The battle of thoughts and feelings…
While it’s important to be smart, it’s also important to be able to balance what we’re thinking and what we feel about it. And vice versa. The combination of these two is what creates our experience.
I’ve recently reread Goleman’s book on emotional intelligence and after that I read Emotional intelligence 2.0 by Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves.
The overly cognitive misses cues to be able to connect, build intimacy, have influence, or help calm a situation that seems to be escalating out of control. If you want to get what you want, you need to be able to connect with people. Connecting with people is risky business.
The ability to “read” people and have intuition in situations rests on someone being able to know what they feel, how another person is feeling, and how to navigate through that situation. We’ll need that funny thing we call empathy. If you’re not in touch with your own emotions it’s hard to read someone’s body language and gauge how to relate to someone. If you can’t relate it’s going to be harder to get what you want.
I’ve shared thoughts around this before, in earlier blogs I’ve concentrated on talking about where we might be landing on a binary scale and about being one or the other but here I want to talk about how they work together. I believe what’s important is having a balance of these important parts and knowing how our minds work.
Let’s talk about these different things working together, in motion, at the same time, cooperating to help us have the highest quality life possible. When I say “in motion” it’s because this isn’t a static thing. Sometimes the balance and ratios should fall heavier to one way or another. Bringing our consciousness “A” game will help know how much to bring of each part and when. The masters in this game are dynamic and able to shift things in motion.
If we’re overly emotional (not me, I’ve never been overly emotional), engaging the part of us that can critically look at a situation helps talk us off the ledge and reduce the intensity of the emotional reactions that we feel. That’s mindset work-seeing where our emotions are possibly running the show rather than it being that cooperative sweet spot of both things.
And if we approach things from a strictly rational approach we’ll miss the boat when it comes to understanding how people are processing information and having the experience they do. I also believe that when we’re locked in our heads we can struggle to take action since we can become a victim of “paralysis by over analysis”.
If you’re winding up in the common situation where one person is trying to share how they feel and the other person goes into problem solving, you haven’t mastered IQ + EQ and you might just be an amateur.
The opportunity:
Sit down, close your eyes, and do a body scan.
Notice where you feel any sensations.
Figure out what the message or information is that’s connected to that sensation.
Find other interpretations for that information or message for those sensations.
Thanks for your time, have a great day!