It's Smart to Feel
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.
The Heart
and the Head: Not So Separate After All
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.
A Name for
Emotional Smarts: EQ
Emotion and
intellect are two halves of a whole. That's why the term recently coined to
describe the intelligence of the heart is EQ. EQ is deliberately reminiscent of
the standard measure of brainpower, IQ. IQ and EQ are synergistic resources:
without one the other is incomplete and ineffectual. IQ without EQ can get you
an A on a test but won't get you ahead in life. EQ's domain is personal and
interpersonal relationships; it is responsible for your self-esteem, self
awareness, social sensitivity, and social adaptability.
When your EQ is
high, you are able to experience feelings fully as they happen and truly get to
know yourself. Keeping the lines of communication wide open between the amygdala
and the neocortex thus endows you with compassion, empathy, adaptability, and
self-control.
EQ provides a
critical edge in work, family, social, romantic, and even spiritual settings;
emotional awareness brings our inner world into focus. It enables us to make
good choices about what to eat, whom to marry, what job to take, and how to
strike a mutually healthy balance between our own needs and the needs of others.
Getting
Back to Lucy
All of this may
sound right--but does it feel a bit empty? That's because while I've told you
what EQ can bring, I haven't engaged your emotions in the process. I've supplied
words for your intellectual understanding. Now I'd like to try to hook your
empathy by taking a closer look at how a low EQ gets in the way of so many of
our day-to-day lives, out here in the real world.
Lonely
People Who Need People: Why People with a Low EQ Push Other People Away
There are reasons
Lucy is not on anybody's guest list. Lucy is a very angry woman. Maybe she's mad
she didn't get promoted; maybe she's furious that her mother loved her sister
more than her--we don't need to explore her reasons. (As we'll see, you don't
need in-depth analysis to raise your EQ.) But Lucy doesn't want to know she's
angry. Most of Lucy's focus is pushing away her feelings. And she's good at it.
She numbs herself to her own feelings through constant mental chatter: “No one
ever gives me a chance . . . They’re so unfair . . . It wasn’t my fault.”
She pushes those feelings right out--and right on to everyone else.
Because Lucy is
unaware of both her own feelings and the feelings of others, she is always
caught off guard and hurt by direct confrontations. She is therefore always on
guard. Lucy defends herself at every turn--if you say the room feels warm,
she'll tell you she was nowhere near the thermostat. When something upsets
Lucy--and most things upset Lucy--it is a complete surprise to her, and her knee
jerk response is "I've done nothing wrong."
People sense the
anger that Lucy tries to evade and get a vague feeling they'd rather not hang
around her. Meanwhile, rather than experience the pain of consistent rejection,
Lucy obsesses endlessly about how unfairly she is treated--and so perpetuates
the cycle.
A Lesson
for Lucy: EQ 101
Our
thoughts obscure our feelings and the crucial information that emotion provides.
As we'll explore
throughout this book, there is a major difference between experiencing our
feelings and thinking about them. Most of us are neophytes at the former,
laureates at the latter. Lucy intellectualizes about her feelings all the time,
shifting from feeling to thinking so quickly that she doesn't even realize she
has crossed a line. She broods, she wallows; she rationalizes and rehearses, and
in doing so all she does is change the emotion she experiences from internal
hurt into inappropriate, poorly hidden rage.
Through the
techniques in this book Lucy can learn to remain aware of all her feelings and
not be caught off guard by emotional exchanges. A higher EQ would give her the
ability to stay connected to herself even as she takes note of the feelings of
others. This ability would permit her to hear unpleasant things without becoming
defensive and to feel hurt without expressing that hurt as hostility. Lucy would
become a much more desirable person to be around.
Low EQ
plus High IQ = Repairing Toasters: Why Smart Folks Get Lost
I don't know why Tom
ended up repairing toasters, but I'd bet he got there very soon after he
experienced his first emotional setback. Maybe his father walked out on the
family; maybe his first love dumped him for a football player. Whatever it was,
it destroyed his confidence in a snap, because his entire identity was wrapped
around the fragile and unpredictable trait of intellect.
