Emotional intelligence is the secret sauce to getting ahead, both at work and in life. Even if it doesn’t come naturally, having explicit conversations about feelings can help us understand each other. In fact, most of us are taught that the very first step we should take during a conflict is to tell people how they made us feel.
But as a social psychologist who’s spent years leveraging science to help people solve interpersonal conflicts, I know that emotional intelligence isn’t just about being good at expressing and reading emotions, it’s also about knowing when to talk about them.
And sometimes the smartest thing we can do is to stop diving right in to tell someone how they made us feel. Here’s why.
We tend to skip the step where we talk about whether the event even happened. It feels silly and obvious. Of course Tom shut you down during that meeting, which made you feel disrespected. And Kate obviously singled you out by not inviting you to that party, which made you feel ostracized.
But assuming a shared understanding of these events might be a bigger leap than you think it is. Maybe Tom noticed the group was still at an impasse with three minutes to go. If he didn’t interject, everyone would disperse with no decision made. And Kate left a lot of people out of her invite list, not just you.
