Applied EI E-Book

Tim Sparrow

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 466

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

A decade on from its birth, emotional intelligence is attracting more attention than ever before. Why? Because of its proven connection to performance. Tomorrow's leaders will have to be facilitators who work collaboratively to help others develop their potential, and this will require emotionally intelligent skills and attitudes. Against this landscape, Applied EI provides the tools and advice needed to develop and manage a relationship with yourself and create positive relationships with others - the twin cornerstones of emotional intelligence.

We're all capable of acting with emotional intelligence. Most of us don't, because internal interferences - misguided beliefs and attitudes learnt in childhood - get in the way. Countering this, Applied EI attaches unique importance to the role of attitudes in developing and applying emotional intelligence. Tim Sparrow and Amanda Knight stress that EI isn't a synonym for personality; it's about managing personality. That's why knowing how to put EI into practice is essential. And that's why reducing EI to a single number or score misses the point, and serves only to give us another measure by which to judge ourselves and others.

Anyone interested in performance improvement today needs to be interested in emotional intelligence. Applied EI shows how our attitudes underpin our EI, explores how to develop emotionally intelligence attitudes, and lays out tactics for applying them in practice. It discusses what is needed at individual, team and leadership development levels, and considers what it means to be an EI practitioner. Its practical approach and unique perspective make it a must-read for anyone involved in the field of personal development.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Who this book is for

How to use the book

Introduction

Acknowledgements

PART I - How Our Attitudes Underpin Our EI

Chapter 1 - Why EI now?

The ever-increasing pace of change

A crisis of meaning

The arrival of EI

Why is EI the answer?

Reference

Chapter 2 - IQ and EI

The two sides of emotional intelligence

The three-layered cake

Where do the ideas come from?

Four false “facts” about intelligence

EI / EQ / IQ

References

Chapter 3 - What is Applied EI?

What is emotion?

What are feelings?

What is an attitude?

Who controls our feelings?

Our definition of EI

The five crucial aspects of EI

Reference

Chapter 4 - The vital importance of attitude

Judgement - the enemy of understanding

Acceptance of self and others - I’m OK, You’re OK

The eight principles of emotional intelligence (the vital underlying beliefs ...

The key determinants of performance: KASH

A word about Transactional Analysis (TA)

References

Chapter 5 - Optimising personal performance

Body intelligence

Minimising your interferences and reducing stress

Maximising your potential

Optimising your personal performance

References

PART II - Developing Emotionally Intelligent Attitudes

Chapter 6 - Measuring our personal EI

Our emotional intelligence model

Our emotional intelligence diagnostic tool

Reference

Chapter 7 - Kind regards

1 Self Regard - Accepting and valuing yourself

2 Regard for Others - Accepting and valuing others

3 Relative Regard - Our life position

Raising self esteem / self regard

How to develop your self regard

How to develop your regard for others

Reference

Chapter 8 - Facilitating EI development 1 - “Meeting”

Conditional self regard

Understanding our conditions of worth

Interindividual differences

References

Chapter 9 - Body awareness

4 Self Awareness

5 Awareness of Others

Chapter 10 - Facilitating EI development 2 - “Being with”

Combining empathy and real listening

Giving strokes

Chapter 11 - Managing oneself

6 Emotional Resilience

7 Personal Power

8 Goal Directedness

9 Flexibility

10 Personal Openness and Connectedness

11 Invitation to Trust

Chapter 12 - The art of relationship management

12 Trust

13 Balanced Outlook

14 Emotional Expression and Control

15 Conflict Handling (Assertiveness)

16 Interdependence

Chapter 13 - Knowing oneself

17 Reflective Learning

18 Self Knowledge (Accuracy of self assessment)

Managing interferences

21 Day commitment - changing a habit

Part III - Applying Emotionally Intelligent Attitudes

Chapter 14 - The emotionally intelligent organisation

Meeting business needs

Culture

EI and change

EI in competencies and appraisals

Reference

Chapter 15 - EI in leadership

What is emotionally intelligent leadership?

Developing emotionally intelligent leadership

Authentic leadership - being the change

Reflecting on your own leadership

References

Chapter 16 - EI for teams

The EI qualities of a high-performing team

The Team Effectiveness Questionnaire

EI development for different kinds of teams

Chapter 17 - Assessing EI

The problems with EI measurement

Evolution of EI profiling

Why are you measuring EI?

Using an EI measure

The Individual Effectiveness questionnaire

Other schools of thought

Working with other constructs

Linking the Emotional Intelligence framework with Jungian Typology

References

Chapter 18 - The EI practitioner

Creating emotionally intelligent learning interventions

Being an emotionally intelligent EI consultant

Emotionally intelligent practices

Reference

Appendix: Contact information

Further reading

Index

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sparrow, Tim.

Applied EI : the importance of attitudes in developing emotional intelligence / Tim Sparrow and Amanda Knight.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN : 978-0-470-68751-2

1. Employees - Coaching of. 2. Emotional intelligence - Study and teaching. 3. Attitude (Psychology) 4. Adaptability (Psychology) 5. Management - Psychological aspects. I. Knight, Amanda, 1964- II. Title.