Our intellectual
abilities are innate and largely unchangeable. For very smart kids, good grades
come naturally. It is therefore often hard to develop a strong sense of
self-esteem when you are constantly rewarded for something that seems to be a
transient gift. It came easily--and perhaps could go just as easily. People like
Tom, who were in all likelihood encouraged to value only their intellectual
achievements at the expense of their inner selves, end up with little
fundamental sense of how they feel and therefore who they are. They are
devastated by their first emotional setback, with little or no ability to handle
the emotional fallout of even a minor failure. They do not know who they are if
they are not the smartest kid in town. They feel lost and often end up getting
lost, taking unchallenging jobs, giving up and dropping out.
An EQ
Lesson for Tom:
Without
EQ, IQ will always fall short.
Expecting to ride
through life on the coattails of a high IQ alone is like expecting to be handed
your first driver's license after only a written test. IQ predicts only how
we'll do on paper, how we measure up to standards set by someone else. EQ helps
us set our own standards.
That's because EQ
illumines our inner world. People who are emotionally intelligent know the
difference between what's important to them and what's important to someone
else; they also know the difference between what they need to survive and a
passing whim. Most important, they can weather life's thousands of setbacks.
They have a sense of proportion that the "brainiest" among us often
lose at a young age.
Low EQ on
the Job = Middle Management Forever
Ladies and
gentlemen, meet Henry. Henry is a brilliant accountant with an IQ of 160. Henry
spends much of his day at his desk, sweating out figures in a race against
himself and succeeding often enough to go home a little early. Henry spends much
of his evenings complaining to his wife: "My boss has an IQ of 90. He has
no idea what I do! My coworkers never give me the support I need to get things
done right." This is all true. Is it unjust? Henry thinks so, and so does
his ulcer.
What Henry hasn't
told his wife is that his work is unimpressive in the ways that really matter.
He's oblivious to the fact that he's a lousy troubleshooter who gets so bogged
down in detail he rarely see the big picture. He also doesn't see his boss
grimace when he hands her unnecessarily technical and complex reports that are a
painful struggle to decipher. It doesn't occur to him that everyone sees him
leave early at least once a week but no one's around to notice how often he
comes in early because his ulcer often wakes him up before the alarm.
Henry doesn't see
why he should spend any time worrying about other people's feelings. After all,
he never gets any sympathy from them when, year after year, he's passed over for
promotion, does he?
Henry's EQ
101 Lesson:
While
thinking certainly interferes with feeling, feeling does not interfere with
thinking.
Intellect alone
cannot help Henry--or any of us--navigate the choppy political and psychological
waters of an office full of people, each with a different set of needs and
desires. It takes empathy to second-guess a boss and learn which projects really
carry the most corporate weight; to see a secretary's tension and not overload
her with work on that particular day; to sense a client's dissatisfaction with
your team's work despite his protestations.
Despite what our
cultural prejudices tell us, emotional acceptance actually supports our ability
to reason effectively. Were Henry to follow the principles of this book, and
learn to raise his EQ, he would find his intellectual accomplishments expanded
and his social skills enhanced. Secure in his ability to perceive and respond to
his own emotional needs, Henry can risk reaching out and responding to the needs
of others. In doing so, he will get ahead--big time. And maybe do something
about that ulcer in the process.
When You
Know How You Feel, You Know How You Feel
Sandy can't make up
her mind. When she goes out to dinner, she orders "whatever everybody's
having." She falls in love at the drop of a hat, unfortunately often with
two men at once. Her relationships are passionate and short-lived. When pressed
about her indecisiveness, she bursts into tears. "I just don't know what I
want!" she yells.
Sandy is certainly
emotional, but like so many low-EQ people, she hasn't really learned to trust
her full range of feelings. When she doesn't like how she feels, she tries to
cast it off by acting out her emotions--but her feelings remain tied to her
intellectual expectations of what she should do and how she should act. She
knows she should find a mate, so she ignores her heart's messages that she's
with the wrong men. She knows everything there is to know about what to order in
a restaurant (low-fat, skip the veal, go-ahead indulge, keep the price down,
know the wine, skip the wine), but that knowledge gives her no clue as to what
she really wants. Her head spins, and she just feels like crying.
