Emotional Intelligence: Why you Should Care and Its Important Role at Work
Dear reader,
What is Emotional intelligence? Here’s what Wikipedia has to say: Emotional intelligence (EI), also known as emotional quotient (EQ), is the ability to perceive, use, understand, manage, and handle emotions.
And, why should you care?
Because emotions are part of the whole human experience and whether you know it or not, and perhaps despite your best efforts and what you might believe about how you operate, your life is run by your emotional life, just as the lives of others around you also are.
Emotions are driving the behaviors and decisions on a subliminal, subconscious level as they are constantly influencing your behaviors. The less aware you are of this fact, the more likely you will miss the importance of the emotional life in the quality of workplace culture.
And the less likely you will be to invest in the quality of workplace culture. But, as we all know, “culture eats strategy for breakfast” (Peter Drucker).
The importance of emotional intelligence at work
If you haven’t yourself had to go to therapy, or invested in personal development and social emotional work, you won’t necessarily have the organs of perception to see the undercurrents of the collective culture, the collective social emotional dynamics that may be playing out in your company.
Here’s another reason why you should care: without some social and emotional intellignce you may find connection with your workmates and team very challenging, either because you’re carrying too much of the emotional atmosphere around you – you’re too aware and impacted by it – or you do too little and are blindsided by office politics, gatekeeping, or gossiping. Either one, or any number of other possible challenges you experience, could potentially drive you to look for better culture elsewhere, only to find it’s challenging everywhere!
Google did a study a while back to learn why some teams were more high performing than others, and the single factor they had in common was what they called psychological safety. I haven’t read the study, but I have my own ideas about what makes for psychological safety and it ties neatly in with my version of what makes for emotional intelligence – its all the same thing in my view.
So the tools and concepts I’m going to share with you in a series of articles — this is the first — about emotional intelligence will also teach you how you can create psychological safety at work.
I have a different approach to emotions because I have a pretty clear distinction in my own mind between emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. I think this is important because otherwise we conflate things, and we don’t think them through deeply enough or observe our inner worknigs with enough care.
This is why a taxonomy of the inner life is really important; otherwise you’ll have a hard time understanding or putting a concept to what you’re observing. A taxonomy helps to refine your observation. This is what I have found at any rate.
Now, I do come from an esoteric perspective which means I am dealing with the inner life as a spiritual phenomena, and not as only a mere outcome of biological secretions, or neurological outputs. I come from the perspective that consciousness already exists before it is refracted via the body into thoughts and the consequences of thoughts into feelings and behaviors. This gives me a different epistemology from which to base my observations of the inner life.
I don’t want to imply that my approach is better than a more conventional approach, because the worldview of empirical science is doing a deep dive into the physical phenomena of the world and the human being, and this is necessary and important. I want to be able to add to that, that there is more to reality than JUST the physical reality. Its a yes and, not an either or. Moreover, the intellectual achievement of science is something we should embrace and use — build on — and not reject because its not mystical enough or some other dumb reason.
Emotions are not very pleasant to deal with
Many people do not want to think about a topic like emotions. Perhaps they don’t want to have to manage other peoples’ emotions nor face their own. But the reality is, you have to deal with your own emotions — and if you don’t like that idea, then you should know that the denial, ignoring, and suppression of emotions in order to get on with things has major health consequences, both mentally and physically.
At some point we all have to face our real feelings about things. We are feeling beings, just as we are cognitive and logic beings, and doing beings. It’s best not to deny that fact.
Now, despite what you might think I said right in the beginning, emotions are actually not the source point of the driving forces in your life. And this is where I can depart from conventional thinking about the emotional life.
What is actually driving your emotional life is what you believe – about yourself and about what kind of place the world is.
Thoughts always come before feelings. You have to have a concept in mind before you’ll know what you feel about it. If you feel anger, there is always a conclusion – a thought – that drives it. If you’re anxious, there’s a thought that is driving it. If you are resentful, you are resentful about something you are believing about life or another person whom you resent. And it goes on like this through all the emotions you experience on any given day.
If you don’t believe me, just try this idea out for yourself. Next time you feel an emotion, stop for a moment and try to see why you feel the way you do. What made you feel that way? Whatever that is, its a conclusion you’ve drawn, a belief you carry.
There is actually another force of influence I’ve identified going on below the waterline of your every day awareness: unmet needs. If you want to learn more about unmet needs and the havoc they play in your life, check out this podcast episode.
Here is a cross section of the driving forces happening within your inner life, called the ladder of influences driving behavior, that ties all these influences I’ve just mentioned together:
As you can see, there is a great deal going on beneath the surface of every day awareness! This is why it can be so challenging to get to the bottom of the matter when you’re really feeling upset about something, and you assume its something more on the surface of things, but actually it could be related to a deep place way below your awareness.
For example, often anger is a mask for deeper emotions such as grief or shame, driven by unmet needs that are in turn driven by deep beliefs you would need to really work to access.
The primacy of the thought life over everything else
Lately I’ve been doing a deep dive into Obsessive Compulsive Disorder because I’ve found that looking closely as the extreme expressions of mental disorders can teach us much about our consciousness and helps us see the phenomena of the soul life in bigger movements at the pathological end of the spectrum of experience.
This helps us see the same movements but at the subtler levels of a more “normal” affect. In the case of OCD, I am still researching but it has already brought up emotional intelligence — a term coined by psychologists John Mayer and Peter Salovey in 1990, subsequently gaining more widespread popularity through Daniel Goleman’s 1995 book on the subject.