HF5549.5.C53S67 2006

658.3’82 - dc22

2006016611

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Typeset in 11/15pt Goudy by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall, UK This book is printed on acid-free paper responsibly manufactured from sustainable forestry in which at least two trees are planted for each one used for paper production.

It is not your aptitude, but your attitude that determines your altitude. Zig Ziglar

To the CAEI Steering Group - David, Jo, John, Matt, Maureen and Richard. For your support, commitment and energy. Thank you.

Who this book is for

This book is aimed at three categories of people.

1. Anybody, private individual or member of an organisation, who wants to

enhance their personal effectiveness in the world and their life outcomes, and/or to

improve the quality of their personal relationships, and/or to

improve their health, both physical and emotional, and/or to

increase their happiness, and who

understands that developing their emotional intelligence is the royal road towards the achievement of these aims.

2. Anybody who has organisational responsibility for performance improvement; in other words, anyone who has managerial responsibilities of any kind. (The more senior you are, the more your organisation will benefit if you take on the lessons of this book.)

3. Anyone whose role is to facilitate personal or organisational change, including management consultants, personal or management development specialists, coaches (both executive coaches and life coaches), counsellors and psychotherapists.

While these three categories are conceptually distinct, we hope that in practice they will overlap, that those with the responsibility for performance improvement (2) will also want to make the shift for themselves (1). And even more that those whose job is to facilitate change (3) will also want to embark on personal change (1): they will not be effective change facilitators unless they do so.

How to use the book

This book grew largely out of our nine month course for professional EI practitioners, and like that course is ideally designed to be started at the beginning and then gone through until the end. However, we recognise that different people have different priorities, and in particular that busy managers may be tempted to go straight to sections of Part 3 “Applying Emotionally Intelligent Attitudes” which have particular implications for them or for their organisation. We have therefore attempted to make this possible by introducing summary reviews of the foregoing theory into the various chapters of Part 3. So, if you find yourself coming across repetitions of the basic models, please note that this is deliberate and for a purpose. By all means skip the repetitions if you want to.

Introduction

We believe the exploration of the notion of emotional intelligence to be the most significant event in the fields both of personal development and of management theory in the last twenty years. Properly understood and applied, we believe it to have the potential both for transforming individual people’s life experience, their health, happiness and success, and for transforming the effectiveness of work organisations.

The last ten years have seen a growing acceptance of the importance of emotional intelligence as a significant variable in determining organisational outcomes. However, as with any new field, there is a variety of conflicting views about the nature of what is being talked about, and indeed about what we need to do about it. We meet a lot of people who are at the point of saying: this is obviously important, but what exactly is it, and what do I need to do about it? It is those questions that we address in this book.

The main thing that distinguishes the view of the Centre for Applied Emotional Intelligence (see page 297), which is what is outlined here, from other approaches to the subject is that we see emotional intelligence neither as an intellectual capacity, nor as an aspect of personality, nor as just another term for soft skills. But rather it is a characterisation of our habitual stance towards self and the world, which is determined largely by the attitudes we hold. The happy result of this fact is that it is entirely changeable and developable. Hence its importance: it is highly influential of our personal and organisational outcomes, and it is something we can do something about.

What it is that we need to do all depends on where we - or our team and our organisation - are now. Hence we need to understand the various different aspects of emotional intelligence, how to measure them and how to develop them. All of that is set out in this book, and we hope that it will facilitate readers to embark on, or to pursue, a successful programme of personal and organisational change.

We wish you all success in the enterprise.

Tim Sparrow Amanda KnightJune 2006

Acknowledgements

The chief acknowledgement that we each need to make is to the other. Luckily our strengths are complementary. Tim has been the originator of much of the theoretical development that is contained in this book. However, if Tim has been the thinker, Amanda has been the feeler and the doer: it is she who has ensured that the thinking is accessible, that the book has been created, and that it has taken the form that it has.

Both of us wish to acknowledge the contribution of the Centre for Applied Emotional Intelligence’s partners: Jo Maddocks (Tim’s co-designer of theand the) and John Cooper of JCA Occupational Psychologists of Cheltenham, and Matt King of Activate Training in Lymington in the New Forest, specialists in outdoor experiential learning.

As are all writers on the subject, we are indebted to Daniel Goleman for having popularised the idea of emotional intelligence in the 1990s and for having pursued his development of the theory so energetically and so creatively. We are also grateful to Dr Alex Concorde for her contribution to our understanding of the physical basis of emotional intelligence, and for her endorsement of this book.

Individually, we each of us have more debts to acknowledge than can fully be enumerated here. Tim particularly wants to thank Dr Elizabeth Morris, the Principal of the School of Emotional Literacy, and professors Maria Gilbert and Charlotte Sills who introduced him to Transactional Analysis - and to the idea of personal change - for their contributions to his thinking. Amanda wishes to thank in addition Ian Havelock-Stevens, Stephen Bray and David Hand for their mentorship, and the following people for their unconditional love and support: Sheila (Mum), John (Dad), Marilyn, Pip, Louise, Anne, Caroline, Darci, and Neil.

Also thanks to Mike Wilman for facilitating the introduction to Wiley, and to Francesca and the team for delivering the final product.