Sandy's EQ
101 Lesson:
Decision
making is a key benefit of raising your EQ.
While intellect can
tell us many things objectively, it can't tell us how we feel, and it's our
feelings that make our decisions wise.
Passive or
Paralyzed: It's All in Your Head
Frank's wife would
love it if he would just remember to take out the garbage. Frank's boss would
love it if he would just take out a little initiative and call a meeting when a
problem arises instead of waiting for someone else to point it out. Frank's kids
would love it if he would just ask them, for once, to do something with him.
Frank says he wishes he would do these things. He can see how easy they seem to
be to others. He thinks about all the things he could or should do. And he
doesn't do anything.
Frank's EQ
101 Lesson:
Intelligence
helps us recognize a range of actions but doesn't drive us to act; emotion does.
The root of the word
emotion is the Latin motere, which means "to move." It is our emotions
that release us from paralysis and motivate us to act. In fact, the more
passionate we are about something, the more we are apt to act on it.
Moreover, studies
have shown that we remember best those events that move us most deeply
emotionally. People like Frank, who have closed themselves to the emotional
significance of any action, often simply have a hard time remembering what they
have promised to do.
Frank can
see--coldly, clinically, logically--the sense in changing his ways. But until he
masters the skills of active emotional awareness taught in this book, he'll
remain distracted by intellectual demands, losing touch with the deep, strong
feelings that drive the desire to act. By rooting us in a source of motivation
that does not disappear as our interests shift, EQ keeps our determination
fixed.
How Can
Someone So Loud Be So Out of Touch?
Rod is an attractive
man and an excellent dentist. But his temper is more painful to bear than a root
canal. Despite his technical skills, he loses patients right and left. Maybe
it's because he rants and raves about the world's problems while clients squirm
uncomfortably in his chair, or maybe it's more personal. For example, Rod
attended to the dental needs of three members of the same family: father,
mother, and college age daughter. Rod inadvertently said something that offended
the young woman. When the protective father brought the incident up, Rod slammed
down his instruments and asked the man, through clenched teeth, how he could
possibly know what had happened without having been there. This is not an
emotionally intelligent response.
People with low EQs
do have feelings, and those feelings do build to a point of overwhelming them at
times. Indeed they are more likely to become emotionally overwhelmed than people
who consistently recognize the physical signals that herald emotion, because in
time suppressed emotions can bubble to the surface, provoking physical ailments
and causing unexpected emotional outbursts.
Rod distracts
himself from feeling unpleasant feelings by blaming others--and hollering.
Rod's EQ
101 Lesson:
Feeling
your emotions isn't a sign of weakness.
Because we've been
told it's self-indulgent, most of us impose strict rules on how, when, where,
and how much we allow ourselves to feel. If we cry at all, we don't do it in
front of others. When we're angry, we bite our tongues. When we're hurt, we
force a smile. But such actions backfire miserably for us all. It's healthy for
mind, body, heart, and spirit to feel our feelings when they occur.
Unexperienced feelings pop out, as we've seen in all of these examples, in
self-destructive ways. If Rod adopts the techniques in this book, he'll discover
that most strong feelings don't last long at all. Let them happen, and they
leave us with a clear head, a contented heart, and greater self-control. Fight
them, and they come back to haunt us.
High EQ =
Infinite Possibilities
It's pretty clear
how much easier life would be for us all if Lucy, Tom, Henry, Sandy, Frank, and
Rod--and you and I--got an EQ boost. You can't feel at home in the world if
you're not comfortable in your own skin. Once you are--once you've learned to
accept your emotional self--every facet of your life can benefit.
Thirteen-year-old
Brent has started asking his parents to come to his junior-high basketball games
instead of pretending he doesn't know them--now that Beth and Alan ask
themselves "How is our son feeling?" instead of "What was he
thinking?"
Anne now knows
exactly when pleasing her aging parents begins to impose too much on her own
needs. For the first time in her adult life, her parents are happy with all she
gives, and Anne no longer has to feel guilty about "letting them
down."
