Emotional Intelligence

Emotions Shape Our Lives and Link Us to Emotional Intelligence

Why doesn't anybody like Lucy Leroy? As she'll be quick to tell you, she's smart, conscientious, well organized, and industrious. She cares about other people; she really does. But time after time, when the invitations go out, her name is left off the list; she hears chitchat of lunch plans in the making at the office but eats alone at her desk.

And whatever happened to Tom O'Brian? Tom was the kid in the neighborhood all the moms envied--so smart he got sent to a school for gifted kids; so creative his inventions won science prizes usually reserved for much older children. He was awarded a scholarship to some Ivy League school, but lately a rumor's been circulating that he dropped out and is repairing toasters out of his apartment. Could it be possible?

How about you? How's your life going? Have you achieved all you expected you would? Are you content with the number and depth of your friendships? Is your marriage the fountain of intimacy and support you dreamed it would be? Have you been promoted with the alacrity you deserve at work? Do you feel generally at ease in the world--or a little out of synch, for reasons you can't quite discern?

If you feel out of synch; if you answered no to many of the questions above, I can diagnose your problem in a snap. You're normal. You, Lucy, Tom--and Dick and Harry and Jane and Joan--are average, red-blooded thinking Americans, trained in family, school, and work to value the intellect and devalue the emotions, to squelch passion and to use your head to "figure out" what your body is feeling, to be, in short, smart--not emotional.

But what exactly is "smart" and at what cost do we stifle the emotional component of our identities?

I say the price is far too high, for ignoring our emotions leaves all of us at least to some degree -lacking the skills we need to lead healthy, satisfying, fulfilling lives. Our IQ may help us understand and deal with the world on one level, but we need our emotions to understand and deal with ourselves and, in turn, others. Without an awareness of our emotions, without the ability to recognize and value our feelings and act in honest accordance with those feelings, we cannot get along well with other people, we cannot get ahead in the world regardless of how "smart" we are, we cannot make decisions easily, and we are often simply at sea, out of touch with our sense of self.

Culturally, Americans (along with many other Western societies) have been taught to think of consciousness itself as an intellectual activity rather than as a heart or gut response. We've learned not to trust our emotions; we've been told emotions distort the allegedly more accurate information our intellect supplies. Even the term emotional signifies weak, out of control, even childish. "Don't be a baby!" we say to the little boy who is crying on the playground; "Leave him alone! Let him work it out!" we admonish the little girl who runs to help the little boy. In fact, we tend to mold our entire self image around our intellect. Our abilities to memorize and problem-solve, to spell words and do mathematical calculations are easily measured on written tests; those measurements are slapped onto report cards in the form of grades and ultimately dictate which college will accept us and which career paths we should follow. If we do not perform well on these standardized tests, we clearly feel the impact of the label--any goal we have becomes that much tougher to reach when we know we may well not be smart enough to attain it.

Does your instinct tell you there's something wrong with that picture? That's because as much as our society tells us being objective and rational is the way to get ahead, the sense that people weren't meant to be thinking-only beings runs strong in us all. When we see a film that moves us, we agree it was wonderful; when we see someone act with compassion, we applaud him or her. But we accept our emotionality only in the proper contexts: it's OK to cry at the movies but not on the job; it's fine to trust your gut playing poker but not when it comes to picking a product to market. Therein is the paradox. We are told to value the head and devalue the heart; instinctively, we value the heart and feel wrong for doing so. We are not wrong.

Raising Emotional Intelligence

In studying people with strokes, brain tumors, and other types of brain damage, scientists have recently made some fascinating discoveries about intelligence. When the parts of our brains that enable us to feel emotions are damaged, our intellects remain intact. We can still talk, analyze, perform excellently on IQ tests, and even predict how one should act in social situations. But under these tragic circumstances we are unable to make decisions in the real world, to interact successfully with other people and/or to act appropriately, to plan for the immediate or long-term future, to reason, or finally to succeed.

The exact neurological workings are not yet clear, but the brain imaging technologies that are now helping scientists "map the human heart" clearly suggest that the rational and emotional parts of the brain depend on each other.

In evolutionary terms our emotional facility is the more ancient, having existed in the primitive human brain stem well before the thinking part of the brain--the neocortex--even began to develop above it. Even more telling, though, is the fact that the centers of emotion in the brain continued to evolve right along with the neocortex and are now woven throughout that part of the brain, where they wield tremendous power over all brain functions. Could it be that emotion is meant to have more control of thought than thought has over emotion? Just a few years ago such a suggestion would have been scoffed at by scientists. But then along came Joseph LeDoux of NYU, who in the early nineties discovered that in fact the messages from our senses--our eyes, our ears--are registered by the brain structure most heavily involved in emotional memory--the amygdala--first, before moving into the neocortex.

This means emotional intelligence actually contributes to rational thought. That is why, physiologically, when the emotional centers of our brains are harmed, our overall intelligence is short-circuited. However, we don't need to suffer brain damage to rob our intellect of its essential emotional partner. We pay so little heed to our feelings now that our emotional resources have atrophied like any unused muscle.

Why Emotions Matter

According to a mounting body of evidence, feeling is the most powerful resource we have. Emotions are lifelines to self-awareness and self-preservation that deeply connect us to ourselves and others, to nature and the cosmos. Emotion informs us about things that are of utmost importance to us--the people, values, activities, and needs that lend us motivation, zeal, self-control, and persistence. Emotional awareness and know how enable us to recover our lives and our health, preserve our families, build loving and lasting relationships, and succeed in our work.

Since the early nineties, funds have been pouring out of the research coffers for study of emotion's role in our lives. Compelling support for the importance of feeling to intelligence and well-being has started to appear in popular books and other media outlets. So far, though, we have not been offered a way to make emotion one of our tools for learning about ourselves and navigating a fulfilling course through our world.

Emotions and Emotional Intelligence:

Emotions Shape Our Lives and Link Us to Emotional Intelligence Describes how emotion and its expression influence every aspect of our lives.

Good Leaders Use Emotional Intelligence is from an article written for a professional health journal that applies to all workplaces.

Emotional Intelligence Quiz This quiz gives you an indication of your comfort level with emotionally charged situations where emotional intelligence is called for.

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