Lack of EI and relationship disasters

Relationships are the core of anyone's success or failure. Our entire life is founded on relationships and their outcomes. Family, personal, professional, business, community and social relationships have a huge bearing on the quality of life one leads. However, there's not much taught about relationship management at any level of mainstream education.

We learn and excel at what we prioritise. There is serious relationship distress all around and it is escalating exponentially. Our young people represent the future of our societies. If they are inept or worse than the generation preceding them at relationship management, we can imagine the kind of social outcomes in next few decades.

It is shocking to see exponential neglect in managing even family and personal relationships in contemporary times. Workplace and professional conflicts are surging. Global conflicts driven through religion, region and geo-politics are at an all-time high. The global outcomes are for everyone to see, nevertheless there are not many initiatives in this area to correct the course.

Emotional Intelligence can empower individuals and groups to manage relationships very effectively. However, massive lack of EI enabled individuals is a clear and present danger, in societies we live currently across the world.

The result of lack of Emotional Intelligence is shockingly visible through unprecedented scale of relationship distress across all domains, if one were to pay attention. Relationships are being stomped upon as if, they mean nothing. Shocking outcome of such horrendous relationship abuse leads to a pattern of social normalisation.

This trend forever lowers expectations and standards in dealing with important relationships across the social spectrum. While there are many, I am highlighting just two prime factors which are driving severe relationship distress in societies across the world.

Empathy neglect

It is almost normalised to be unempathetic. If this is not dangerous, what is? There are serious implications in not being empathetic to oneself and other's emotions.

Ever increasing transactional relationships are discounting emotions and dealing plainly for logical and financial outcomes. This trend can be highly counterproductive especially in reference to personal, professional relationships and social institutions.

Lack of empathy at personal level can blind an individual to neglect emotions of others in a relationship. One will fail to prioritise effective intervention, when higher degree emotions between two individuals or groups need satiation or effective emotional response. Lack of timely intervention in an emotional distress can lead to relationship strain and sometimes even a break.

Increasing number of early divorces, breakups, spousal conflicts, sibling rivalry, parental challenges, teenager conflicts, work-place rivalry, turf wars are some of many outcomes of lack of empathy. The cost of these conflicts is quite expensive not just to individuals but to the society at large, as these cases set precedence to many such conflicts across the social spectrum.

The utter disregard for emotions cannot be excused through labels like 'being busy', 'no time for tantrums', 'complex behaviour' or 'pre-occupied'. It is fundamental to protect, respect and manage relationships through addressing one's own and others emotional expressions.

Prioritising is the key word. If one values a relationship, there will be a higher order of priority in ensuring that other's emotional needs are satisfied or managed applying a mix of emotion and reason. Relationships which are underprioritised or taken for granted will graduate to become redundant and dysfunctional overtime.

Most relationship disasters between individuals, teams, social groups, communities or even between nations are driven from unempathetic conduct, driven from underprioritizing the relationship value or through redundancy.

Lowered emotional standards

Human beings are emotional at the core. Thoughts driven by reason and logic have evolved at a later period, on the foundation of emotional core. If one is not considering emotional satiation is an essential factor for robust emotional health, one is ignorant.

As stated earlier, emotions are building blocks for human survival. Disregarding emotional health will directly impact mental and physical health. Emotional Management is all about satiating one's emotional needs to the extent possible, especially of higher degree emotions. Relationship mastery is all about respecting, enabling, or supporting others to satisfy their own.

Over the period of last two to three decades there is a visibly increasing trend to undermine one's own and others emotions to trivialise them as unimportant. As this trend has picked up pace through continued acceptance and reoccurrences, it has led to normalisation of this twisted emotional conduct.

Most societies are currently undergoing a dangerous level of deterioration in standards, in reference to how emotions are respected, experienced, reciprocated, satiated, and managed. This trend weakens the operational links on which relationships survive. Relationships primarily survive on reciprocal satiation and when reciprocation stops, relationships get devalued and eventually cease to exist.

If it is alright for young people to disrespect parents, if it is acceptable for parents to be unaccountable towards their children's upbringing and learning, if its ok to not trust, if friendship has transformed into opportunism, marriages into financial arrangement, sycophancy labeled as professionalism, violence as a viable resolution and lying as a necessary competence to survive, where have we arrived?

There are thousands of other standards that have been lowered, which our predecessors have set for higher level of emotional intelligence for relationship survival.

There are dangerous consequences for lowering emotional standards for a society. The human society is facing that wrath already. There are rare occurrences of eye-to-eye contact and meaningful conversations between parents and young adults. There is a serious lack of professional conduct at workplaces, heightened levels of insubordination, attrition, and incompetence.

There's a rise of abusive social media ecosystem which undermines difference of opinion, flogging independent thinking. Mutual respect already is as rare as a white elephant. Trust has no takers. Careful communication is no more a professional competence.

Conclusion

If human relationships are systematically undermined, devalued, and disrespected, it will not too long before the human enterprise degenerates and regress into break-away anarchist, nomadic cults.

Respect for meaningful relationships is naturally driven out of core human necessity to mutually satisfy emotional needs. Disregarding this key driver of all human evolution and progress, will rob the current and next generations of humans from the pleasure of peaceful co-existence through emotional fulfillment.

(The author is a Harvard Business School certified organisational strategist and a global expert in Emotional Intelligence)