Overcoming Barriers as a Nepali Woman Through Emotional Intelligence: My Emotional Literacy Journey Into My PhD in Educational Leadership

This article explores my process of being emotionally literate, realizing my personal power through this process, and deciding to move ahead with my Ph.D. to explore further my contribution to the flourishing of humanity. In this qualitative reflective self-study, I have used my detailed personal, professional, and academic reflective journal and audiovisual narratives that I kept over seven years as data to explore the process of learning. The article reveals my process of learning from my experiences as a confused Nepali girl to my experience of working as a journalist, to becoming an aspiring educational leader and a researcher. The results are discussed using a microscopic lens into my childhood together with an understanding of how social settings played a major role in my learning and how emotional intelligence played an instrumental role in deconstructing that and helped me understand myself better, urging me to explore further through my Ph.D. research as an educational leader.