Riding the Elephant: Emotionally Intelligent, Totally Drained?

Spent a day in emotional intelligence training. And I just felt emotionally drained.

Maybe for the analogy in this post to work better, imagine birds riding an elephant, like in this photograph. See footnote: humans riding elephants is cruel.

It took me over a year to reach a point where I felt ready to write about this. Not because I didn’t want to share — but because I wasn’t yet ready to process what it all meant. And even now, I’m not entirely sure I am. But here we go.

Self-improvement isn’t always easy. If you’re doing it right, it probably shouldn’t be. That sentence probably captures the essence of the entire experience better than any psychological model could:

Spent a day in emotional intelligence training. And I just felt emotionally drained.

Knowing Is Easy. Doing Is Hard.

Like most things in life, emotional intelligence is not about what you know. It’s about what you do. I thought I understood emotions. After all, I’ve written a book about happiness, worked with thousands of people on their personal goals¹, and lived through my fair share of highs and lows. But understanding a theoretical concept is one thing — applying it in the middle of an emotional whirlwind is something else entirely.

The human brain is wired to react emotionally before it responds rationally. Emotion fires faster than logic, so the feelings often come first, before you process anything else. It’s hardwired into the structure of our brain — particularly in the way our amygdala processes perceived threats before the prefrontal cortex even gets a say.²

In simple terms: we feel first, and think later.

Your Feelings Are Real — But That Doesn’t Make Them True