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EMOTIONAL LITERACY is the first step towards building your emotional intelligence. It is the ability to recognize, understand and appropriately express our emotions. It is an essential skill that we must work to develop. As we evolve and our cultures change, new forms of literacy are required to give us the proper tools to deal with a broad and ever-changing spectrum of issues. Emotional Literacy is a key to taking advantage of all possibilities. It is basic to joy and happiness in life and fundamental to your ability to love others.

As a new parent, you embarked on a life-long journey with your child. Our Kids EQ books are like a MapQuest for you to use along that journey.  We have identified the key concepts that will serve as a guide for a new understanding about emotions that you and your child will experience together. Many of us will be learning emotional literacy along side our children, only now, in the 21st century, Emotional Literacy is starting to be taught in schools. The tools and techniques laid out in these books apply as easily to adults as they do to children. Truly experiencing a world of emotional literacy with your child depends upon you learning and understanding the concepts in emotional literacy as well as helping your child along the way.

–Ayman Sawaf

7 – Emotional Literacy Is the Most Sacred of All Teachings

Emotional Literacy is the most sacred of all teachings …Because it is all about you. All of us are born with the sacred inside of us. The qualities of the sacred are beauty, mystery, enchantment, and love. When you find yourself in the presence of the sacred (people, places, animals, objects) you will feel all four of these qualities.  Without accessing the sacred with in our lives, life becomes stripped of its true meaning.

With Emotional Literacy, you will begin to discover the sacred in yourself. Part of the power of achieving Emotional Literacy is being able to uncover the mystery of you and recognizing your inner beauty in a natural way. This leads us to the more complex life skills (developing character, integrity, trust, confidence, etc.). If we are able to see the sacred in ourselves, then we can see it in others. As you discover yourself, you discover the mystery of you: your inner beauty, your love, and your ability to enchant; qualities that too many people never get to experience in themselves. The qualities of the sacred are the building blocks to a strong sense of the valued self (self-worth, self-confidence, self-love, self-esteem, etc.). One of the main reasons people aren’t able to receive compliments is because they can’t see the sacred in themselves. Emotional Literacy provides access to feelings, which in turn gives access to the sacred. Listening to and taking action on our feelings is our true Moral Compass. In the process of becoming emotionally literate, you develop a strong sense of self, thus becoming an independent thinker, with the ability to make choices about how outside forces affect you. Emotions are one’s true source of power; once you know how to harness and direct that power, you will have an amazing key to compliment your thinking/intellect in manifesting your dreams.

6 – The Language of Relationships…

Developing Emotional Literacy allows one to create strong and lasting relationships. Most people deal with relationships through thinking and talking, we ad depth and meaning to that through adding our feelings and our empathy for the other persons feelings, it is through balancing our thinking, with our feeling that we muster a much stronger way to communicate, with far greater depth and intimacy, thus a more beautiful language is created. Relationships of any kind depend on understanding other people. It is not only important to be able to communicate how we are feeling, but equally important to have empathy, which is both about sharing the emotional state of others and understanding it in relation to oneself. It is all about communication, expressing oneself and understanding others.

When emotions are expressed positively we tend to feel safe, trusting and heard; when emotions are expressed negatively or not expressed at all, we tend to feel nervous, uneasy, and maybe even afraid. When we don’t know how to read our feelings we can end up feeling doubt or confusion. In a relationship, if we feel afraid we need to identify why, and then bring our understanding to the situation and take appropriate action based on the information our thoughts and feelings together have given us. If an emotion is real and expressed lovingly (even if painful) then our trust in each other and  the power of the relationship can grow, trusting the relationship to be able to “handle” whatever comes up. Put another way, a “positive emotion” is really an emotion that is appropriately expressed, as it is the expression that causes the release of energy and the movement in our reality- a “negative emotion” is an emotion that is held in, any unexpressed emotion can make us sick, or cause harm in our reality- love not expressed can cause heartache and depression, anger not expressed or dealt with can lead to violence and or substance abuse. When we are not  aware of our emotions, we react to them; when we are emotionally aware, we have the ability to respond. When we respond we are being “responsible.” When we are “responsible” then the power is squarely in our hands and we can no longer blame others or feel like victims; we are empowered to find a solution. When all parties in a relationship are coming from a place of responsibility the relationship has the opportunity to grow and flourish. An emotionally literate child is more able to easily differentiate between feelings of his/her own and the feelings that are someone else’s, or feelings that are activated by another person’s presence. As parents/teachers we can use these tools to help our children to identify how they feel about other people, and to take appropriate action in creating strong relationships.

