Emotional Intelligence Essentials: Belonging and EQ

Belonging and EQ

Essential Emotional Intelligence Resources

Emotional intelligence can play a role in the “inner work” toward a just society where everyone can be a full and engaged participant. When people feel belonging, they can show up, bring their strengths, and cocreate great results.

This takes awareness, intentional choice, and delibrate action — partly it’s about practicalities, but a lot is about emotion. People FEEL belonging, and when they do, results improve. So, we need to grow and practice emotional intelligence to work on the feeling part.

Introduction: EQ & Belonging

There are systems in human societies that unfairly diminish certain groups. These have grown over centuries and some people are unaware of the oppression that these systems perpetuate. We are all operating within cultures and norms, laws and practices that contribute to inequity, and we won’t have widespread equity without changing these systems. To dismantle the systems, however, will take people. So we must start with the inner work, the “heart work” of equity — which includes learning to see all people (including ourselves) with compassion.

To have a more just and equitable worlds, we need ways of relating grounded in profound mutual respect. Equity means affording each person with the opportunity support they need — which will be different depending on their lived experiences. This requires moving away from a mechanistic view where people are interchangeable widgets — and away from zero-sum-game thinking founded in a fear of scarcity.

Since emotions fuel division and bias, could being smarter with feelings (practicing emotional intelligence) help us individually and collectively to build communities of equity?

Why is EQ relevant to Belonging?

To create a culture of mutual respect and belonging requires dismantling cultural and systemic structures that divide us by sustaining, and even exacerbating, prejudice, and by institutionalizing discrimination. Perpetuating these unjust systems diminishes all of us.. Yet how can we do this systemic work when we, ourselves, are products of unjust systems? There is an “inner work” to do; in one of the videos to the right, Kamilah Drummond-Forrester describes this as “reclaiming our humanity.”

Following the Six Seconds Model of Emotional Intelligence, the process might include:

Know Yourself: Tune in to be more aware of your own emotions and reactions. Noticing how your reactions are influenced by unjust norms and past experiences. Being curiously open to your own feelings as a source of insight.

Choose Yourself: Assess when your reactions are not equitable and life-sustaining. Then shifting from unconscious reaction to intentional response that is aligned with your core values.

Give Yourself: Connect beyond yourself to get out of an isolated, ego-based perspective. Increasing empathy for you and all of us so you can FEEL that we are in this together. Stepping forward on purpose.

Why is Belonging relevant to emotional intelligence?

Emotional intelligence means “being smarter with feelings.” It’s about accurately acquiring emotional data and using that to effectively solve the intrapersonal and interpersonal challenges we face. Social inequities (reinforced by systems that evolved under racism, sexism, ageism, etc), the emotional data we perceive is skewed by cultural biases and the social and cultural expectations of emotion regulation and expression.

If we want to be ACCURATE in understanding emotional data, we need to distinguish the useful information of emotion from the distorting effect of widely held assumptions & experiences. In other words, we can’t effectively grow EQ without addressing the distortion caused by inequity.

Free workshop kit

This kit offers a structure workshop to use the Beyond Allyship film to teach about allyship, and moving beyond “being an ally” into building community for equity.

Request your kit

Article: The Science of Unconscious Bias

An introduction to the science that confirms, “if you have a brain, you have bias,” and strategies for disrupting these biases

The Science of Unconscious Bias: What, Why, & How

Video: Exploring EMOTIONS on racism

Can emotional intelligence help end racism? We are joining together to share emotions on racial inequality and systemic injustice against Black people in the US and beyond. We invite members of the Six Seconds Emotional Intelligence Community and anyone to join us in this space for compassionate dialogue to explore the idea.

Video: Mental Health for a just & thriving future

How can we thrive and build justice through mental health? What are the social and emotional resources we ALL need to courageously step into difficult conversations about race, identity, and the world we want to co-create? What would it take for everyone to have the assets needed for emotional wellbeing — and could that coincide with an end to racism?

Video: We All Lead: HOW CAN EQ WIDEN THE “DRIVER SEAT” OF EDUCATION?

One of the central challenges in education is building alignment as a learning community — we need metaphorical maps, a GPS, and a car that will take all of a school’s stakeholders forward. To do so, we can re-imagine educational leadership as a collaborative endeavor.

Six Seconds’ Vision of Practicing Emotional Intelligence

Our vision is “a billion people practicing emotional intelligence,” and, at Six Seconds, we hope this can help end racism.

Our team understands that, “if you have a brain, you have bias.” Human brains are adapted to increase efficiency, and so we’re wired to categorize and judge. In a social context of intense stress, low trust, and polarization, bias accelerates into prejudice. And, humans have the capacity to learn and grow, so we are not prisoners of our neurobiology.

At Six Seconds, we believe that all change starts on the inside. One of our expectations for people who are part of the Six Seconds’ community is that each of us will do the work of growing and practicing emotional intelligence. As an organization, we will continue to learn how this practice includes the work of antiracism, and we expect every member of Six Seconds’ staff and community to grow the compassion and skills to cocreate communities of equity.