Break Blocks by Writing with Emotional Intelligence

1. Intro: Hi everyone. My name is Jen. Today I want to talk about emotional intelligence and I want to talk about creative writing and what those two things have to do with one another. I created this course because over the last decade I have taught creative writing. I've coached writers. In the last five years. I've taught personal leadership and team effectiveness. And a big component of personal leadership is emotional intelligence. There are some really fantastic life-changing tools that will really help us to better relate to other people that are understand difficult material. I'm so excited to just allow these worlds to bridge today and help you to write with more authenticity and effectiveness using the tools of emotional intelligence. So we're going to have fun, we're going to go a little deeper with some of these creative writing exercises. Just throw yourself in and have fun with it. And I will see you in the first module. What can be helpful is to have a pen notebook and, or a document that is specifically for this class. And a very, very open-mind. Alright, so let's get started. See you soon. 2. Write from your wounds: Hello, Welcome. Today we're going to talk about creative emotional intelligence. So what is that? And what does emotional intelligence even have to do with creativity? Let's begin by talking a little bit about what our feelings and emotions are and defining emotional intelligence. Audre Lorde and amazing writer and activist, says, our feelings are our most genuine paths and knowledge. I completely agree with this. I think a lot of times the impetus to writing or creating anything is really beginning in a place of feeling. We feel something, we respond to it on the page or in our art, we explore it. What is the difference between feelings and emotions? Why does this matter? What does this have to do with our art? Lots of questions. Let's dive into some answers. Essentially, one way to think about the difference between a feeling, an emotion is that a feeling is something that you automatically feel. You may see a car barreling towards you on the freeway and you get scared. If you feel a feeling. Now, if you're driving and everything is fine and you happen to see a similar car a week later and there's no threat and you get scared. That is an ingrained emotion. It's a feeling that is a little bit more permanent. This is a really good way of thinking about it. Once we understand the difference, we understand that emotions are the things that were kind of replicating in our mind. We can start to unpack this idea of what emotional intelligences. Now, I've taught leadership at University for the last few years. And one of the things that the students are most interested in is what emotional intelligence is and how we can learn skills around it. Essentially emotional intelligence and you can define it slightly differently. But it's the recognition in self and others of emotions and an ability to manage and better our relationships again, both with self and with others. And we do this through self-awareness, self-management, empathy, and relational management. So Daniel Goleman has done a lot of research in this area. He's got quite a few books on emotional intelligence. And by really breaking emotional intelligence down into four or five component parts, depending on the way we look at it, we're able then to start to create strategies around how to become more self-aware, how to manage our own emotions in a productive way. How to raise empathy, become more empathetic. And then ultimately this all leads to better relationships. We also get better at observing and understanding when others maybe going through perhaps extreme emotions, how we can be more supportive, these kinds of things. So again, what does all of that has to do with creativity? What do feelings and emotions and all of that has to do with writing specifically, well, emotions and feelings, but mostly emotions, the things that are a little bit more embedded in us. Our fire, their fuel there where we get the steam and the urge and the reasons for right? But the paradox is that emotions are only benefiting our ability to storytelling or to create anything artistic. If we're able to examine them, we cannot create great art by getting stuck in extreme thinking. That may be a bold statement to make, but I stand by it. It's my personal belief and my observation as just being a reader and being someone who's taught writing for quite a long time as well. We cannot really create our best work if we're stuck in extreme thinking. If we're in this space of reactivity, for instance, if we're trying to write about a traumatic experience from our past, sometimes we can be a little bit too emotional in the sense that when we write it just feels like a release. It doesn't actually feel like anything more than a release. And that can be beautiful. Therapeutic writing is beautiful. But there is a difference between writing for therapy for ourselves and writing to share. Thinking about emotions as something that are deep seated and that come from within. Let's move forward a little bit and talk about how we can write from our wounds, right from this place of total emotion as a starter point. All right, so, right, what stimulates you write your anger to release, but it all out of the body, out of the mind. Writing from our wounds is exploratory. It's emotional writing that allows us release and maybe perspective. A lot of times if I've written about something that's really bothering me or that I feel very emotional about. Once I write it, I'll reread it and it'll almost feel as though it's a different person. So this is kind of how the therapeutic nature of writing works. We can heal through writing. We can channel are writing into fiction and poetry. So if we've had a traumatic experience, we may want to depict that metaphorically and find some kind of power or control over the situation in that way. Alright, so let's go ahead and dive into our first exercise, writing from our wounds. We're going to really embrace this idea of writing from a place of pure emotion. I invite you and please don't overthink really just let the guttural emotion girl wants you to write about a time that you had an overwhelming wave of emotion. What triggered it? What did it feel like? Really see if you can recreate that feeling on the page. And we're just going for a few paragraphs, ten minutes, right, as much as you can and meet me back here in the next module. 