Depending on whether you catch me at the gym, at work or at home you may think that I either role model the sign to the left or that I’ve got no business writing this post – and that’s no joke.  I’m generally a pretty serious person when the situation calls for it and I guess maybe I see the situation calling for it more often than not.  That doesn’t mean, however, that I don’t believe in the power of positive expression (yeah OK, smiling) as a major element of emotional health.  Lets take a closer look at emotional health as I think this vector of wellness has a lot of fascinating topics to explore in future posts.  In Health: The Basics emotional health is defined as follows:

This is the feeling component – being able to express emotions when appropriate, and to control them when not. Self-esteem, self-confidence, self-efficacy , trust, love, and many other emotional reactions and responses are all part of emotional health.

If you are wondering how I’m going to tie this to the gym well wonder no more.  I’m not seeing a whole lot at the moment but that doesn’t mean that emotional health isn’t a huge part of wellness – it just means that I can’t come up with a cool connection at the moment. Stay tuned though, I promise that I will! 

In the meantime I’d like to introduce you to the connect of emotional intelligence if you haven’t already heard of it, yeah its a thing.  Here’s the wikipedia definition for what its worth:

Emotional intelligence can be defined as the ability to monitor one’s own and other people’s emotions, to discriminate between different emotions and label them appropriately and to use emotional information to guide thinking and behavior. However, substantial disagreement exists regarding the definition of EI, with respect to both terminology and operationalizations.

I’ll get deeper into why I think this is such an important topic in future posts but for now check out the link above.  In the past 5 years or so you’ll find emotional intelligence referenced in a lot of the leading business books as a key trait of some of the worlds more influential leaders…