Chapter 8. Preventing Stressful Situations with Emotional Resilience

In this chapter, we will cover how to build emotional resilience to better cope with stress, anxiety, shame, guilt, depression, lack of support from family, friends, employers, the feeling of being overwhelmed, stressed out, depressed, and burnout. Emotional resilience, in the context of emotional intelligence, can help build and enhance new skills and abilities that help you to cope and even prevent some of these situations. It does not mean you will be free of anxiety, stress, or anger as these emotions can be useful. However, they can be frightening and overwhelming at times. Therefore, it is important to build good emotional resilience to help you in the moments you need it the most, to manage your emotional states. Therefore, we will learn about the five pillars of emotional resilience, listed as follows:

• First pillar: Stay calm, cool, and collected
• Second pillar: Control your emotions
• Third pillar: Create positive emotions...

What is emotional resilience?

Emotional resilience is the skill to adjust to change and move on, from negative or traumatic experiences, in a positive way. To keep a healthy balance between a tough head and a warm heart. As you build your emotional intelligence competencies and skills you are also building your emotional resilience, though a person with a high level of emotional intelligence still gets frustrated, angered, stressed, or anxious. The main difference is that a person with emotional resilience knows how to prevent and bounce back from those situations. Emotional resilience does not mean pushing your emotions down or away, or ignoring them altogether. It means acknowledging and managing them well. Your heart needs to stay open for you, so you can care for yourself in even the worst times. Before you delve into the five pillars of emotional resilience, I would like to share with you the best advice to be resilient:

• Being resilient is not blocking out your feelings with drugs, pretending...

The five pillars of emotional resilience

We are going to learn how to build our emotional resilience upon five emotional pillars so that we can endure the setbacks of life and work. The five pillars of emotional resilience are:

• First pillar: Stay calm, cool, and collected because when you apply your emotional intelligence skills to develop a sense of calm like this at work, emotional intelligence can enhance and increase your life and work satisfaction. You will no longer be buffeted by your environment and what happens to you. Instead, you will be able to take responsibility for your emotional reactions. Bliss!
• Second pillar: Control your emotions; emotional intelligence is about feeling your emotions, knowing they are there and why. Express them and move through them in a healthy way.
• Third pillar: Create positive emotions daily because happy workplaces benefit productivity, and boosts the sales, it is a great branding strategy, supplies lower staff turnover, boast creativity, lower the costs...

A special word to prevent burnout

Burnout is a state of emotional, mental, and physical exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress. Burnout is the outcome when you feel overwhelmed by work, emotionally drained, and unable to meet constant demands. You begin to lose motivation, interests as stress piles up. Most people are not aware that a burnout situation is more destructive to them that being overstressed. And a burnout is the outcome of being over-stressed for too long. Of course, to prevent a burnout situation first you need to know the symptoms of a burnout. But first let's learn the difference between stress and burnout:

First and foremost, burnout and stress are not the same thing, though burnout could be the outcome of a very stressful situation for too long time, without you taking care of yourself, like we have learnt in the five pillars of emotional resilience.

Stress, in general, denotes a sense of too much. Too many pressures, which demand too much of you physically,...

Summary

In this chapter, we have covered the five pillars of emotional resilience: stay calm, cool and collect (first pillar), calm down when strong emotions arise (second pillar), create positive emotions daily (third pillar), develop self-compassion (fourth pillar), be grateful (fifth pillar) to know how to build emotional resilience and cope with the stress, anxiety, shame, guilt, depression, lack of support from family, friends, employers, the feeling of being overwhelmed, stressed out, depressed and burnout.

You have learnt that emotional resilience is the skill to adjust to change and move on, from negative or traumatic experiences, in a positive way. To keep a healthy balance between a tough head and a warm heart. As you build your emotional intelligence competencies and skills you are also building your emotional resilience.

You have learnt that being emotionally resilient is not blocking out your feelings with drugs, pretending that everything is okay, when it is not or being too...