The material in this book has been endlessly refined by the reactions to it of successive generations of students on our Certificate course in Applied Emotional Intelligence practitionership, and of delegates on our EI development programmes. We are indebted to them all.

PART I

How Our Attitudes Underpin Our EI

1

Why EI now?

The ever-increasing pace of change

We live in a world where change has to be taken for granted, and where the rate of change appears to be increasing steadily (though probably the rate at which it is increasing is itself increasing). This is due to the effects of a combination of factors:

• advances in technology, particularly information and communication technology;

• globalisation;

• the Internet;

• breakdown of cultural and, since the end of the cold war, political barriers, leading to more rapid exchange of ideas;

• the spread of literacy and higher education;

• greater openness to the contribution of different cultures;

• the decline of conservative institutions, such as the extended family, and authoritarian regimes.

Learning to live with change, to embrace it and not to be frightened by it is a task for us all, and involves not so much cognitive abilities as appropriate feelings and attitudes.

Leadership, too, requires a new approach. As business strategists such as Dr Lynda Gratton of the London Business School and Professor Richard Scase of the University of Kent are predicting, tomorrow’s leaders will need to cope with more demanding customers and a more discerning employee base. The leaders of the future will need to be facilitators - leaders who enable others to develop their own leadership and potential. They will also be collaborative leaders, highly skilled in developing and sustaining mutually beneficial partnerships and able to influence and lead non-employees and stakeholders. These both require a new set of skills and attitudes for leadership - emotionally intelligent skills and attitudes.

A crisis of meaning

For most of the history of mankind people have been overwhelmingly preoccupied with what Maslow would call safety and survival needs: warding off physical threats, getting enough to eat and drink and bringing up the next generation. With the coming of the Industrial Revolution, people went to work to get money to house and feed themselves. It is just over 100 years since Thorstein Veblen published his book on The Theory of the Leisure Class, and in developed countries the majority of the population is now relatively leisured - or could be if they chose to be. Many people are no longer prepared to exchange hours of boring drudgery and partial loss of liberty for cash.

For many years this exchange has been fostered by the triumph of Western materialism: people wanted more and more, often for purposes of conspicuous consumption, and for that they needed more and more money. Increasing material wealth has not brought in its train increasing happiness: having too little money may make you anxious and unhappy, but above a basic minimum having more will not make you happier. The triumph of materialism in the West to date has, therefore, been an empty triumph, and, coinciding as it has with a decline in adherence to revealed religion, has led to a psychological revolution: the evolution of humanism.

Humanism posits the human being, with his/her needs and aspirations, as the central value of our society and as the solution to the crisis of meaning which has assailed Western culture ever since the abandonment of the selfish materialism of the “me” generation at the end of the twentieth century. Nowadays, many people seek to spend their lives not just earning money for themselves at whatever personal cost, but working in accordance with their values, which include the promotion of a society in which human rights are completely realized: the right to health, education, freedom, spirituality, search for the meaning of life and an existence with dignity. As well as seeking work which accords with their values, educated employees in particular - those belonging to what economists and sociologists would traditionally have called the white-collar and managerial class - seek work that fosters their self development, that allows them to grow towards what they could possibly be. In Maslow’s terms, they seek opportunities for self actualisation at work. We take a look in Chapter 5 at how we can create more meaning in our working lives through developing our emotional intelligence.

The arrival of EI

The history of emotional intelligence is most easily set out in tabular form:

Table 1.1The history of Emotional Intelligence.

And here we are, some ten years on from Daniel Goleman’s acclaimed book, and emotional intelligence hasn’t gone away. In fact there are more and more books, articles and references being made about EI now than there ever have been - this book included!

So why has it stood the test of time? Briefly because of the connection between levels of emotional intelligence and levels of performance, particularly in senior jobs: anyone interested in performance improvement (and who isn’t?) needs to be interested in emotional intelligence. (We address the connection between EI and performance more specifically on page 22.)

Furthermore, EI hasn’t just passively “stood the test of time” in the sense of proving not to be a short-lived flash in the pan; as the years pass it is coming to be seen as more and more important.

This is, in summary, because the changes in society and work organisation which have taken place over recent years, and which are continuing, mean that there are new requirements of today’s and tomorrow’s organisation leaders and members, and they all demand emotional intelligence.

Figure 1.1 sets out the societal changes and the new organisational requirements to which they are giving rise.

Figure 1.1Societal changes and the associated new organisational requirements.

None of these new or enhanced requirements is technical; they all involve aspects of emotional intelligence.

Why is EI the answer?

Our answers to this question lie in this book, but here is an overview.

Traditionally, people were employed largely for their muscle power - to do physical things. Increasingly during the second half of the last century they were employed for their brain power - to do mental things. But the new requirements of organisations and their leaders listed above, which translate into new requirements of their employees by the leaders of organisations in the 21st Century, require that people bring their whole selves to work rather than just their muscles and/or their brains. Similarly, employees want the fulfilment of involving and developing their whole selves, rather than just their muscles and/or their brains, at work.

