Society sets about teaching us everything from reading to yoga to algebra.

We are in information overload. Whatever we want to learn, there is a YouTube video to help us. But how do we learn to be emotionally mature? We need to go back to school.….back to our emotional education.

Not Good Enough?
Think back to your school days…. You may have been prepared for work but were you prepared for life and for love? Were you prepared for rejection? Schools do little to teach us even the most basic emotional skills and how to manage them. Most of us leave school able to read, write, and add up. But emotionally, we have not evolved. The British education system tells us we are Not Good Enough. Where are the opportunities in classrooms to learn kindness, compassion, and love? Where do we find out how to learn from failure or manage our temper? We are leaving school emotionally illiterate.

Act your age not your shoe size
If we were to provide classes for sulkers, we could well see 7-year-olds sitting with 30-year-olds. The truth is that many of us have massive gaps in our emotional education. We may never have learned a healthier way of conflict resolution than sulking. So we go into our adult relationships and stay there, acting like big children. If we have never learned to feel respect for the opposite sex, we go into our adult relationships with the potential to be abusive. Take a look around you. Have we evolved into emotionally mature adults?

We are all standing in our emotional inheritance.

Emotional legacy
Most of us have wondered what our parents will leave us financially. But have you ever wondered what our parents will leave us emotionally? As a child, did we learn how to set boundaries so that our minds, bodies, and emotions were protected? Take a moment to think….What exactly is your emotional inheritance? It’s really important. Why? Because this is what we – in turn – leave to our children. Without emotional evolution, this becomes our emotional legacy to them.

Mind the gap

We all have emotional gaps. By doing a clear 360 of our life, we can begin to work out what we still need to learn. There is no shame in returning to complete our emotional education as adults. We may need to learn or remember emotional skills such as setting boundaries, saying yes or no, expressing sadness. There are also things we may need to unlearn – drinking to numb the pain or crying/losing our temper to get our own way. Learning new emotional skills will help us to recover our emotional freedom.

Love is a skill

We can face anything life throws at us if we create a solid emotional base. Every mistake or failure becomes a chance to learn and evolve. We can choose to enjoy the company of friends but not desperately seek it just to escape ourselves. With emotional maturity, we can gain focus for our goals, more honesty in our relationships, and even walk away from situations that may harm us. We gain our autonomy – making our own decisions based on our values not on our changeable emotions. The more we learn, the more we taste freedom. So let’s agree that our emotional education is lifetime learning. After all, love is a skill. So let’s think and feel it. This is the future. This is an emotional evolution.