3. Write from Your Scars: So how did that go? How did it feel? How did it feel to just allow a pure guttural release on the page or whatever art form that you decided to create. Now, what we're going to do is just taking this as a foundation. We're going to explore how to write from a slightly different perspective. The whole idea of emotional intelligence, at least in my estimation, is assuming something of a luxury of time and perspective. And it's a muscle that you need to build. We're not going to automatically be able to self-manage and understand how other people are feeling all the time. There are inherent limitations to this. Assuming we know how other people are feeling or assuming we even know, or even assuming we really have deep insight into our own emotions can be something of a mistake. So what we need to do is explore from a place of curiosity. What I proposed next is to consider what it would mean to write rather from a place of a wound or a place of extreme emotion, even if it's positive. Let's look at something from a little bit more distance. So let's talk about what it might look like to write from a place of more emotional intelligence. This could be writing our hero or heroine is journey. This could be looking at the arc of our personal life, of the story we want to write. Looking at both the parallels and the power. When we write from a place of exploration, reflective writing allows clearer focus and objectivity in the way that I'm defining this creative emotional intelligence combines logic, emotion, empathy, and considers all people, including the people who will read your work down the line. Here's a quote by Melissa Phoebus, author of body work, which I think shows a change in perspective when writing about creative nonfiction, writing about are passed from a place of, as she puts it in, oh, well attitude. Saying that there's some kind of moral imperative to have a vision as an artist and Surette about our own experience to a place that is more deliberate, more multifaceted, that considers an issue not just from the emotion itself, but from a little bit more complex perspective. I'll give you a moment to read this quote. You can always pause if you're continuing to read. What I'd like to do is use that kind of shift of perspective as a way of just summarizing what we've gone over so far. What again, is emotional intelligence in writing or any creative venture? Well, first we have to understand that emotion is often a reason for wanting to write, understand, share stories, share a true. The process is the writing itself. The idea is that outlines the progressions, the whole thing. The technicalities. Perspective is empathy, considering the impact of our writing, considering the audience, taking ownership, looking at things from different angles. When you combine all of these things, we have emotionally intelligent and emotionally impactful writing. This is the formula. Another quote here, Viktor Frankl. He founded Logotherapy and I think that this quote is really a beautiful encapsulation. Lot of his writings, we are no longer able to change a situation. We are challenged to change ourselves. I think that as an artist, as a writer, it's important to consider the challenge of changing the way that we see material, that we see certain things that create any kind of very extreme emotion in us. Viktor Frankl, in his search for meaning and Man's Search for Meaning. And in other texts talks about the search for meaning in a way that it's a primary facet of being. His theory is that if the search is unrequited leads to necrosis where the spinning of wheels, the greatest task in life is to find meaning. So you can find it in contribution and you can find it and carrying and understanding encouraged during difficult times. I bring this particular perspective up because I think that another important component of this inherently tied into this model of emotionally intelligent and emotionally impactful writing is this idea of courage. So we have to find courage on the page. Okay, So we've talked a lot. We have are just kind of emotional dump of a piece of writing that might have some real wonderful nuggets in it might have some real ideas to spin off. Now I'd like to write from a place of distance, from a place of exploration. Let's go ahead and dive into exercise part two. Let's write about the original topic. So the same topic that came up in exercise one, but do it, I'm purposefully from a place of exploration, courage in meaning. Lsu again, to go for about ten minutes and just get a few paragraphs on the page and see if you can tackle that same thing. That just feels like an emotional powder keg in your body. And just really focus on the exploratory nature of your writing of the topic. If you can look at it from different angles. When you're done, meet me back here and we will debrief. 4. Reevaluating Relationships: All right, beautiful job. That last exercise may have been very difficult for some of us. It is an incredibly valuable exercise, even if it didn't feel like it went well and you didn't write great literature from that particular exercise. One thing that you did do as you exercise the muscle, you exercise your creative EI. Now we're gonna talk a little bit about storytelling and relationships. We've talked a lot about the self-awareness components of creative EI. And now I want to talk about the gift of perspective, the ability and privileged to story tell, and what growth or change comes from processing extreme emotional wash. we even do this. Why should we even care to dissect what it is that we're feeling? Why not just create from a very technical standpoint? Well, computers can do that for us. We have algorithms to tell stories for us that followed that model. What we need is the human experience. Emotion equals change, either positive or negative. We need to remember that it is important. It's important to explore until the story from a place of knowing. So let's talk a little bit about how we can develop a relationship with our readers that this emotion. So one way to think about this is that instead of burying our souls or showing up naked on the page or whatever other analogies are often used, are putting our baby out there in the world when we publish a book, for instance, instead of using these very vulnerable analogies, how about we look at it as an opportunity to deepen our relationship with people that we may not ever meet. An opportunity to confide in them and to have a discourse that spans beyond a single moment in time. Re-framing in this way may help you to approach an emotionally sensitive topic and emotionally important topic in a different way. In the next module, we'll do a little wrap up. Please know that you are doing a wonderful job moving forward and exploring the tough subjects on the page. Not everybody is willing to do this, but the way that storytelling is an needs to be in the future in a human capacity is by leveraging what only humans have to offer. And that is our emotional resonance, our ability to connect through our vulnerability, as well as the strength that comes from emotion. Let's wrap up in the next module, I'm going to give you a little homework to go exercise. 5. Revision: For our final writing exercise, we are actually not going to write, we're going to start to revise. We're going to craft a story or an essay, or a poem, or a series of poems around our emotional catalyst. We're going to take this second exercise that we did and actually create something from it and share it below. Now this is not a lot of guidance, but I have to implore you to trust your instinct to follow the thread where it goes introduced. So from a place of curiosity, from a place of true empathy, from a place of personal ownership and exploration. And if you do that, I guarantee you, you will surprise yourself. So share your work below. I look forward to reading it and we'll wrap up in the next module. 6. Well done! Now Write your draft!: Hi everyone. You made it, You did it. We got vulnerable on the page. We explore topics that were not easy for us. Then we re-explore them. We applied the principles of emotional intelligence and we looked at how we can reconsider writing from a more exploratory place rather than a reactive place and how that can really change everything in the way that we tell a story and the way that we connect ultimately with our audience. I'm so excited to hear how it went for you. Please share, either share the actual work or share just how it went and what you plan to do from here, I look forward to connecting and I wish you all good things.