Our sense of ourselves is largely tied up with our feelings, and this development entails the recognition of organisation members as being feeling beings as well as thinking beings. Similarly, our values are related to our feelings and attitudes, not just our thoughts and ideas. Again, employees who are value-driven need to be recognised as being feeling beings as well as thinking beings. Since emotional intelligence is about integrating feeling and thinking, it is clear that developing EI in organisations, in teams, in managers and in employees is the appropriate response to these developments.

From management’s point of view, the above changes have led to a significantly increased need in themselves and their employees for effective self management and relationship management, which, as we shall see later, are two key EI processes; for creativity and flexibility, both aspects of EI, and consequently to the need to consider staff as fully rounded human beings, to develop them, to motivate them and to lead them rather than just manage them, all part of the emotionally intelligent approach to organisation management.

To boil it all down to one statement: emotional intelligence is highly correlated with performance, and since we are all in the business of performance improvement, we all need to focus on emotional intelligence.

Reference

Veblen, T. (1994) The Theory of the Leisure Class, Dover Publications. First published in 1899.

2

IQ and EI

A word about the term EQ. In the early days of the study, and the promotion, of emotional intelligence, this label was adopted by those who wished to persuade what they thought would be a sceptical, and largely male, audience of the “hard” and respectable nature of the concept. By creating an acronym of Emotional Quotient they created a term that enabled EI, or as they labelled it EQ, to be put in the same frame as cognitive intelligence, or IQ.

EI testers then set about creating questionnaires to help you ascertain your EQ score, by which you could measure “how emotionally intelligent you are compared with other people”, just as your IQ score measures how cognitively intelligent you are compared with other people.

But the creation of a single score of EQ involved suggesting that our emotional intelligence can be reduced down to just one thing, by which we can then be compared with other people. Which is not the case: our EI is made up of a multitude of components, each of which we can have to varying degrees and each one of which represents a different aspect of the way we handle or use feelings. To reduce this down to one score, a single number, misses the point and only serves to give us yet another measure by which we can judge ourselves or others.

In this book which outlines the model of emotional intelligence adopted by the Centre for Applied Emotional Intelligence (CAEI), we demonstrate how meaningless it is to attempt to represent our emotional intelligence with a single score.

The two sides of emotional intelligence

To begin with, we can divide the supposedly unitary concept of emotional intelligence into two: the intrapersonal and the interpersonal, as shown in Figure 2.1.

Figure 2.1Managing our relationships with ourselves and others.

The arrows in this model represent causation. The chief causal connections are downwards: we can only manage ourselves effectively to the extent that we are self aware, and we can only manage our relations with others effectively to the extent that we are aware of them and their feelings. The bottom horizontal arrow is fairly obvious: I can only manage my relationship with you effectively to the extent that I can manage myself. If every time you say something that irritates me I lose my temper and bop you on the nose, then it is unlikely that we will have a good relationship. The top horizontal arrow is perhaps a little more esoteric. It refers to the fact that we use our body as a source of information, non-cognitive information, about other people (“hunches”, “gut feelings”, “instinctive reactions”, “intuition”), and to the extent that we are unaware of what our body is telling us we will also be unaware of the other. (The exceptions appear to be sociopaths and conmen: highly aware of others but not in touch with themselves.)

The three-layered cake

In order to understand how to measure emotional intelligence properly, we need first to understand what is being measured.

Figure 2.2The three-layered cake.

Imagine we are like a three-layered cake - a Victoria Sandwich - with a layer of sponge on the top and on the bottom and a juicy, fruity layer in between (Figure 2.2)! The top layer represents the overt part of us: what we do. This is relatively easily changed: we can go on a training course and be taught new patterns of behaviour - such as being more assertive, for example. However, whether these newly learned behaviours are retained and integrated into our repertoire of behaviour, whether they “stick”, depends on the impact of deeper variables underneath. In our example of assertiveness, if we don’t believe we are as important as other people are, then it will be difficult consistently to stick up for our rights, even if we have learned how to do so.

In the bottom layer of the cake are to be found the relatively fixed parts of ourselves, whether inborn or the result of very early learning: our personality (personality being an abstraction from behaviour which is constant over time). The acquired, rather than inherited, aspects can change, although this may be a drawn-out process involving many years of psychotherapy or personal development.

Finally we have the juicy bit in the middle! This is where the essence of our emotional intelligence resides. It is made up of our beliefs, our values, our attitudes, sometimes expressed in our habits. Also, some underlying general competencies like the capacity to empathise. These are wide-ranging and profound (like the bottom layer) but also changeable if we want (like the top layer). This is the area that we focus on in this book, although what lives here also has associated with it certain personal and interpersonal skills which live in the top layer.

Emotional intelligence, because it addresses primarily the middle layer as well as the top one, therefore cannot be reduced to “soft skills”. Furthermore, EI, as we have already seen, is composed of two complementary aspects: intrapersonal intelligence (to do with our relationship with ourselves) and interpersonal intelligence (to do with our relationships with others). “Interpersonal skills” only looks at one of these, and therefore misses half the point.

Contrariwise, “personality” is unchangeable, or very difficult to change: it refers to things in the bottom layer of our cake, e.g. being an introvert or an extravert. Whereas emotional intelligence refers to things in the middle layer, and all the components of emotional intelligence are changeable and developable. Emotional intelligence is not the same as personality: it is about how we manage our personality.

