can find audio versions of this podcast listed as insights in the teens. You can also find audio and video versions listed as insights into things.

00:38:00:00 – 00:38:19:29
Joseph
And we’re on Pandora, Castro, Stitcher or anywhere you get a podcast, I would invite you to write in and give us your feedback. Give us your suggestions for topics you’d like us to talk about or questions that you might have about the things we are talking about. You can email us at comments and insights into things that come.

00:38:20:14 – 00:38:42:12
Joseph
We do stream five days a week both on Twitch, twitch that twitch slash insights into things as well as on our YouTube channel at YouTube.com, slash insights into things where you can find all of our podcasts listed as well. You can also get us on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash insights into things podcast or links to all that.

00:38:42:12 – 00:38:49:07
Joseph
More on our official website at WW W dot insights and the things that come at you.

00:38:49:22 – 00:39:04:00
Madison
And don’t forget to check out our other two podcast insights and entertainment. I’m assuming you and Mommy are still doing it. So those are the hosts and insights and A Tomorrow are not really a monthly podcast usually hosted by you and my brother Sam with.

00:39:04:00 – 00:39:08:12
Joseph
The change a tagline to the not usually a monthly podcast. Now, because you say it so.

00:39:08:12 – 00:39:10:15
Madison
Often, not usually a monthly podcast.

00:39:10:15 – 00:39:15:28
Joseph
Not usually a monthly podcast. That’s it for us today. Another one of the books.

00:39:16:01 – 00:39:16:24
Madison
By Everyone.

00:39:16:26 – 00:39:43:10
Joseph
By.