I am certain that a lot of us have heard this before by Maya
Angelou, ‘It is my observation that in the future, they will not remember what
you said or did, but they will remember how you made them feel’.
Feelings are a part of the emotional
repertoire and the next step after feelings are emotions, i.e. when I put that
feeling into motion.
At the heart of Emotional Intelligence is
Compassion. When we understand what compassion is in contrast to Compulsion, we
understand what Maya Angelou says.
Compassion has an emotion attached to it
and this emotion is different from the ‘think emotion’ that we so incessantly have
all the time. When we think that we need to do something, it is not Compassion
but compulsion and that is where most of us are caught up in, in today's world.
According to Wikipedia: ‘Compassion is the emotion that one feels in
response to the suffering of others that motivates a desire to help’.
And to that I add,
‘make a difference’!
Compulsion means: ‘the action or state of forcing or being forced to do
something’. Many a time, I attend functions that I don’t want to, do something
that I don’t feel like or comply with actions that are not necessarily mine.
The force that Compassion has is internal,
it is something from within that makes me want to make a difference and this
gives me tremendous energy! When I am told to do something against my will the
force is external, I do it more as a requirement and obligation rather than
free will and this drains me.
This external force might be family,
social pressures, environment, a boss or whoever!
From this we understand that both
compassion and compulsion have a bodily response to an emotional action. I can
differentiate my actions by the output that my body generates at the end of
that action. I can feel the output through my body!
While this is applicable personally,
the person on the other side of the fence who is a recipient of doer’s
behaviour is also capable of recognizing whether the doer is being compassionate
or is doing it out of compulsion.
All of us have in us the infinite
wisdom to recognize motives; we can instinctively feel whether it is heart felt
or head conceived!
When we act in compassion, we are
acting from the spirit, when we act out of compulsion we are acting from the
EGO.
Go ahead and make a conscious choice to
celebrate the joy of the spirit rather than be bound by the drama of the EGO!
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