Along a similar vein, I have long believed that anxiety is not about the emotion of fear so much as it is driven by a cognitive source which then stimulates emotions of fear, shame, terror, etc — which drive the anxiety. Generalized anxiety cannot really be explained by anything rational, and can at least be somewhat managed by approaches such as cognitive behavioral therapy, which uses logic and facts to help reveal the illogic of anxious catastrophizing.
But there are deeper cognitive dissonances that are playing out in the subconscious part of the mind. This layer is very challenging to get to, but is necessary in order to find one’s way out from generalized anxiety in my view. I talk about this more extensively in this episode.
With OCD, it is a thought that drives everything else, a thought that gets stuck, like groundhog day, endlessly repeating until things finally “feel right”. OCD is so interesting precisely because we struggle to really understand what drives it.
And, the reason why I’m mentioning anxiety and OCD, is that I think you’ll find that it is the thought that comes before any emotions reveal themselves. It is always the thought that comes first to which particular emotions then become attached. And if we look at a more normal level of mental acitvity in the case of emotional intelligence, I propose to you that it is exactly the same.
How is it that one person can more easily manage their emotions compared to someone else? How can one person show more emotional intelligence than another?
I am going to explain and hopefully show you that it is the tone with which you put a concept to your observation that is the deciding factor.
What do I mean by this? If you are moving through the world with deep beliefs, out of sight to your normal awareness, that you are, let’s say by way of example, invisible to others and to the world, and that you don’t matter to anyone — in other words, this is a lens through which you observe, that color everything that you see going on around you — then every experience you have, every thought you think, is going to go through that filter.
So imagine, then, what you are going to feel about, well, everything? Well, not very good! Resentment, despair, helplessness, anger, outrage, shame — all are some possible ramifications.
Emotions will reinforce what you think, and make it true.
If you are feeling a lot of shame, then you will firmly believe you have something to be ashamed about. And once the feeling sets in, its very hard to persuade you that you have nothing to feel ashamed of. This is how anxiety and depression set in and become chronic.
Moreover, in my experience the combination of a deeply embedded and out-of-sight belief plus the emotions that accompany that thought creates an addiction. You then have something going on within you that is every bit as forceful and powerful as a chemical addiction.
And this is why I’m so interested in OCD; I suspect a stuck loop that may be approached from the perspective of an addiction, rather than something wrong with the physical brain. This is one possible reason why the OCD sufferers who can bear the therapeutic intervention of Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) often get better.
Remember though, none of what I’m saying here should ever be construed as medical advice, nor am I a medical professional. I am a researcher, exploring the spiritual nature of the mind, soul, and spirit. However, I do not want to shy away from talking about the difficulties and even pathologies of consciousness. I believe the more we understand about all this, the less we will “stigmatize” mental illness.
And on a more personal note, I had two very close friends in university who both suffered from OCD. They are the original inspiration behind my interest in the phenomena of consciousness because I was so deeply affected by their struggle with it.
To learn more about addiction and OCD, check out the book In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Dr Gabor Mate to understand more about what is behind chemical addiction. And if you are interested in OCD I’m currently reading this book which does a fantastic job of thoroughly explaining, in detail, what extensive research can tell us about this disease.
Emotional intelligence is a learned skill
I’m of the camp that says emotional intelligence can be learned and strengthened, but I think people often don’t really prioritize it, especially if they grew up in a family that cared more about outer qualities of life such as good grades, making a profit, academic careers, and other such outer considerations of life and work.
We don’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to our emotional regulation, unless we’ve spent time in therapy. Or, similarly, we are continually struggling with our emotions that are negatively impacting us and we seek help.
But I hope you can see that its very important that you do — strengthen your emotional intelligence capacity — and that if everyone did, we would actually all be better off. There are plenty of studies that show this, and more that show the consequences when we don’t.
I want to talk briefly about one objection that might have come up: that emotions have no place at work. It’s often seen as unprofessional to bring them to work.
Moreover, emotions are really difficult to deal with. And I agree with this when emotions are used in unhealthy ways — like in domination, bullying, manipulation, power dynamics, sabotaging meetings with “emotion bombs”, or asking everyone to tip toe around your feelings. But this just proves my point actually, that we need to become more conversant with emotions so we don’t let these kinds of behaviors get an upper hand and destroy relationships, undermine the culture, or negatively impact efficiency and good work.
Emotions can be overwhelming and scary, and there are many reasons why, but one example could be a parent who is too afraid to try and help their child by asking them how they feel. They’re afraid that they won’t be able to handle the truth. Maybe because they have no idea what to do with all the difficult feelings that might come out, or maybe because they will fall into annihilating feelings of shame that they somehow failed their child, or other such unbearable feelings.
So on the one hand we already know how much more dangerous it is to suppress or deny emotions, especially when they are dark and difficult, but on the other it’s still easier than facing them which can present its own dangers such as the fear of losing control, of falling into an abyss, or losing oneself into a dark place, or being subsumed by one’s emotions. These are all understandable fears, and the reason why more and more people are going to therapy to get the help and support they need to navigate this minefield.
But there is a third alternative here, which is becoming skilled in handling emotions. To become more conversant in them, to get used to including them — and this aspect of being human — in our more day to day lives. How do we do this in healthy ways? Without becoming touchy feely, or too much, or too emotional? Or losing ourselves in them?
This is what cultivating emotional intelligence is supposed to help create, and I’m going to talk more about this in the next article in this series, coming out in the next coupe of weeks.
Warmly,
Louisa
P.S. if you know anyone who has been talking lately about emotional intelligence, please consider forwarding them this email and inviting them to sign up. I’m currently on a roll about this topic 😀
P.P.S. I have shifted things around on my website, changing some email services I’ve been using, and making things better. So things look a little different!