Friends have noticed
(with a twinge of envy) that Jeff and Barb are suddenly acting like new
lovers--after 20 years of marriage. Their secret? They've put away the sex
manuals and starting reading each other's feelings.
They said it would
never happen, but Sam is finally telling Jenny he wants less yard work, more
evenings out without the kids, and more control of the family checking
account--and he's getting it.
Unless you
know what you want, you can't ask for it.
Why EQ Is
a Stronger Ally than IQ
As Sam learned, it's
never too late to get what you want out of life. I believe we have EQ -- not IQ
-- to thank for that fact. In fact, for any high-IQ disbelievers out there,
here's one very objective reason to give EQ a hearty round of applause:
You can change your
EQ.
You're stuck with
your IQ forever.
Growing emotionally
is a lifelong process, a beautiful part of our human potential. You can always
learn to become aware of your feelings, to accept them, and to use the
information they offer to the advantage of yourself and others. Time and again
I've seen people of advanced age make great leaps in EQ. And the sky's the
limit.
IQ is a different
story. You were born with--or without--the capacity to develop math, linguistic,
or other testable intellectual skills. How close you come to your intellectual
potential may be affected by your environment or your EQ, but that potential is
fixed, predetermined--a fact.
How much EQ you can
develop over a lifetime is determined by only one thing--motivation.
Fortunately, I've found EQ is kind of like golf: once you're hooked, you're
compelled to keep trying to improve your game.
How to Get
Smart
I know there are
very clear ways to increase your EQ. I've used them myself and helped hundreds
of clients and thousands of seminar attendees change their lives using the
instruction and exercises presented in this book.
Think of
getting emotionally smart as another trip through school:
Step 1: Elementary School--Feeling Our Bodies' Feelings
When we enter
emotional elementary school, we have little sense of our own bodies and
therefore our own feelings. Yet we don't have to reach too deeply into our
experience to recognize that all emotions are physical events. You can probably
remember feeling serious fright as a pang in the pit of your stomach, sorrow as
a heavy weight in your chest, joy as a euphoric swelling around your heart. The
only feeling we have in our heads is a headache. So our elementary curriculum
involves learning to recognize the feelings in our bodies by doing the exercises
in Chapter 3.
Step 2: High School--Accepting Those Feelings
Becoming aware but
not accepting of our emotions is like getting into shape and then taking up
smoking. What was the point? In Chapter 4 I'll show you how to build the stamina
that I call “emotional muscle” so you can live with what you've found out
about your feelings--especially how to cut off the intellect when it inevitably
tries to intrude and distort the emotional messages you're receiving.
Step 3: College--Hanging in There
You can get pretty
adept at using those skills of emotional awareness and acceptance within the
hallowed halls of your high school (kind of like winning at "Jeopardy"
from your living room), but now rivalries become intense, relationships blossom,
responsibilities multiply . . . You're in college, away from home for the first
time. You need a way to hold on to the tools you've acquired now that you're out
there in the halls of life.
Developing active
emotional awareness--fully experiencing every emotion we feel every day--and
using it along with our powers of cognition to set a course in life takes acute
sensitivity. I'll show you how to turn emotional awareness into a lifetime habit
in Chapter 5.
Graduation
with Bonus Points
The benefits of a
high EQ ripple outward in ever-widening circles. Simply put, those who care for
themselves can also care for others. So your bonus for recognizing and accepting
your feelings and withstanding all the external pressures to ignore them is
great empathy. In Chapter 6 we'll learn to strike a balance between caring for
others and caring for ourselves.
How Much
Emotional Muscle Do You Already Have?
As I've said, anyone can get into this school at any time. But it always
helps to know where you stand from the start. So let's begin by gauging the
emotional muscle you're bringing to the classroom.
A
Brief Entrance Exam
Pop quiz time. Take
this quiz quickly--no thinking allowed. Fill in the following statements with
never, rarely, sometimes, frequently, or always. Answer as rapidly as possible;
don't pause to flex your intellectual muscle!
1. Feeling left out or ignored (never, rarely, sometimes, frequently, always)
troubles me.
