Emotional Empowerment: Governing Your Behaviour And Choice

Emotional capacity largely governs our behaviour and enables us to understand / manage our emotions and create happiness. Intellectual capacity, on the other hand,  is the instrument we use to reach our goals. Expanding emotional capacity consists of improving all eight competencies highlighted on this page. Doing so promotes emotional stability and empowerment . The first competency mentioned here is Self Confidence. It represents trust in our abilities, qualities, and judgement.  

Another name for self control is willpower.This represents our ability to overcome our impulses in order to reach longer-term goals. Rather than being impulsive, we can plan, evaluate alternative actions, and, often enough, avoid doing things we'll later regret. 

Self awareness is a mechanism of self control.  It represents our ability to monitor our inner world, our thoughts and emotions as they arise. Motivation refers to our passion and poses the question: What makes us do our best? .

Self-regulation refers to our ability to act in our long-term best interest, consistent with our deeply held values. As such, going against our deepest values causes guilt, shame and anxiety, which undermine well being.  Self-regulation also includes our ability to calm ourselves down when we are  upset and cheer ourselves up when we are down.

Empathy involves identifying with what someone is feeling and actually feeling those feelings ourself.  The capacity for empathy varies from one person to the next.  Empathy is learned behaviour even though the capacity for it is inborn.  Social skills allude to our ability to build and manage relationships

Trust refers to a belief that someone is good and honest and will not harm us, or that something is safe and reliable. Recent research shows that in many ways our brains are hardwired to trust others. This aspect of our human nature is one reason that having our trust betrayed can short-circuit our neurobiology and make it difficult to trust again.