Emotional Resilience – Emotional resilience is one’s ability to adapt to stressful situations or crises. The more emotionally resilient you are, the more able you are to bounce back and triumph over adversity. less emotionally resilient you are the more challenging it is to overcome stress and life changing events, no matter how big or small.
Wisdom – Wisdom is related to the qualities of possessing unbiased judgment, compassion, experiential self-knowledge, self-transcendence, and non-attachment, together with the virtues of ethics and thoughtfulness. Wisdom is one’s ability to use thought to think and act using one’s knowledge, experience, understanding, common sense, and insight.
Having the wisdom of how you are feeling helps you to converse and state exactly the feelings you are going through. Many of us often say, ‘I am ok. ‘I am fine’ I am good’. This may be because they do not know how to express how they are feeling because they do not have the knowledge of the words they can use to describe how they are feeling. By building on this knowledge, they can have a better understanding on how they are feeling at any given time about any event or occurrence.
With this knowledge and understanding, they have tools that build on their emotional resilience because, with that deeper knowledge, they can strengthen their adaptability to the situations and therefore allow a more positive impact so that they can bounce back better from the adversity.
However, it is important to mention that one’s common sense and insight is often overlooked when faced with a stressful situation because the body is concentrating more on the ‘Fight or Flight’ response.
Building on the knowledge of our Emotions
In order to strengthen our resilience and build on our knowledge of our emotions and feelings, we need to study the language, terminology and words ascertaining to emotions and feelings. Now I am not saying you have to sit there and eat the dictionary for your breakfast. There are many scholars out there that have done that for us.
Dr. Robert Plutchik, an American psychologist, created the emotions cone which further developed into the emotions wheel. He stated that there are 8 core emotions joy, fear, trust, surprise, sadness, anticipation, anger, and disgust. Interesting to note here that there are 4 polar opposite pairs within these core emotions. Joy is to sadness as trust is to disgust, as fear is to anger and anticipation is to surprise.
His emotions wheel first created in 1980 was further developed by Dr Willcox and was then known as the Feelings Wheel. It may astound you to know that there are about 34,000 emotions a human can feel. I have shown below the 2 different wheels so you can see how they have been developed.
You can click on the links to find out more
Dr Plutchik’s
Dr Willcox Feelings Wheel
Dr Plutchik’ theory shows that the 8 core emotions are either strengthened (go deeper) or weakened (go shallower) depending on whether you go closer to the centre of the wheel or closer to the outer of the wheel. The language used and the depth of the colour depict the strength or depth of the emotion or feeling.
If you want to know more about your emotions and where you are on the Emotions wheel, check out the quiz here
The Heart and the Brain and how they wise up to our emotions
You might want to use the words hearta nd mind here, the relationship between the two are paramount to understading one’s feelings and emotions. As some one who works from a very heart centred approach, I have studied this relationship. The heart, also known as the little brain, sends the signals to the brain which in turn ignites our thoughts on how we are feeling. It could be argued that many say it is the other wy around. Check out this presentation I put together to explain the relationship between the to.
Hello Brain I am Heart, Let’s Talk
Through developing our knowledge of this relationship gives us the wisdom to understand our feelings and emotions more deeply. Allowing us to process our feelings so that we can move away from the negatives and step forward into the positives.
I am currently undergoing more research into the Emotions Wheel of Dr Plutchiks so that I can include it in my HeartACT™ Approach, guiding, inspiring, focusing, and transforming Executive Career Women and Female Entrepreneurs to take back their control and live life on their own terms.
To find out how the HeartACT™ Approach works go here