Of course, our “three-layered cake” model is pretty crude and schematic: in practice the three layers are not separate, unrelated boxes; there are things which straddle the boundaries. For example, for the general population the capacity to empathise belongs in the middle layer and is changeable, but in the case of individuals with Asperger’s or another condition in the autistic spectrum it may well be that their difficulty with feeling empathy is more fixed, to do with the way their brain is wired, and therefore belongs in the bottom layer. In general, however, as a conceptual aid, the three-layered cake model helps bring clarity to what is often a muddled and confusing area.

Where do the ideas come from?

When Daniel Goleman’s book Emotional Intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ was first published in 1995, it went straight to the top of the New York Times Non-fiction Bestseller list and stayed there for six months, which no book had ever done before. Why was this? Because people were ready for an idea like this, and one of the reasons why they were ready was a number of research advances that had been published and popularised in the preceding fifteen to twenty years.

Let us consider these under three headings.

• Educational research and the multiple intelligences (see immediately below).

• Brain research, brain imaging and connections between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala (see False fact no. 4 later in this chapter).

• Psychoneuroimmunology and connections between the body and the brain, and the effects of stress on both of these (see Chapter 5).

First, let us have a look at the previous understanding of the nature of intelligence, which these developments have begun to impact.

Four false “facts” about intelligence

As well as the misplaced emphasis on the supposed unitary nature of emotional intelligence and the generation of a single figure to summarise it, the other great drawback of the use of the label “EQ” was that it encouraged people to import into the field of emotional intelligence all the false ideas prevalent about intelligence summed up in the idea of “IQ”. Four of these in particular were an impediment to a proper understanding of the nature of emotional intelligence.

False fact no. 1

Intelligence is one thing that you have more or less of, i.e. IQ.

Harvard Professor of Education emeritus Howard Gardner and his multidisciplinary team began publishing their research into the nature of intelligence in the 1980s. This work made two significant shifts in previous understanding. First, they found intelligence not to be a single unitary factor but a bundle of related factors. They described not human intelligence but multiple human intelligences, as listed in Table 2.1. Each of the intelligences they identified had to meet eight stringent criteria, including having its own area within the brain where it is housed and activated and being able to vary independently of other intelligences.

The concept of our multiple intelligences is being used quite widely now in education, promoting the attitude that what’s important is not how smart we are but how we are smart. It is still true that our education system very much focuses on the need to be able to read, write and add up, and the syllabus primarily teaches skills to develop our IQ. But Howard Gardner’s work is helping us see that our IQ is just the tip of the iceberg; research is now showing that we need more than just our IQ in life to be effective and successful.

Table 2.1Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences.

The other shift in thinking which derived from this work is an encouraging one: that each of these intelligences is not fixed, at birth or before, but is capable of being developed during life.

Note that “Spiritual/Existential”, as well as being a later addition, unlike the others does not seem to be localised to a particular segment of the brain; it involves the whole brain and so is put in italics. We should make it clear that while the identification of the intelligences in the table is due to Gardner, the groupings they have been put into are our own.

Although Gardner himself did not equate the sum of his intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligences with emotional intelligence, a concept which was popularised after the initial publication of his work, we see them as being equivalent, hence the division we have already made of emotional intelligence into its two components of intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligence.

Table 2.2Intrapersonal intelligence.

The far from exhaustive list of aspects of self management in the right-hand side of Table 2.2 may need some expansion and explanation.

Mood management

For those who doubt the possibility of mood management we recommend The Good Mood Guide by Ros and Jeremy Holmes. We are referring here to what Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) calls “state management” - NLP has some useful tools to help us do this effectively.

Self motivation

Self motivation demands intrapersonal intelligence because to motivate ourselves we need to be good at picking up the cues from our body that tell us what we like and what we don’t, what turns us on and what alienates us.

Dealing with setbacks

“Dealing with setbacks” is common language for what, in psychological jargon, is called emotional resilience. That demands intrapersonal intelligence because we need to pick up the bodily cues that tell us what we need in such situations of adversity, and there is often a physical element to the support that we need.

Using your intuition

Insofar as intuition is concerned, there is a common fallacy that women have more intuition than men. We do not believe this to be the case, but it is true that men do not use their intuition as much as women tend to. They seem on the whole to spend more time not just in their heads but in their cortex, being cognitive, and to pay less attention to the intuitive information available to them from their bodies and from their limbic system.

Managing your energy

“Managing your energy” means making sure that your body has what it requires for you to perform well. Tim used to be so lacking in intrapersonal intelligence that, for example, it took someone else to point out to him that when he got dehydrated he got short tempered and the quality of his thinking deteriorated. Having recognised the truth of this, he is now careful to drink enough at all times. For many people it is about food rather than drink: they need to monitor their bodies so that they ensure that they eat regularly enough to avoid their blood sugar plummeting so that they feel tired and energy-less.

Dealing with stress

Stress avoidance and handling stress are both key aspects of self management and they both demand intrapersonal intelligence. Each person experiences slightly different things as more or less stressful, each person has a different series of bodily signals that appear at increasing levels of stress and each person needs different things to handle their stress effectively at various levels of intensity. We therefore each of us need to be in touch enough with our bodies to know what stresses us, to pick up and be able to assess the significance of our stress signals and to know what we need to help us deal with various levels of stress (see Chapter 5).

