Emotional Maturity Is An Awakening That Is Not Defined By Age

Emotional maturity is not a normative entity that is reached at a certain age. Our world, whether we like it or not, is full of adults who achieve professional success while still showing the emotional management of a three-year-old child. We are therefore facing a dimension as sophisticated as it is intimate, it is an awakening to self-esteem, empathy and that social life based on respect.

There are those who see adolescence and early youth as a kind of joyous nonsense, there where follies are justified, there where there is no shortage of those who with a long sigh say that “nothing happens, they will mature, they are young . ” We forget, perhaps, that the simple fact of reaching adulthood does not grant us the card of absolute truths, of that maturity that knows everything and that gets everything right, where one is immune to errors, where one is they resist frustrations and you become a real social guru.

This focus error has its possible origin in the word “maturity”. We all assume the idea that the brain goes through very specific stages where as we get older, each structure develops and consolidates each region with its millions of synapses until culminating in that perfect engineering that is the prefrontal cortex, that destined area to decision making, planning and that also orchestrates our social behavior.

Well, it is important to bear in mind that as experts in cognitive neuroscience explain to us, the brain is always in continuous growth. Furthermore, a work published in the Journal of Neuroscience shows that many of our association fibers of the white matter, associated with cognitive tasks, never stop growing if we maintain, yes, an active life, if we encourage curiosity , interest, sociability …

By all this we mean something very simple. Emotional maturity does not appear in your 30s or 40s. The plasticity and potential of our brain is such that we need learning, continuous interactions and early teachings. It is in this “joyous and crazy childhood” when the 6-year-old child will appreciate being taught to manage emotions. .

We all seem mature and well prepared

All of us appear to be an effective, triumphant and very valid maturity for this society where prepared and highly qualified people are needed in infinite abilities and capacities. Now, as Tony Campolo, a sociologist at the University of Baltimore, explains, we are giving the world adults with an “atrophied” emotional maturity.

However, be careful. This does not mean that they are “evil” people, but that what we actually have are men and women incapable of being happy, of giving happiness and of creating facilitating, harmonious and even productive environments.

The reason for this is explained, according to experts, for a number of very specific reasons. One of them we can see without a doubt in our youth: they have at their disposal more information than previous generations. Many have grown up handling an infinity of stimuli, data, reinforcements … At home and at school they have been trained in multiple skills in order to reach the labor market and society “well prepared”. And they certainly are.

However, the problem is that we just “fill” their minds, but we do not train their brains in the most important skill of all, the emotional one. Because let’s get it straight: it ‘s no use being a software developer if I don’t know how to work in a team, if I can’t resist frustration. It is useless for me to aspire to be a manager if I do not have good emotional intelligence, if I do not know how to create a good work environment, empathizing, enhancing my human capital …

Developing emotional maturity requires humility and will

Emotional maturity does not come with age but is promoted from an early age. Emotional maturity does not come with damage either, that is, we do not have to go through a thousand adversities to know what life is and thus develop our personal strengths. In reality, there is no starting point, nor a normative moment, nor a trigger that, by itself, gives us the ability to be empathetic, reflective, assertive, skillful when it comes to resolving conflicts …

Emotional maturity is a daily investment, it is a continuous awakening towards oneself and towards others. To achieve it, we need to put into practice a series of habits, a series of strategies that will only work if we promote them through the breath of will and the armor of humility.

These would be some key points to promote in our day to day:

• L os errors are errors, not shirk, asúmelos and learn from them.
• Do not fear changes, changes allow us to create ourselves, and change is also maturing.
• You are not the center of the universe but you are part of a whole where your presence is also relevant and essential. So respect others as much as you respect yourself.
• Emotionally validate others, practice useful empathy: it is not enough to understand others, you must show that you understand them. The feeling without action is useless.

• Practice detachment: do not let anything or anyone be so important to you as to lose your essences, your identity, your ability to decide, to act, to be free.
• Accept that sometimes you lose, but understand that surrender is not allowed.
• Stop focusing on the complaints, on what you don’t like. If something is uncomfortable or you don’t like, have the courage to change or accept it.

To conclude, with all that we have explained, it should be clear to us that the one who is older is not the most mature, but the one who has learned the most in his years lived, be it 20, 30 or 70. For this, we must assume the firm responsibility of take care of ourselves,.

Images courtesy of Josephine Wall