Dear Hailey:

You are welcome and I am glad that you posted again. It is never late to post, so your reply is not late.

“I always thought my empathy was very strong. But when it comes to communication, it’s not working at all“- my understanding (and please correct me if I am wrong) is that when you are alone at home, or alone elsewhere, let’s say in a park, you are relatively calm. When alone and relatively calm, and you think about people (or animals) who suffer, or you watch TV and see a person on TV suffer, you feel strong empathy.

But when you are with people, in social situations, you are so anxious that you don’t feel empathy, or much of any feeling other than anxiety. Am I understanding correctly?

“About this NPAR strategy, could you recommend me any books that I could read to help to improve my EI? I would love to learn and improve my EI“- I can’t recommend any books to you because I haven’t read books for years (I did read very little in one book recently because it was given to me as a gift and didn’t like the book). I donated all the books that I read in the past, so I have no books in mind. I just googled books on the topic and I can see a few titles that include the words emotional intelligence in them. (I came up with the term NPAR, so it’s not in a book).

My emotional intelligence was low for years before I improved it. What a relief and what a difference this improvement is making in my life, it’s like day and night: life is not easy, but it is so much easier with a higher EI. You know how you operate in life using your five senses, well EI is like a valuable extra sense that makes you understand people (including yourself) so much better. It makes you more and more confident around people because you view yourself as.. well, emotionally intelligent, and people usually respond very well to emotionally intelligent people.

I just googled further and came across a website called talent LMS. com/ Emotional Intelligence. Looks like it offers courses for managers in the workplace, but maybe it can help you too.  EQ, by the way,  stands for Emotional Quotient and it means the same as Emotional Intelligence. The courses listed are titled: “What is EQ?”, “Self-Awareness”,  “Self-Regulation”, “Emotional Intelligence: motivation”, “Emotional Intelligence: empathy”, “Social Skills”, “Improving your EQ“, and more.

So you see, you can improve your EI (aka EQ). If you would like to, you and I can keep communicating and…  improve each other’s EI!

anita