Avoiding depression and addictive behaviour

Lastly, depression and addiction are symptoms that the body, or our self, is not getting what it needs. Addiction, whether to drugs, drink, sugar, chocolate or work, is an inappropriate way to respond to the body’s needs. It doesn’t work, so we need more and more of what we are addicted to in order to dull the pain of not getting what it is we really need. Depression is a consequence of the person being deprived of what it is they need, in emotional terms. If we are intrapersonally intelligent, pick up the bodily signs that tell us what it is we need and then ensure that we get it, we will not need to resort to substance abuse and we will not get depressed, thus avoiding two of the greatest scourges affecting people’s wellbeing in the Western world.

And now for the other side of the coin, interpersonal intelligence.

Table 2.3Interpersonal intelligence.

The examples of effective relationship management in Table 2.3 are perhaps a bit more self explanatory, but it should be acknowledged that you can’t really motivate other people beyond the carrot and stick level. If you really want others to be truly motivated so as to contribute their energy and their creativity, then what you have to do is to help them motivate themselves and obviously you need to be interpersonally intelligent to do that, because you need to pick up what it is that turns them on or turns them off.

It should also be noted that being interpersonally intelligent does not mean being all lovey-dovey. You need interpersonal intelligence to collaborate effectively with others and get them to collaborate with you, certainly. But you also need to be interpersonally intelligent to have an effective confrontation with someone else.

Insofar as “facilitating relationships between others” is concerned, this applies not just to professionals, like mediators and couples counsellors, but more generally to all parents who have more than one child and to team leaders and all managers who have more than one subordinate.

Similarly, “developing others” involves not just management development specialists but all managers, all teachers, all parents, all sports coaches, and so on.

False fact no. 2

Intelligence is fixed; you are born more or less clever or stupid and remain that way for the rest of your life.

This is the optimistic version. In practice it is worse than that: many aspects of cognitive intelligence seem to peak at around 20 years of age and then to decline year by year after that. However, analyses of emotional intelligence test data show that the opposite seems to be true of emotional intelligence, which appears to continue to rise throughout the years of working life - it seems we naturally develop our emotional intelligence through the University of Life. The growth is not steady: the biggest jump appears to be between the average emotional intelligence of people in their twenties and those in their thirties. It seems to us that this is likely to be the result of parenthood: there is nothing like having young children to force you to learn how to manage yourself and your relationships more effectively!

This rise in EI test scores with age chimes in with our belief that all the aspects of emotional intelligence are not fixed but are changeable and developable. It also helps us to answer a question put by some sceptics: “If EI is so important, how come nobody had noticed it or given it a name before the 1990s?” Of course, emotional intelligence is not a new thing: human nature is no different now from what it was before Daniel Goleman wrote his first book. “Emotional Intelligence” is just a new label for old-fashioned virtues previously ignored by psychologists, educationalists and HR professionals, although recognised by the man or woman in the street: wisdom and maturity.

Wisdom and maturity naturally grow as we get older, provided we learn the lessons that our life experience offers us. So, if to a degree this happens naturally for most of us, why bother pro-actively to develop our emotional intelligence? Quite simply, there is no need to wait for life to dish out its lessons when you can create your own learning opportunities and speed up the process, thereby experiencing more of your potential more of the time and getting more out of your life. The real challenge in our pursuit of growth as human beings is to create our own change, rather than waiting for circumstances or other people to force change upon us. Also, pro-actively developing our EI will lead to a greater increase in it than merely picking up the lessons that the University of Life offers us.

A large aspect of this life-learning experience is, in fact, unlearning. Most of us in our childhood come to some overgeneralised conclusions in response to the way the grown-ups treat us that we continue to live by in adulthood, even though they no longer apply - perhaps they never did, because a lot of what adults tell children is not true, and what we worked out for ourselves we did with our childish brains on the basis of very limited experience. So, if we are told “I want never gets”, or “Speak when you are spoken to”, or were treated cruelly by a man with red hair, we may go through life not asking for what we want, being passive and not initiating interactions and terrified of all redheads, however mild and benevolent. A lot of these patterns are unconscious but nonetheless powerful for that, probably more so because it means that they escape conscious examination and review. These false beliefs and unhelpful patterns we call, after Timothy Gallwey, interferences.

We believe this applies to functioning with emotional intelligence just as much as it does to sports. In fact more so, since the physical and technical requirements for emotionally intelligent functioning are minimal. All of us have the potential. Unfortunately, most of us have, at least to start with, lots of powerful interferences too.

Be warned that this belief distinguishes our approach to EI, and our beliefs about it, from those of many others. You may come across a number of EI specialists who see emotional intelligence as being like any traditional aspect of intelligence - relatively fixed and perhaps inborn. As they see it, your only hope of being emotionally intelligent, just as it is of being clever, is to choose your parents well. And you will also come across EI specialists (this time coming from the gang of psychologists who call themselves personality theorists rather than intelligence theorists) who believe that EI is a trait, or at best a bundle of traits, that are relatively fixed, perhaps inborn, parts of someone’s personality.

