Emotional intelligence

1. Emotional Intelligence
Striving for excellence
What are the five main roles you play in life? Most would answer: Parent, sibling, daughter/son,
manager, team member. What qualities make you successful in these roles? The ability to
empathize, fulfill responsibilities, trust, care, discipline, communication, take initiative and many
more. How many of these qualities do you learn in school; in Science, English, Maths etc?
These life skills contribute to 93% of our success in personal, social relationships and in our
professional life. Research of a hundred companies of the Fortune 500 has shown that graduates
from top institutions get good jobs because of their academic qualifications, but 67% are fired in
their first six months due to lack of interpersonal skill.
No denying that education, technical know how, product knowledge etc play a vital role in goal
achievement. Yet, how this knowledge is used is what makes the difference between mediocre
and star leaders.
Emotional Intelligence (EI) gives us the ability to manage our feelings for appropriate and effective
expression. EI is the primary source of human energy, aspiration and drive, activating our
innermost feelings and purpose in life, and transforming them from things we think about to values
we live. EI is the energy needed to transform thoughts into deeds. Emotional competence (EC)
allows us to use the EI potential to the desired end.
IQ (Intelligence Quotient) changes little after our teen years. EI is largely learnt through
experiences. This is called maturity. Maturity comes through self-awareness, empathy (reading
feelings), social skills (handling those feelings artfully) and adeptness in these skills.
7% of leadership success is attributable to intellect (IQ); 93% to ‘other’ qualities, i.e. trust, integrity,
authenticity, creativity, honesty, presence and resilience.
We are constantly hearing two voices within us. One says, “Don’t eat that greasy food it has too
much calsterol.” The other says, “But it is delicious.” One says, “Wake up, it’s 6.30 a.m. Go for
your exercise.” The other says, “Just half-an-hour more sleep. It is so difficult to get out of bed.”
Whose voices are these? Which voice do you listen to?
One is your head, the logical, rational mind that gives you the reasons for doing or not doing
something; and the other is your heart, which tells you what you feel like doing. Most of the time
there is conflict between these two. The more the conflict, the greater the dissonance in your life.
The less the conflict, the greater the peace and contentment we experience.
What we call ‘heart’ as the center of feelings, is actually only the blood-pumping organ. Your
center of feelings is the amygdala that lies at the back of your head, close to where the spine
meets the brain.
What happens when, lets say, you see a snake? A visual signal first goes from the retina of the
eye to the thalamus, which is like a modem and translates the visual signals into the language of
the brain. Most of the message then goes to the visual cortex, where it is analyzed and assessed
for meaning and appropriate response. If that response is emotional, a signal goes to the
th
amygdala to activate the emotional centers (time taken 1/6000 of a second). But a smaller portion
of the original signal goes straight from the thalamus to the amygdala in a quicker transmission
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(1/12,000 of a second), allowing a faster (though less precise) response. Thus the amygdala can
trigger an emotional response – “Run to save your life,” before the cortical centers have fully
understood what is happening and give a logical response – “don’t run, stay still, the snake won’t
bite you.”
The amygdala is a repertoire of memories and responses that we enact without quite realizing why
we do so because the shortcut from the thalamus seems to allow the amygdala to be a repository
for emotional impressions that we have never known about in full awareness. (LeDoux).
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2. Emotional Intelligence
We are all endowed with Attributes. Each of us may look different, because we are genetically
unique, but each one of us can be patient, generous, forgiving, just and fair, caring, humble,
evolving, creative, honest etc. And we have the opposite of these traits as well. We can be
impatient, greedy, unforgiving – vengeful, unfair, uncaring, arrogant, stagnant, dishonest etc. The
ability to use these traits is our Aptitude. Whether we use the constructive ones or destructive ones
depends on our Attitude. That is why we are completely responsible and accountable for our lives.
In our lives we live through a series of experiences. How we react to these experiences
determines our destiny. AAA (triple A) forms the framework around which we can choose and
decide.
While our emotions have been wise guides in the evolutionary long run, the new realities
civilization presents have arisen with such rapidity that the slow march of evolution cannot keep
up. The first laws and proclamations of ethics – the Code of Hammurabi, the 10 Commandments
of the Hebrews, the Edicts of Emperor Ashoka can be read as attempts to harness, subdue and
domesticate emotional life.
What we are born with worked well for the first 50,000 generations, but not for the last 500
generations, and certainly not the last 5. We too often confront post-modern dilemmas with an
emotional repertoire tailored to the urgencies of the past.
All emotions are impulses to act. The root of the word emotion is motere, the Latin verb “to move”
and the prefix “e” is “to move away.”
Beliefs of the rational mind are tentative; new evidence can disconfirm one belief and replace it
with a new one – it reasons by objective evidence. The emotional mind takes its beliefs to be
absolutely true, and discounts any evidence to the contrary. That is why it is so hard to reason with
someone who is emotionally upset, no matter how sound the argument; it carries no weight if it is
not in line with the emotional conviction. Feelings are self-justifying, with a set of perceptions and
proofs all their own.
Our emotions guide us in facing predicaments and tasks too important to leave to intellect alone –
danger, painful loss, persisting toward a goal despite frustrations, bonding with a mate, building a
family. As these eternal situations were repeated over our evolutionary history, the survival value
of our emotional repertoire was attested to by its becoming imprinted in our nervous system as
innate automatic tendencies of the human heart.
The growth of the brain in the human embryo roughly retraces the evolutionary course. Emotional
memories are stored in the amygdala as rough wordless blueprints since they have been
established before infants have words for their experiences. That is why often we feel something
but are unable to express that feeling in words.
Place feelings and emotions on one side of a continuum and pure reason and logic on the other
extreme, balanced on a fulcrum. Since emotions are blind; love is blind, faith is blind, jealousy is
blind; because they are instinctive responses; if we respond to a stimulus based solely on
emotions, what would that make us? That would make us animalistic, as animals do not reason
before reacting. They are driven by instinct. On the other hand, if we respond to a stimulus based
only on reason, with no feelings what so ever, we would be like a machine, or a robot.
Being human means balancing our emotions and reason at the point of the fulcrum in the middle. It
is through the quest for this balance that we strive for excellence. We attain the ability to think
about our feelings and direct them. The fulcrum represents purpose. If you are on purpose, your
faculties of emotions and reason will become available, tuned in with the goal. You will find a well
of untapped energy you never thought existed; the floodgates of ideas will open up and you will
become a magnet, attracting others who seek the same dream.
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