Never complain and never explain

Emotional intelligence is a person’s ability to cope well (for himself and others) with the demands and pressures of the environment. In this text, I will focus on the three most common triggers of negative emotions, because they are very common causes of unwanted behaviour in the business and private environment:

Justification – people’s need to justify themselves, their results or behaviour in a given situation.

Identification – people’s need to find an explanation for their situation in other people’s bad results.

Finding the culprit – people’s need to take the burden off their backs, through the process of proving to themselves and others that the end result would have been much better if someone else had done their part better.

The roots of these triggers come from the earliest youth, because as children we had the need to justify, identify or find the culprit in others, in order to avoid the punishment from adults.

One way to learn to deal with other people that children use is to move from pain to pleasure. Children are born without limitations in their mind, with a great need for love and hugs from his parents. Parents, in order to “shape and educate” the child according to their own standards, resort to different types of control.

A child in fear of emotional or physical pain develops a mental mechanism to justify the situation in which the problem arose. This mechanism continues its development through schooling by justifying situations in which the child is not ready for the written or oral exam, or has “behaved inappropriately”, so the child needs to justify this situation to teachers, professors, and almost always parents.

This mechanism, at different levels of strength, is present in adults and in the business environment. In fear of punishment, loss of position or job, condemnation from colleagues or bosses, a person usually unconsciously, automatically uses these mechanisms. Unfortunately, many of these mechanisms begin to come to life at the earliest youth (up to the age of 5) when a child is not fully aware of what is happening around him. That is why many adults believe that these types of behaviours are completely normal and logical. However, these habits are neither good nor healthy. Why?

Because every time a person justifies himself, identifies or looks for the culprit in others, his inner self perceives it as an inability to cope with the situation he is facing, and that act erodes his inner faith in himself. It erodes his self-confidence.

As self-confidence decreases, at the same time a person’s need to justify and accuse because of his situation grows even more, and so he falls into a whirlpool of negative emotions. Negative emotions distort a person’s personality and terribly drain his energy. In addition, they trigger a torrent of cortisol, a stress hormone that affects a person’s productivity, creativity and immune system.

That is why my message for you is: Never complain and never explain.

The text was taken from www.blic.rs