Why Emotional Intelligence Is Crucial For Creative Success
As an up-and-coming artist, comedian, musician, or filmmaker, it’s important to have your feet on the ground in order to handle all the ups and downs of your very fickle industry. One component of stability is emotional intelligence (EQ.) Emotional intelligence is often misunderstood. Many people equate emotional intelligence with the ability to feel or empathize. It’s actually much more than that. It’s also about what we do with these feelings- both internally and socially. People that are emotionally intelligent are comfortable with being uncomfortable. They understand that being accepting of their negative emotions and what those feelings can teach helps them grow. They are also able to separate their feelings from objective reality so they can make better choices. Emotional intelligence not only involves emotional awareness but regulation. It’s not just about having empathy. It’s also about setting boundaries. Additionally, it requires having an awareness of other people and navigating the social world, which is essential for any profession. Let’s get into it! Emotional Management Emotional intelligence is really just about finding the right balance of opposites. I have used the word balance before and will continue to use it. Balance is the keynote of the Universe and it’s an important theme to keep in your arsenal as you navigate your artistic career.
As a musician, this is how I think about balancing emotional intelligence: In audio production, we use an abbreviation that we coincidentally also call EQ. In audio, EQ stands for equalization. To EQ a song is to balance all the volume levels and frequencies of the audio channels (different instruments) to get the effect that sounds the best for that piece of music. Your intention is not to repress any of the instruments. All of the instruments (um… feelings) are there. However, you don’t want any instrument to overpower the other, because the song won’t sound good. You’re just moving them to the desired level. It would be absurd to let the song manage itself without an audio engineer fixing up the sound quality, you get my drift? Emotional intelligence works the same way. Just like an audio engineer, you want to approach all of these levels in an observant, self-aware, non-judgmental way and make adjustments to your levels as necessary. Empathy Empathy is often misunderstood because many people equate empathy with being responsible for someone else’s dysfunction, or even sacrificing your own needs for someone else’s. This simply isn’t true. Having empathy doesn’t mean you need to make others feel good 24/7. It also doesn’t require meeting anyone’s needs before your own.
Empathy is the ability to recognize and understand what someone else is feeling. This also requires distinguishing between your own feelings and someone else’s. For instance, having your own personal anxieties about someone’s response to you may cause you to easily misinterpret what someone else is putting out. Basically, you are mixing your feelings and someone else’s together, which muddles the reality. Taking your own feelings out of the equation in order to be fully present with the emotions of others ensures greater accuracy. This comes with practicing mindfulness to form a better awareness of your unconscious emotional responses so you don’t mix them with another’s. Another misconception about empathy is the idea that you have to try to make others feel better, which usually hurts more than it helps. To grow, you need to sit with and work through difficult feelings. Empathy is giving others the space to do so without judgment. It does not mean you take action whenever someone feels bad. There is usually little you can do because you’re not them. Emotions are subjective, therefore emotional responsibility is an individual battle. To sum up: Sacrificing someone else’s needs before your own is not empathy. Understanding and separating your own feelings from someone else’s purifies your empathy meter. Trying to “fix” someone’s feelings is unhelpful.
Setting Boundaries Setting boundaries is vital to maintaining a lifestyle and mindset that works for you. Everyone has slightly different needs based on the lifestyle they have and who they are. Some need more socialization. Others need less. Some are easily overstimulated. Others need constant stimulation. Sometimes people will need help, and you may be qualified to offer help in a given situation. At other times, you aren’t in a position to assist someone and that’s okay. You’re not responsible for them if you aren’t equipped to deal with their issue. It’s very important to start identifying what your boundaries are if this is a new concept for you. I suggest that as you go about your day, start noticing what drains you or stresses you out. Usually, this is the point in which a boundary needs to be set. Here are some examples of my current personal boundaries: ●
I don’t let people hang out in my house past 1 am on a weekday. If it’s 1 am, you gotta go, and I don’t care what you want. I need to get sleep.
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I won’t help someone out financially if it will cause me undue financial distress.
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I will not accept personal calls or texts between the hours of 11 am and 7 pm when I need to get work done.
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I have a very busy schedule. If someone hits me up to hang out the day of, I will say no, and ask that they schedule with me in advance moving forward.
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If someone is having angry or anxious feelings and needs to vent, they need to do it calmly or find somebody else, because excessive amounts of loud emotional energy trigger me, which helps neither of us in that situation.
