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.