Relational Wisdom Where Have You Been?

Discovering the places from which you relationship

From the moment we burst out of our mother’s vagina (others through the sunroof), we are magically in relationship with our parent(s), with no guarantee it will be a good one. Then strangers become friends and family members decide how close they want to be in relationship with us. There’s not a second on earth that we’re not relationshiping. Eventually, we realize that life is all about relationships, the relationship we have with ourselves and others.

If relationships are such a significant part of our lives, why wasn’t How To Relationship Well not a course in our formal education? Who’s job was it to teach us how to develop and maintain healthy relationships? Our parents? What if they’re emotionally unhealthy and have broken relationships in their life? Do we just inherit those unhealthy patterns and perpetuate offenses, unforgiveness, and misunderstanding by making a shit ton of assumptions?

Most of us were not taught how to relate to ourselves and to others. With an under-emphasis on emotional intelligence (EQ) in our early developmental years and an over-emphasis on IQ, we learned how to be in relationship with people through trial and error, observation, mirroring, and the occasional words of wisdom from our elders.

It should not be a surprise why people just can’t get along and marriages are prone to failure.

A lot of the brokeness we see in the world and in our own life is a result of broken relations. We weren’t taught how to relate to ourself and to others constructively. Many of us are, have been, were emotionally dumb.

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A Song For the Emotionally Dumb

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Relational Wisdom

Relationships are challenging, especially intimate ones. Each of us have war stories about that one time when we emotionally exploded on someone because we were triggered by what they said or did, and let em’ have it. The victim could have been our child, a spouse, a parent, strangers, peers or even colleagues. In that heightened emotional state, we lacked the self-intelligence to identify why we were triggered and the emotional intelligence to manage our response in a constructive way. We either failed to operate from a place of relational wisdom or we just didn’t know it even existed.

Understanding yourself, learning how to manage your own emotions, as well as recognizing and influencing the emotions of those around you, is an interpersonal skill with many rewards. Relational wisdom has the power to propel you to the next level in your business, career, and personal development, it can help you to build and maintain healthier relationships and attract the right people into your life. It’s also in demand in the job market.

The most sought-after interpersonal skill in the workplace, according to Harvard Business School is Emotional Intelligence (EQ). The results of a Career Builder Survey seem to confirm that with at least 71% of employers saying they value EQ over IQ when hiring and promoting employees. If you have ever been around a brilliant narcissist, you would probably agree.

I challenge the notion above. EQ alone isn’t enough. A little less obvious are those who conduct themselves as society expects with some EQ, but they lack any self-awareness and the ability to understand their own emotions. These individuals can recognize how other people feel and empathize, but without the self-intelligence to regulate their own mood and emotions they can still be triggered and prone to sabotaging relationships in their responses to people. Stronger relationships and less conflict are things we all desire at home and in the workplace, but it requires a lot of heart work. Relational wisdom is the hard heart work we have to start acquiring to be successful in all of our relationships.

How to gain relational wisdom is for another newsletter.