2. When I have done something I'm ashamed of, I (never, rarely, sometimes,
frequently, always) can admit it.
3. It (never, rarely, sometimes, frequently, always) upsets me when a stranger
is less than friendly to me.
4. I (never, rarely, sometimes, frequently, always) laugh at my vulnerabilities.
5. I (never, rarely, sometimes, frequently, always) beat myself up for making
mistakes.
6. I (never, rarely, sometimes, frequently, always) can recognize my
imperfections without feeling guilty.
7. When someone gets angry at me, it (never, rarely, sometimes, frequently,
always) spoils my day.
8. I (never, rarely, sometimes, frequently, always) experience a full range of
feeling every day, including sadness, anger, and fear.
9. My intense emotions (never, rarely, sometimes, frequently, always) cause me
to feel out of control.
10. I (never, rarely, sometimes, frequently, always) agonize over decisions or
put off decision making.
11. Other people's intense emotions (never, rarely, sometimes, frequently,
always) cause me to feel out of control.
How did you do? To
oversimplify, if your EQ is nearing its full potential, you probably answered
"never" or "rarely" to the odd-numbered questions and
"always" or "frequently" to the even-numbered questions. But
before you start to picture yourself smugly handing this book back to the
well-meaning friend who gave it to you, please bear with me for just a few more
questions:
Did you take the
test quickly? If you agonized over your answers (and the possible implications
for your own deficient character) or tried to "psych out" the test by
answering the way you think you should, your intellect is firmly in control,
your emotional muscle pretty flabby. (Yes, Henry, the accountant, finished
quickly, but only thanks to incredible mental speed. And, yes, after reading the
preceding paragraph, he handed the book back to his wife, who had bought it for
him.)
Do you think the
test is stupid? The urge to disown our (possibly incriminating) feelings can be
so strong that your first and lasting reaction may have been scorn for the
oversimplification of this modest little quiz. You're not ready to suspend
disbelief and just see what your emotions can tell you. (Lucy got so involved in
an imaginary confrontation in which I was shamed into admitting that I had set
up this quiz just to make her look stupid that she never even got to question
3.)
Did you go back and
change any of your answers? Rod started out answering "never" to the
odd-numbered questions and "always" to the others. Then he got up from
his desk, got a cup of coffee, returned, and erased his answers, replacing all
of his nevers with either "rarely" or "sometimes." After
"proofreading" his test once more, he agitatedly scratched out his
answers, replaced all of them with "sometimes," then tore the page out
of this book, crumpled it up, and stomped out of his office.
Obviously you’re
not alone if the quiz showed your intellect is in control. I’ll explain why
we’re all in that boat in Chapter 2. But even if you think you aced this
little quiz, your answers may not have come from the heart, despite your
intentions. What's more important for now is how you felt about taking the test
and how you feel now. Even unpleasant discoveries you've made, like how much
pressure you place on yourself for silly reasons, are opportunities for
emotional growth. Grab whatever chances you get. You're in the door and on your
way to higher emotional learning!
Looking
Ahead: What Your Diploma Will Bring
All this is not to
say there is no risk in raising your EQ. The price we pay for the information
about ourselves that emotions bring forth is that it often conflicts with sacred
beliefs about how secure we feel or how pleased we are with various choices we
have made. Many of us would rather not be aware of our vulnerability and
culpability.
Then why do we take
the risk? Because safety comes at the price of loneliness, isolation, and
stress. But even more because EQ heightens the highs. Studies have shown that we
can feel only as high as we can feel low. If we're willing to learn to recognize
and feel our most frightening anger, our most distressing sadness, our scariest
fears, we stand to reap no less than ecstasy. As you will see in Chapters 7-9,
these lessons give us unlimited potential for enhancing love, work, and family
life.
So I invite you to
join me as we enter the school of the heart. I promise you that following the
exercises in this book will help you feel that you fit in; it will armor you to
weather life's invariable emotional setbacks, to understand how others are
feeling and why they may respond to you in distressing ways, to make up your
mind, to avoid inappropriate emotional outbursts, to raise emotionally healthy
children, and to feel in synch with the world. Big promise?
Feeling is
believing.