Emotional intelligence
Many times we hurt people without realizing it. It’s all a matter of emotional intelligence and a lack of ability to recognize the feelings that people express through facial expressions, voice, and body. As a consequence, your relationships begin to deteriorate. To realize if you have this lack of sensitivity, it helps to watch videos or photos in which you try to represent the six basic emotions of the human being (anger, fear, surprise, happiness, disgust and sadness), and see how long it takes you to guess the emotion that the person in question is trying to portray. Another way to do this is by watching a movie you’ve never seen, without audio, and trying to guess what emotions the actors are representing. You can even try it by looking at some Instagram photos without reading the texts below.
How do I get sensitized?
You have already detected your weakness and are ready to do something about it. The best thing to do is talk to people you trust to get accurate feedback. Do you remember what we were talking about about guessing emotions? Now you are going to do it live. Tell your trusted person to express emotions and guess what they are. So you can have immediate feedback. It may be that there is an expression that looks like happiness but is actually fear, and noticing it – even if they have to tell you – broadens your pool of emotions.
Over time and with practice you will learn to read the faces of others and detect when you are saying something out of place, and that in turn will make you more sensitive to your own comments, and when you least expect it, you will be able to omit them before it is too late.