Second, it means that different people are likely to have different interferences. This is not entirely true, since cultural interferences will be fairly general: a couple of generations ago probably most parents, and most nannies, told the children in their charge “I want never gets.” But it is true enough to mean that the route to be followed by somebody to raise their emotional intelligence will be relatively unique. Blanket prescriptions of one sheep dip for all will not do the business. It will be important to make an individual diagnosis (effectively of the nature and the strength of the individual’s interferences) before the appropriate route to change can be identified. Hence the importance of measuring EI, that is to say the various components of EI, in each individual to provide a base line to start from and to identify the route to the goal.

Third, since, as we have seen, a lot of these interferences are unconscious, an early part of the process of dismantling interferences will be bringing them into conscious awareness. We are in the realm of the process illustrated in Figure 2.3. The problem with this is that the first step, moving from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence, can be very discouraging and seem like a step backwards, when really it is the first step in the right direction. Then the second step, from conscious incompetence to conscious competence can seem - to begin with - very false and artificial and can require a considerable amount of attention and energy. Lastly, the third step from conscious to unconscious competence, since it involves changing an ingrained habit and, in IT terms, changing the default setting, will take some time and many repetitions, say three weeks or more. Still, with support, it can all be done!

Figure 2.3The route to the goal.

False fact no. 3

(Cognitive) intelligence determines success in life.

Part of most of us seems to subscribe to this idea, yet at the same time all of us, we suspect, are aware of many counter-instances. On the one hand, of people who are very brainy and “clever” but whose personal and professional lives are a shambles; on the other hand, of people who without being exactly stupid are never going to be rocket scientists but who are extremely happy and successful.

So, if being clever is not the key factor, what is? You will not be surprised to learn that we believe that emotional intelligence is the key, and that health, happiness and success are generated by EI and two related factors: self esteem and self confidence (Figure 2.4).

Figure 2.4A model for health, happiness and success.

To understand this model, you need to appreciate the distinction between self esteem and self confidence. Self esteem (the same concept we shall later refer to as “self regard”, or “I’m OKness”) we define as our attitude towards our being, whereas self confidence (highly correlated with, but not the same as, self esteem/self regard and also highly correlated with our sense of personal power - one of the aspects of EI we can measure) we conceive of as our attitude towards our doing. “Health” here refers not only to our emotional health but to our physical health too: high emotional intelligence, self esteem and self confidence will mean that we are less likely to get stressed, less likely to get depressed or commit suicide, less likely to have accidents owing to inattention or recklessness, less likely to abuse our bodies with drugs or alcohol or sugar or food in general, less likely to present as what doctors call a “Type A” personality and be liable to high blood pressure, heart attacks and strokes, and our immune system is likely to be in much better nick, so that we suffer less from infections of various kinds.

The connection between good life outcomes and emotional intelligence is not surprising when you consider the following syllogism:

1. Emotional intelligence is composed of intrapersonal intelligence and interpersonal intelligence.

2. Intrapersonal intelligence is what you need for effective self management.

3. Interpersonal intelligence is what you need for effective relationship management.

4. Effective self management plus effective relationship management leads to effective overall performance.

5. Therefore, emotional intelligence leads to effective performance.

Obviously there are some jobs where the need for emotional intelligence is greater than others: all jobs involving a significant element of person management and/or leadership, all jobs involving direct contact with the public (therefore, other things being equal, service jobs rather than production jobs), all sales jobs, all jobs involving development of others (all management jobs again, all jobs in education, in HR and training, consultancy) and so on and so on. But in the end it is hard to think of a job where emotional intelligence is not one of the determinants of success: whatever our job we have to manage ourselves and in the vast majority of jobs we also have to manage relationships, with colleagues, with bosses, with subordinates, with customers, with the general public, with suppliers, and so on. Professional hermits (and they are not very common these days) may be immune from the need for relationship management but not really anybody else. So, in short, emotional intelligence is an important determinant of performance, to a greater or lesser degree, in all jobs. And also in no job at all: since we are talking about health and happiness as well as about success, we are inevitably talking about life outcomes as a whole as well as job performance.

False fact no. 4

Intelligence / thinking is separate from, and liable to be undermined by, feelings.

This goes back to Descartes and his “cogito ergo sum” - “I think, therefore I am” - see Antonio Damasio’s fascinating book Descartes’ Error (1994). In its traditional, say nineteenth century, form this fallacy was put forward in a highly, if on the whole implicitly, sexist way. Effectively: intelligence / thinking is superior and belongs to men but it is liable to be undermined by feelings, which are inferior and belong to women. Thanks to recent developments in brain science we now know this to be entirely false.

It has been understood for twenty years or so that anatomically we have a triune brain: a reptilian brain stem, a mammalian midbrain or emotional brain, and a primate neocortex or thinking brain (Figure 2.5).

Figure 2.5The human triune brain.