5 – Emotions Are Electromagnetic Energy

Emotions are electromagnetic energy, like our thoughts, they come from the brain – It is important to understand that it is in fact the brain that both thinks and feels, it is the same electromagnetic energy coming out in two forms, one more feminine (our feelings), one more maculine (our thoughts). Electro = energy (comes from electricity) – Magnetic = magnetism, which is the function of attracting things. How we react and respond to life’s ebbs and flows emotionally is the very thing that attracts the next experience to us; it is like a magnetic attraction – love attracts love, fear attracts fear and so on. It is the balance of our internal masculine and feminine energy that allows the realities we desire to be drawn to us with greater elegance. As we gain more internal mastery, we become more able to consciously direct our reality- this is one of the primary gifts of emotional literacy.

4 – Emotions Are Neither Positive or Negative

Emotions are neither positive or negative- they are energy. It is the way we express them can be positive or negative. When we respond to our emotions it is positive, when we react to them it is usually negative. Expansive emotions such as joy, happiness, and love make you aware of a greater range of possibilities – whereas contracting emotions such as anger, fear, and jealousy narrow the range of possibilities, thus creating focus; both are important. Focus can allow one to deal with injustice, consequently; anger and fear can save our lives. It is the expression of an emotion that can be positive or negative, not the emotion itself- for example, love can make you feel like you have wings, or it can hurt like a dagger in your heart- Anger can make you make you loose your temper at the town council, or it can motivate you to inspire the whole town to clean the streets. When listened to and acted upon appropriately emotions usually bring us closer to what we want, thus creating a positive outcome, or a change in our reality. When acted on by instinct, without thought, they can cause all kinds of trouble having a negative impact. Just like the miracle of electricity, if we put a finger straight in the socket, we get a nasty shock – “OW.“   If we put a finger on the light switch and turn it on, our room is illuminated – “WOW.”

3 – Emotions are Raw Power

Emotions are raw power that can be harnessed and directed by us as individuals – E-motion is energy in motion, a source of power and information. Emotions are internal feedback about our reality – whispers about what’s working and what’s not. As we begin to recognize these whispers we learn to consciously choose how we want to use the energy, rather than being passively tossed this way and that by potentially hazardous and unchecked emotions. Once understood, emotions become a source of power that we can use – for example, we can transform anger into passion to create change in a situation. coming from the latin emotivas, the energy that moves with in us.

IQ Isn’t Everything: Why a High IQ Doesn’t Mean You’re Smart

How can someone with a high IQ have certain kinds of intellectual deficiencies? Put another way, how can a “smart” person act foolishly?

IQ tests fall down when it comes to measuring those abilities crucial to making good judgements in real-life situations. That’s because they are unable to assess things such as a person’s ability to critically weigh up information, or whether an individual can override the intuitive cognitive biases that can lead us astray.

“IQ tests measure an important domain of cognitive functioning and they are moderately good at predicting academic and work success. But they are incomplete. They fall short of the full panoply of skills that would come under the rubric of ‘good thinking’.”
There is no proven test of rational thinking skills that could be used alongside IQ tests. “It is not enough to say what intelligence is not measuring, you have to propose alternative ways of measuring rationality,” says Kahneman. Stanovich maintains that while developing a universal “rationality-quotient (RQ) test” would require a multimillion-dollar research programme, there is no technical or conceptual reason why it could not be done. An RQ test could measure the extent to which people are inclined to use what capacity they have.
Sources:
Journal of Economic Perspectives Fall 2005

http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/089533005775196732

New Scientist November 2, 2009

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427321.000-clever-fools-why-a-high-iq-doesnt-mean-youre-smart.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

Stupid In America: What’s Wrong with the U.S. Education System?

This video should be required viewing for every member in Congress, every teacher in the United States, and every parent with children in public education. The video compares the U.S. public education system with that in Europe, and with magnet and charter schools vs. districts where there is no competition.

The results are shocking.

Check out the program that 2020 aired at

2 – A Basic Life Skill…

it is important to understand that Emotional Literacy is a basic life skill that is about the ability to recognize, understand and appropriately express our feelings, and empathize with others. To take the analogy to academic literacy further, expressing emotions is like the act of writing and empathy for other’s emotions is like the act of reading. These skills are the tools used to understand and direct what is going in inside of us and outside of us. Emotional Literacy is not about healing (although it can have that effect), it is about communication.

1 – Emotional Literacy is the ABC, 123 of our feelings

Like learning the alphabet, we first learn about each letter and then how those letters can form words and combinations of words to form sentences. One of the problems children have is not being able to name their emotions. When they have the knowledge of how to name them, it helps them to be able to express them with far greater ease. In Emotional Literacy, we first learn how to recognize and name each emotion, then how to harness the power within it, and use it successfully.  Just like academic literacy, Emotional Literacy is a skill that can be learned and improved upon throughout our lives. Knowing the ABCs of our feelings gives us greater access to our primal intuition. Children begin to recognize and differentiate their own feelings from other peoples feelings, allowing them to form their own opinions even if they differ from influential people around them. As children gain mastery their thinking and feelings begin working together to create joy and happiness in their lives. The earlier we start learning these skills, the more elegantly we can navigate the inevitable ups and downs of life, making Emotional Literacy one of the greatest gifts we can give our children (and ourselves).