Emotional Intelligence

Chapter 6Face it: Controlling our emotions and working with them

Now that we own who we are and what makes us ‘tick’, it's time to regulate our emotions and face it. This stage of The EI Rewiring Process is about facing our emotional triggers and our responses in different situations. It's about facing who we are and working with it rather than against it. It's about facing some of our greatest fears and learning to mitigate.

There's a scientific process that occurs in our emotional mind, and understanding how it works helps us develop resilience and techniques to react exactly in the way we want to, resulting in the best outcome for everyone.

Let's start by understanding our core emotions.

Core emotions

With some exceptions, research generally confirms there are between six and 12 core emotions. The number and names are not really relevant as long as we understand that there are core emotions and sub‐emotions. Each emotional feeling we have falls into one of these areas.

I tend to align to eight core emotions because I believe this provides a good balance. Author Pia Mellody lists the eight core emotions as fear, guilt, passion, shame, love, pain, joy and anger, as detailed in figure 1. I really love Pia's list because she not only lists the sub‐emotions for each core emotion, but she also includes the benefits that each emotion brings.

Figure 1: the y of our emotions