With the advent of techniques of brain imaging, we are beginning to understand the brain’s physiology as well as its anatomy; to understand it in process as well as in structure. Thus, our assertion that most human beings are capable of acting with emotional intelligence boils down to an assertion that in most human beings there is potentially good communication between the thinking brain (the prefrontal cortex) and the feeling brain (the limbic system of the midbrain, including the amygdala). This is indeed the case, and, as so often, it is the exception that proves the rule. Antonio Damasio in Descartes’ Error tells a tragic story of a well-functioning and successful man who had to have surgery for a brain tumour, which turned out to lie just between the midbrain and the cortex. The good thing about this location was that Damasio was able successfully to excise the cancer without impairing either the patient’s thinking or his feeling. But in the process of the surgery the connections between cortex and midbrain were severed, with the result that the patient was (since emotional intelligence is about thinking about feeling and feeling about thinking) rendered surgically completely emotionally unintelligent. The first way this showed itself was in a complete inability to take decisions, which is an evaluative process involving feeling applied to the results of thinking. Overall, the results were disastrous: the patient’s life was saved but his effectiveness as a human being was destroyed. Within nine months he was divorced and had lost his job.

EI / EQ / IQ

In all these respects, therefore, emotional intelligence, despite having been saddled for a period with the label EQ, does not fit in with the popular notions of IQ. Like cognitive intelligence, it is comprised of two of the multiple intelligences which Gardner and his team identified, but different ones: intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligences as opposed to verbal / linguistic and logical / mathematical intelligences. (And, as we shall see later, it can be broken down into many more subdivisions.) A person’s EI is not fixed and does not, under normal circumstances, decline through the life course: it tends to grow as people learn and mature. Far from cognitive intelligence being the main determining factor in life outcomes, EI seems to have much more influence. And far from thinking and feeling being at odds, the opposite can be true, as we shall see as we examine what Applied EI is, in the next chapter.

References

Damasio, A. R. (1994) Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, Putnam Publishing Group.

Gallwey, W. T. (1986) The Inner Game of Tennis, Pan.

Gardner, H. (1983/1993) Frames of Mind, Fontana.

Goleman, D. (1995) Emotional Intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ, Bantam Books.

Holmes, R. and Holmes, J. (1999) The Good Mood Guide: How to Embrace your Pain and Face your Fears, Orion.

3

What is Applied EI?

One of the confusing things for anyone exploring emotional intelligence is actually getting a handle on what it means and what it is. Not only are there various schools of thought on the actual subject, there are also various other personal development constructs that overlap with emotional intelligence, for example Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) and Transactional Analysis (TA).

To help create some clarity, first let us define certain key words that are used in association with EI and are commonly used on development training programmes and in personal development books and resources.

What is emotion?

Emotion stems from the Latin word “movere”, meaning “to move”. This is revealing of the fact that emotions are at the root of our doing, our moving towards or away from. The words “motivate” and “motivation” come from a similar root.

In her book Molecules of Emotion, neuroscientist Candace Pert explores the brain-body communication systems, which suggest that emotions do not occur just in the brain as has been commonly believed until very recently. Emotions now appear to be based in biochemical reactions that occur throughout the body and have been found in the heart and in the immune system as well as throughout the central nervous system.

What are feelings?

It is important, therefore, to note that although there is a part of the brain which specialises in processing feeling, feelings are bodily states that:

• do not live in the mind/brain;

• are whole-body experiences (hence: “having cold feet” and “getting hot under the collar”), mediated largely by hormones as well as neurons;

• may have thoughts / ideas which go with them, may describe / define them and be used to express them, but these are not the feeling itself, which is a bodily state.

Feelings can usefully be divided into one of three categories:

• physiological feelings, e.g. hunger, thirst, nausea;

• emotional feelings, e.g. anger, anxiety, happiness;

• intuitive feelings, i.e. non-cognitive, gut feelings, inner knowing.

We need to understand our feelings, where they are coming from and what information they hold for us in order to be able to manage them effectively, and to integrate our feeling with our thinking.

What is an attitude?

This first part of this book is entitled “How Our Attitudes Underpin Our EI” and it is our emphasis on the importance of attitudes which most clearly distinguishes our approach to EI from that of others. So, we had better make clear what we mean by “an attitude”. For us, an attitude is an evaluative position that we hold about a thing, a person, an idea or perhaps an organization (Figure 3.1). It is evaluative in that it is feelings-based and feelings tend to be evaluative - positive or negative rather than neutral, i.e. we see something or someone as good or bad, or in a positive or negative light, and will want to move towards or away from that object / person. Attitudes tend to be associated with relevant beliefs and the association of attitudes and beliefs is two-way. On the one hand, we hold our attitudes not towards what is really “out there” but towards how we perceive it, which may not be the same thing. On the other hand, if our evaluative attitude is strongly held, we will tend to align our beliefs with it. Thus, our perceptions will be altered so as to reflect, support and justify our attitude. The feelings aspects of our attitudes are of vital importance because it is our feelings that galvanise us into action, to move, to choose what to do. So our feelings are highly significant in understanding our behaviours.

Figure 3.1What is an attitude?

Who controls our feelings?

The old psychological paradigm used to be a stimulus leads automatically to a corresponding response. Pavlov rings the bell and the dog salivates.

S → R

And then, about sixty years ago, academic psychologists got really sophisticated and realised that the full picture was: a stimulus goes into an organism, which is effectively a black box and we don’t know what goes on inside it, and then a response comes out of the organism, but it may not always be the same, even when the stimulus is the same.

S→→R