Emotional thought method

The emotional thought method develops a group of activities that can be played so in a personal as in a grupal way. This method want to develop the Emotional Intelligence in a similar way that Daniel Goleman (1995) proposed in his book "Emotional intelligence", a bestseller book written in 1995.

How was born

The emotional thought method has been created by Carlos Hué, a Spanish psychologist who is a teacher in the university of Zaragoza a city placed between Barcelona and Madrid. You can find this method in the book "Pensamiento emocional. Un método para el desarrollo de la autoestima y el liderazgo" (Hué, 2007). Unfortunately this book has not yet translated into English. This teacher of psychology gathers in this method a lot of exercises in order to develop emotional skills.

The Emotional though method

Emotional Intelligence is based on several competencies that guides you to get success in personal, professional and social life. This kind of competencies are usually acquired in the earliest education and throughout adult life, but they are not taught in a specific way. The reason is that these competencies are said not to be taught, since they are characteristic of each individual’s personal maturation.

You can find that there are a great number of training actions favoured by companies, public administrations, entities, institutions and social agents that develop some of these competences. However, there are not complete methods to train emotional competencies.

The Emotional thought method illustrates that the emotional competencies can be learnt throughout life, so they can be taught, learnt and even evaluated.

Emotional competencies

This method propose seven emotional competencies four referred to oneself like self-knowledge, self-evaluation, emotional control, and personal motivation; and three more referred to the others as knowledge of the others, appreciation of the others and control of them.

* Self-knowledge is the first competence to develop and will naturally be through the knowledge of the own capacities, skills, personality features, interests, goals, etc. This point is usually ignored in the education programs. Includes introspection, aptitudinal self-knowledge, emotional self-knowledge, self-criticism and awareness of oneself.

* Self-evaluation the second competence of this Emotional thought method. This competence has a basic relationship with the concept of self and self-esteem. Self-esteem is the real driving force of our behaviour. When we don’t feel happy we feel we have not enough strength to work, to make relationship with others or to live. On the contrary, when we feel happy with ourselves, we feel that we can face new challenges and projects and get involved in life problems. This competence is the result of developing our sensibility, sensuality, sexuality, a right aptitudinal and emotional evaluation, optimism, happiness and self-steem.

* Emotional control is the third one. Emotions are the tool used by animals to survive. Emotions provide animals and men a quick response against their enemies. Stress, fear and anxiety are emotions that help us to avoid external attacks through reacting with the alert, retreat or, even, the attack to the dangers that may come from the outside. But if we do not manage these primary emotions we can be managed by them. So this competence develops three emotional skills as motor inhibition, self-control and mental control.

* Personal motivation is the last competence developed by the Emotional thought method in order to get our targets. Motivation is the force of the behaviour and of the life of people and that is why our interests and desires influence the actions we carry out every day. Expectations, dreams and enthusiasm, specially this last one is the real force to work, to love, to live. Emotional thinking method presents a set of competences to develop as activation, productivity, quality, instrumental tools, globality, plannig, culture, innovation, interests’ wideness, determination and evaluation.

* There are three competences in this emotional method oriented to how to make a relationship with other people. So the fifth competence in the Emotional thought method is Knowledge of the others. The success in our life depends extremely on how we get on with people living close to us. So it is very important to know their personality, what are they interested in, which are their needs. Knowledge of the personality of the others, knowledge of the aptitude of them, empathy, communication ability, social analysis, appreciation of diversity are some of the abilities developed in this fifth part of the method.

* Appreciation of the other is the sixth competence of the Emotional thought method. The way you appreciate the people is a determining competence to increase your position in the relationship made with them. In this method, ten abilities are proposed for the development of this competence. They are structured in four groups. The first group concerns the necessary capacities for a relationship: approximation, affability and tolerance; the second group includes the capacities for creating a link: confidence, comprehension and sociability; the third group includes three levels of approximation: companionship, friendship and love; and, finally, we find the responsibility as summary of all of them.

* The last competence developed in the Emotional thought method is Control of the others. Many people criticises this competence because they say is not respectful with them. But everyone wants to persuade other people to do what we are interested in. So the seventh competence of this method develops the capacity to have relations, the capacity for organizating groups, the capacity to solve conflicts, and, specially, leadership.

These seven emotional competences are developed through several exercises proposed in the Emotional thought method as much as in the book of doctor Hué quoted before, as in the TREIN project mentioned below. This method is a systematic project to develop all emotional competencies needed by every people, in the work, in the family, between our friends, in our life.

A European application

Recently there is born a European project translated into English, French, Italian, Swedish, German, Bulgarian, Romanian and Spanish, of course. This project is named as TREIN (Training in Emotional Intelligence) and you can find it in a website below. So this Emotional thought method, as well as being appropriate to develop mental health of everyone, is suitable in work training. This is suitable to teach [emotional competencies] to employers as to employees. Besides is a good method to decrease work accidents and to increase the labour productivity.

Bibliography

* Goleman, Daniel, 1995. "Emotional intelligence."New York: Bantam Books.
* Goleman, Daniel, 2006. "Social intelligence: the new science of human relationships."New York: Bantam Books.
* Hué, Carlos, 2007. "Pensamiento emocional. Un método para el desarrollo de la autoestima y el liderazgo". Zaragoza: Mira.

Links

* [http://www.leonardo-trein.org/ TREIN project]