When these boundaries are honored, I am capable of much, much more than I would be otherwise. I’m happy, I’m healthy, I’m energized, and the work gets really, really good. When the work is good, I make more money. I am able to provide more. When I’m energized, I’m social, and everyone gets to have a good time. When I’m happy, it’s contagious. Everyone’s mood lifts. All of the benefits I receive from setting my individual boundaries start to swing back around and benefit other people. This is a component of empathy. To Sum Up the Balancing Act Finding a perfect balance of your needs and others is the golden ratio of healthy boundaries. It is the mindset that nobody’s needs are greater than yours, but that it’s still important to be present for others. Self-compassion begets boundaries. Boundaries beget a more purified sense of empathy. Empathy begets social intelligence, which I’ll cover next! Social Intelligence: Connecting with a Balance of Authenticity and Tact The entertainment industry is a social industry. You have to be willing to network, which isn’t just connecting with people, but also knowing what to say.
You have to be tactful in the way that you approach people. This means knowing what to say and how to say it. Additionally, it means knowing when to say something, and when never to say something. Not everyone is born smooth like butter, baby (cue A Tribe Called Quest.) Tact does not come naturally to all. It’s an important skill to learn, so I recommend you actually take classes somewhere, via Skillshare or otherwise if you struggle with this. Honing your self-awareness and having a clear, concise empathy meter for how other people feel is helpful. This is a skill that is hard to teach because it involves a good degree of understanding human psychology - primarily, what others want, what others need, and what others fear. This varies among humans, who all have different experiences, philosophies, and desires. Remember, the EQ levels for every song are different. If getting to the bottom of where, and how strongly, these primal energies reside in a person isn’t a natural skill for you, I can’t stress enough that it is important to learn. Whether you fall in the intuitive or the academic camp for this skill, the most important thing is to always be authentic and mindful. The way you show up with other people will make certain impressions, whether you intend them to or not. Getting in front of the right people and getting them to like you takes some maneuvering. Mixing tact and authenticity comes with three questions you can ask yourself:
Is this honest? Is this necessary? Is this kind? These three filters are your social commandments now. Basically, people are complicated and they aren’t always straightforward (because they don’t all have as much emotional intelligence as you have!) But if YOU show up in a way that is uncomplicated and straightforward, it means you’re probably balancing authenticity and tact along with all of those other newfound EQ skills we’ve already discussed. Others will pick up on it immediately and love you for it. Be Comfortable With Being Uncomfortable In order to handle this industry, you have to handle some really tough stuff. Trust me, it won’t all be pleasant. Unless you were born into money and connections, you, as an artist, won’t always have the resources. This instantly puts you at a disadvantage. You have to work twice as hard to get those resources. You also have to accept the fact that somebody will always be better than you. This means that your relationship with your craft has to be objective enough that you are not only willing to take criticism from people that have been doing this much longer than you have, but you also need to look critically at your own work and constantly look for areas of improvement.
This means being aware of your weak points. You also need to be comfortable with being afraid and have the ability to power through anyway! Listen, this industry is scary. Life is scary! That’s okay! People still function! Not everything you make, even if you are highly skilled, will be well-received by everybody. Art is subjective and not everybody is going to like you or connect with you. And the internet serves as an easy platform for nasty people to assert their opinions in nasty ways. You have to be comfortable with working really, really hard which can be exhausting and always comes with sacrifice. All of that in mind, it’s people that are constantly making art that are getting noticed. Not everything a great artist makes is good. Not every idea is good. And sometimes even cool, original ideas are not very relatable or totally translatable. Here’s the difference between you and the guy that’s winning: the guy that’s winning is willing to look stupid. He’s constantly making shit and learning from mistakes as he goes. These things are uncomfortable and you will feel uncomfortable because that’s the nature of growth. Remember growing pains when you were a kid? They don’t stop. Deal with it. Yeah, I said deal with it. Once you do, it will bring you to my final lesson.
Nonreactivity, Proactivity, and Emitting Your Own Frequency Basically, there are two given states that you can predominantly be in at any given time: active or receptive. When you are in a receptive state, you are absorbing information. When you are in an active state, you are focused on energetic output, or rather, what you are giving out. Both states are important, and it goes back to that balance thing again. When you are navigating this industry, there are instances where people or things are going to just fucking come at you. Nonreactivity means that instead of absorbing an unwanted impact and proceeding to have an impulsive emotional response, you put a clampdown on the impulse and passively observe rather than react. When you do this, whatever happens has less power over you and it keeps you in a position of balance. You can then, with greater accuracy and control, start making proactive choices so that you are running the show and managing the energy in the atmosphere rather than simply reacting to everything that is happening. Once you get in the habit of emitting your own frequency rather than responding to everyone else’s, you’ll begin to notice that the Universe will actually bend to your will and people will be more receptive to you.