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Chapter 19 Improving our family emotional intelligence (2)
Those who can enjoy family fun are usually tolerant of those they love.Tolerance and patience are one of the greatest qualities of human beings. This is the code of emotional intelligence that can make you successful in all walks of life.

I once asked one of the most famous brokers in the insurance industry what is the secret of his being able to grow old with his wife, and he explained sincerely: "We can't be impatient with each other. We all have shortcomings, but when we love deeply, these shortcomings are insignificant. We can be patient and lenient with each other in a way that many couples cannot."

Psychologist Carl Roger once made such a wonderful analogy: "When I am walking on the beach watching the sunset, I can't ask: 'Please dye the right side a little orange.'" You dye less on the back. Is purple good?' Because I like the different natural scenery at sunset. Shouldn't we treat our loved ones the same way?"

Many happy families I have learned are composed of two people with completely different personalities. Both husband and wife have strong personalities, but they can tolerate each other and the negative stimulation brought by each other.This is the greatest secret of their happiness.

Raise Emotionally Intelligent Children
Now, with the improvement of most people's living standards, more and more attention is paid to children's education.This means that we pay attention to the cultivation of emotional intelligence in the process of parent-child education.However, parents' education to their children is often reflected in the cultivation of their IQ, while ignoring their emotional intelligence.

What you need to know is that every child is born with a similar IQ, and EQ is what really determines their future success.

So, how to cultivate and enhance the emotional intelligence of our children?There are several basic principles that are very critical.

You need to help your child identify their emotions

Your child comes back from school and tells you: "A classmate beat me at school today!" As a parent, what would your reaction be?

1. "You don't need to pay attention to such small things, child."

2. "What are you doing, why don't you hit him? You should hit him back immediately and let him know that you are not easy to bully!"

3. "I'm very busy, let's talk when I have time, don't bother your father."

4. "Are you wronged?" Now please tell me, as a competent parent, what will your answer be?What kind of attitude will you use to deal with this phenomenon?In our extensive training and surveys, more than 90% of adults have chosen the first three items, but the best answer should be the fourth item.

Why do you need to choose this way?Because one of the basic abilities of high emotional intelligence is awareness of one's own emotional state.Humans are rational animals, and the premise of rationality is the ability to control emotions.In other words, they must ensure that they quickly understand their current emotions.In such a situation, parents should first help their children identify the existing emotional state:
"You feel wronged, don't you?"

This will remind the child to observe his current state, and then he can proceed to follow-up processing to judge what choice he should make.

Parents who help their children identify their own emotional states have two major benefits.First of all, children can understand that what they have to deal with is their own emotions, not the "opponent" who hit them.In other words, the real thing to do now is not to find the other party to judge because you feel wronged, but to realize that what really troubles you is the feeling of wronged.How to adjust your emotions is the direction you should work hard.If you don't control your emotions and directly seek the other party's theory, it is easy to make wrong judgments and choices.Most of those young people with violent tendencies subtly formed the habit of never observing and controlling their emotions when they were young, thus training and strengthening their instinctive reactions.

Secondly, children can learn empathy from it.It hurts to be beaten, which means that if you hit someone, the other person will feel the same way.This deep emotional experience helps to improve children's ability to empathize.Therefore, from the perspective of family EQ education, this is a way to kill two birds with one stone.

After helping children identify emotions, parents can then ask: "Would you like to tell me what happened?" This is a very important way of parent-child communication. When parents learn to ask and listen, children will be willing. Speak up.If parents can cultivate good parent-child communication habits, the communication with each other will be unimpeded.

Help children develop their own management skills at the level of negative emotions

In some primary and secondary schools in the United States, teachers will include meditation exercises in the curriculum.The teacher will ask the children to choose a period of time to sit down in class, close their eyes, and sit quietly for 10 to 20 minutes.Studies have found that sitting meditation not only helps reduce a person's anxiety, but also strengthens his concentration and further improves his learning efficiency.Well-designed, child-friendly relaxation techniques like these, taught early on, can go a long way toward helping them cope with stress in the future.

I know a young mother in Washington who takes her middle school kids to yoga classes on weekends.She said that after the child entered middle school, his personality became very irritable.She happened to have the habit of doing yoga, so she took her children to learn yoga together.In the process of learning yoga, the child gradually learned the techniques of meditation and relaxation, and his temper became milder.

Her child is not prone to anger, negativity, and impulsiveness. Once such emotions arise, they can be adjusted quickly and their emotions appear to be very healthy.

Cultivating children's healthy interests and hobbies can also help them relieve stress, such as parents taking their children to participate in physical exercise, painting, singing, etc.These are all ways to manage negative emotions.Psychological research shows that doing exercise is one of the best ways to relieve stress. Continuous aerobic exercise for more than 20 minutes will promote the secretion of endorphins in the brain and play a role in relieving stress physiologically.

Help your child develop basic self-confidence

Confidence is the cornerstone of a person's emotional intelligence.Confident children will have good resistance to setbacks and stress, even in the face of malicious attacks from others, they can calmly deal with them.They will also appear to be relatively smooth in dealing with interpersonal relationships.

If parents want to cultivate their children's self-confidence, they must start with a correct evaluation of their children.

A large number of studies have shown that whether fathers and mothers have high or low evaluations of children, whether they are objective or exaggerated, have the most direct impact on their self-confidence.Therefore, if parents only criticize and rarely give praise, they will make children feel that they are not performing well, and they will feel inferior without knowing it.If we want to cultivate a child full of self-confidence, parents must discover more about their children's strengths and encourage them.

In the specific operation, I suggest that parents can sit down, write down the advantages that their children appreciate, keep these advantages in their hearts, and let their children read them.What I need to remind is that these advantages are not the results of comparing children with others, but the characteristics that children already possess.

For example, personality traits such as "very caring, good to small animals; very polite, will take the initiative to say hello to friends", rather than results based on comparisons such as "ranking the best every time".When you tell your child these specific advantages, he can experience very clear and real encouragement from it, and he will feel that his parents are not dealing with him, but that he is really great.If you want to praise your child's academic performance, you can say something like, "Study is very serious, responsible, and I will self-supervise my studies."In short, if parents encourage and affirm their children more, so that they have proper confidence in themselves, their emotional intelligence will be greatly improved.

Cultivate an optimistic and positive attitude in your child
An optimistic attitude is the most precious gift that parents give their children in their life.Optimism comes from a positive outlook, and as long as children have a positive outlook on themselves, they will be optimistic about the future.It's easy to say, but in actual implementation, we need to come up with effective methods.That is, you have to make targeted plans based on your child's behavior to make him truly positive and optimistic.

One of the important manifestations of an optimistic child is that he knows how to think positively about things, can see the positive side of things, and is not easily swayed by negative information.

I know a friend's child in China who is doing very well in this regard.Once, the teacher criticized his historical achievements in public.In such a situation, most children usually feel ashamed or even depressed, which will affect their future study.Instead of doing this, he quickly adjusted his mentality.

After returning home from school, he smiled and said to his mother: "Fortunately, what the teacher criticized was my worst subject. If my best subject is still criticized by him, then I will be even worse." It is a very rare positive thinking ability.Children have this ability, but also have the characteristics of optimism.A child with this ability knows how to see the advantages of things in any environment, avoids undue interference of negative emotions, and thus finds motivation to motivate himself.

In order to help children see more of their own strengths, parents should often use positive questions to inspire children to think, for example: "Hey, baby, how is this new classmate you met today? What do you think are his strengths?" You will judge from a positive perspective, find out where you should improve, or have confidence in some of your own advantages.

(End of this chapter)