WHY
EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE?
Today nearly everybody knows about emotional intelligence. Well, at least
most everyone has heard that term. Emotional intelligence is today a pretty
regular offering in organization as business has been discovering that it is
not sufficient to have smart and talented people on board, they also need to
have some basic emotional intelligence. In fact, the more a business
involves customers, teams, management, leadership, etc. the more emotional
intelligence is needed.
Why is this so? Why has emotional intelligence become popular and what is
it all about? The bottom line is that as a person can be intellectually
smart and know all kinds of things, if a person is not smart about oneself,
one's emotions, managing those emotions effectively, using one's emotions to
connect with others in healthy ways, etc., then one's I.Q. will be less
effective than it could be. E.Q. (emotional quotent) is about being smart
about people and about yourself as a person.
Obviously I.Q. is important, in fact, critical for a person to understand
his world and cope effectively within it. This is one's basic intelligence
in understanding and learning what you are doing, and how to do it. I.Q. is
primarily intelligence of the outside world. E.Q. speaks about your
intelligence of your inside world and the inside world of others. It is
your intelligence in how you handle yourself in relationship to others, your
social intelligence, your intra-personal intelligence, and your emotional
intelligence about how to get along well with others.
Why is it important? Because you and I are emotional beings. Because we
are social beings. Because a great portion of our ability to cope with
life, get along with others, and even get along well with ourselves depends
on our emotional intelligence. It's important because the "logic" that of
our internal world is very different from the "logic" of the external world.
For most of us, it's obvious that the "logic" of our emotions is not the
logic of mathematics or physics. Yet what may not be equally obvious is
that the "logic" of our thinking, reasoning, and interpreting also operates
from a different and unique logic.
In this series of articles, I will first identify what emotional
intelligence is, how we define it, and it's component parts. I will then
relate it to the NLP Model about emotional states. Long before the idea of
emotional intelligence arose, NLP had already focused on it and developed a
great many tools for developing it, only under the terminology of state.
Neuro-Semantics took this further as we introduced the idea of meta-states
which are, in fact, meta-emotions and all that is implied about these
higher/deeper emotional states.
>From there I will focus in the basics in Neuro-Semantics on what we call
Emotional Mastery. The purpose will be to offer many of the distinctions
and processes that we use to facilitate a greater ability to manage our
emotions. That's important for many reasons. First and foremost, to create
a sense of control. Then you will not feel that you are a victim of your
emotions. Then, instead of feeling that your emotions have you, you have
your emotions! Then, with a sense of being in control, you will be able to
manage your stress so it is not creating various kinds of psycho-somatic
illnesses and problems.
By managing your emotions you can then put them to good use- feeling the
emotions that move you (motivate you) to live life more fully- love, joy,
peace, etc. Then, you can turn on the emotions that feed curiosity and
wonder so that you can learn and develop, so that you can connect and
contribute, so that you can unleash your best potentials, and equally so
that you can use your negative emotions for your overall good.
There are no "bad" emotions, there are just emotions. And with every
emotion, there is a message of some sort. There are appropriate and
inappropriate emotions, depending on the context. There are useful and
unuseful emotions. There are emotions to live in (the positive emotions)
and there are emotions to notice, learn from, and release (the negative
emotions). And in the end, they are just emotions. They are not commands
from heaven. They are not infallible-they are entirely fallible. And
because they are fallible, they do not always tell us the truth.
L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.
