I do feel them, my friend! This is an extract from a piece I wrote on Aug, 2019:

"I became aware of Emotional Intelligence when I worked as an IT project manager, my last position before experiencing an existential crisis.

In a moment of truth, I admitted to myself how much I sucked at this thing called life, I decided, and not without completely freaking out, to quit everything and start the most rewarding investment of my life - in myself!

I won’t lie to you. My primary goal in this transformational journey was selfish; to recover from my perfectionism syndrome — a combination of a pleaser and an achiever, which left me with no psychological breathing space.

It took me a while, progressively developing my critical thinking until I could recognise which knowledge could help me grow for real — not simply numb the root causes of being stuck through exclusively using self-compassion and positive affirmations.

We can easily get trapped into the motivational ‘positive attitude’ tools. It can work for a while, it worked for me. I had post-its everywhere. I read them daily and tried to trick my subconscious program.

It worked so perfectly I became relaxed, generous, eloquent, patient— all that I could ever wish for in myself, until an incident or two wholly destroyed my fragile balance.

Luckily, my family was supportive, and unquestionably respected my decision to commit to the real transformation. I wouldn’t have been able to provide any coherent answer at that time anyway!"