Emotional Intelligence And the Mind
Have you noticed that one of the nice things about the study of emotional intelligence and the mind is that it seeks to cut straight to the truth?
The truth about who we are…
The truth behind what’s required to achieve a stable peace of mind…
The whole study of emotional intelligence is focused on getting solid, practical results. After all, the study of emotional intelligence has been around a long time, in psychology, in psychiatry, even religion.
It’s nothing new to question what makes us tick, but what’s refreshing is the practical purpose of getting results—results we can see in the workplace. This is great because by focusing on practical results, we can free ourselves of all of the complication and problematic dead ends that other paths have led us to.
It’s time for simple answers.
So in the spirit of simplicity, let’s take a look at the mind in a way that allows us to recognise its basic functions. More importantly, by keeping it simple, we’re free to move on to finding the answers we’re really looking for: how to achieve emotional intelligence!
There are three basic aspects to the mind:
The first aspect I want to point out is the sensing aspect. We use the mind to experience the world, by means of our sensory perceptions: We feel hot, we feel cold, we smell roses, we taste chocolate. Animals possess this sensing aspect, as do we.
The second aspect of the mind is what I call the ‘recording and playback’ aspect. The mind is constantly recording everything that comes to us through our senses. This allows us to recall information that we’ve experienced at a later time when it’s useful to us.
There’s a big problem with this aspect of the mind, however. And this problem is 90% of why we’re looking for answers to emotional intelligence…
The problem with this ‘recording and playback’ aspect is that the mind constantly plays back information to us, whether we want to listen to it or not.
You know what I mean…
Have you ever had a big disagreement with someone at work? Then you went home that night, got comfortable and ready for bed. Now, instead of falling off you sleep, you laid awake all night thinking, “I can’t believe what they said to me! I should have told them…”
Or maybe you’re driving home from the office and somebody cuts you off on the road. All of a sudden, an angry voice tells you to speed past them and display an unfriendly gesture.
See what I mean? We have this voice—we don’t know where it came from, we don’t know who gave it to us—but we think we have to listen to it.
STOP and consider this question very carefully:
Who said that you have to listen to this voice?
By the way, as you consider that question, also consider this… we also share this second aspect of the mind along with animals.
If you take a baby elephant and tie its leg to a stake in the ground so that it can’t wander off, it will record into its mind that it can’t move as long as it’s leg is tied to the stake.
When that same elephant grows up to weight 6,000 kg, it’s big enough to yank that same stake out of the ground by merely lifting its foot. But it doesn’t. The elephant has recorded into it’s mind that it can’t move as long as it’s tied to the stake, therefore it doesn’t even try.
Now, this second aspect of the mind is the one that leads us away from having emotional intelligence. If we put in a belief or behaviour that goes against proper discrimination, it will forever play back until we go in and remove it.
This leads us now to the third aspect of the mind: Discrimination.
As the human mind has the ability to discriminate, we’ve now set ourselves apart from animals, which do not possess this aspect. You know that you are human, but a dog doesn’t know it’s a dog.
The ability to discriminate opens the door to emotional intelligence.
Go back to the situation where you’re driving and someone cuts you off. Say you pull up next to that person at a stop light, fully prepared to give them a piece of your mind.
You look over and notice that the person is 190 cm and 130 kg. All of a sudden you start discriminating real fast and decide to smile instead.
So, what is the point of all this?
This is what emotional intelligence is all about. Instead of hindering ourselves with beliefs that the mind is an overwhelmingly complicated instrument, and looking for the simplicity within it, we can begin to find the answers we’re looking for.
There are proven tools that allow us to take this insight and do something about it—truly achieve lasting emotional intelligence.
See our EI /EQ profiling page to find out more about the tools we use in emotional intelligence.
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