I'd probably need to argue their effectiveness, and I'm talking from a place of experience. This is an extract from an old piece:
"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."
And I even wrote a relatively recent piece about their danger and I believe that I have the duty to share it with, my cherished friend:
