Appreciating the Good!

Head and Heart!

ENABLING DIVINE EMOTIONS AND EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE TO DRIVE THE HAPPINESS QUOTIENT

Looking around us everyday, we get a sense of the emotional energy pervading all around of Fear, Anger, hostility, guilt, shame and depression, which Deepak Chopra calls as Diabolical Emotions.

Spin it around and we can look at the divine emotions of Love, Joy, Compassion, and Equanimity according to him.

Connecting the dots of the divine emotions to emotional intelligence, I have put forth my views how to arrive at the Happiness quotient that we all are seekers off.

Recent research in the field of EI calls happiness as an indicator of emotional health and well-being and the four factors of Happiness as per EQ-I 2.0, are Self Regard, Optimism, Interpersonal Relationships and Self actualization.

As an individual with high Self Regard, I respect myself as well as accept the strengths and limitations while remaining satisfied and self-secure. When we can do this to ourselves and can apply a similar structure to all around us, we become unconditional, which is the primary ingredient of the divine emotion called Love for me.

The second aspect of optimism where I see hope, the glass as half-full, can get energized by setbacks and obstacles and fuelled to overcome challenges in life, I express the second divine emotion of Joy showcasing itself in all its glory.

Wikipedia defines Compassion as that emotion that one feels in response to the sufferings of the others that motivates a desire to help, which sits exceedingly well for me with the Emotional Intelligence element of Inter-Personal Relationships where we look out not only for new relationships but also take care of the ones we already have, we have the courage to ask and give help and have mutually enriching exchanges in professional as well as personal lives.

Self-Actualization in the business world means finding the purpose and enjoying what you do while performing at the optimal level. When I operate from that space I can help others to self-actualize too because there is this inner stillness of peace and confidence, that the universe is conspiring for our greater purpose, which the divine emotion of Equanimity is all about.

When I am at peace, the other three divine emotions of Love, Joy and Compassion flow effortlessly and express themselves in their true glory.

To the emotional intelligence angle of measuring happiness, if divine emotions are added, I propose that I am an individual with a high happiness quotient.

Conversely, apply the divine emotions first in day-to-day life and automatically increase your emotional intelligence as well as your happiness quotient.  

Psychology takes time to express what spirituality already possesses!

Using Emotional Energy to Inspire

In the boardroom at 3M headquarters in the fourth quarter 1995 after putting a $650 million worth magnetic-storage business, the benefits director drew an iceberg. Inside the tip, the part exposed above the water, he wrote absenteeism, medical expenses, technology, facilities, tech training, quality control and benchmarking. Below the waterline – on the submerged 90 percent of the iceberg – he wrote tension, energy, stress, personal wellness and lifestyle, interpersonal skills and creativity. Below this he wrote a series of question marks.

It is that time of the year in companies and maybe some companies the time has come and gone, when we do the annual performance appraisals of employees and I dare say the most traumatic part of their work year. “Why is this so?”

I am sure that there has been enough of research and debate around the topic and the 3M instances just influenced me to put in my two bits to the plethora of information that is already available. I am approaching the topic from the Emotional Intelligence angle.

In my personal view the 10% above the water is what I would like to call as the ‘Drama’ that which is visible to the external environment and is an indicator of the companies well being. The 90% below the water line is what I call the ‘Story’, which is hidden and very often not given its ‘due importance’. Do pay attention that I have said due importance.

In the current context the Drama is priority forgetting the Story which leaves the employee often frustrated because all the challenges that he is facing stems from the 90% and a sustained focus is lacking here.

Any attention to the 90% paid is more through a ‘spray and pray’ form of skill based training whose effects have a highly limited period of retention let alone implementation.

We need to understand that the pain points mentioned in the 90% all have an emotional component attached to it and when we try and deal with it as a skill gap, the results are what they are, dismal.

Using Emotional Intelligence as a means to address the emotional component of employee challenges would lead to changes that are more effective and lasting. We need to understand that any situation that we deal with in our everyday interaction has an underlying emotional element attached to it, the more we deny it the stronger it gets.

The said emotion has a corresponding energy woven to it that can be used for the good of both the individual good as well as for the collective good.

New age Emotional Intelligence is defined as, “a set of emotional and social skills that influence the way we perceive and express ourselves, develop and maintain social relationships, cope with challenges, and use emotional information in an effective and meaningful way.”

When these emotional and social skills are channelized the resultant energy can result in brek-through performances both at an individaul as well as at a organizational level.

Going forward as a developmental tool for this year, look at what ‘Emotional Energy’ can do to build emotional engagement for and individual both personally and professionally.

Remember that the Story supports the drama and not the other way round!

References: Executive EQ: Robert K. Cooper and Ayman Sawar, EQi 2.0 – Multi-Health Systems

Emotionally Intelligent Living.

Our Physical personality consists of the Perceiver and the actor. Our forms of perception, driven by the sense organs of Taste, Touch, Smell, Hear and See, help us understand the physical world. The actor executes the actions based on our perception. The Emotional personality has the Feeler in us, which involves handling our emotions, and the discriminatory personality has the Thinker in us that defines intellect, which further branches into the gross and the subtle. The gross is involved in worldly boundaries and worldly thoughts and the subtle is the contemplator in which lies the spiritual personality. We now live in the age of speed and instant gratification; we have everything instant starting from noodles, to messaging. The media today constantly exposes our minds on the need or speed. We have 15-second advertisements showing achievements, which might take a lifetime, and giving us a false sense of instant possibility. This has driven focus from what is fundamentally important to what is urgently important thereby causing anxiety when one discovers things do not work the way they want it to and it surely doesn’t work in 15 seconds. We begin to live on expectations from our actions, which causes internal stress, rather than on accepting the results of our actions. When the mind is racing with thoughts of expectations and encounters roadblocks anxiety increases and when anxiety increases it leads to stress. Stress is therefore the speed of the mind. To reduce stress we need to decrease the speed of the mind. This is the yogic definition of stress. So, the percolation of stress starts in the mind which affects our breathing (observe your breath in moments of anger or fear), which affects the way, we look (body language in times of anger and fear) and finally affects the individual organs leading to various ailments. When our intellect is inattentive due to external stressors the mind goes wandering, making the senses run helter skelter which causes the body to be under constant pressure and finally break. Therefore to control the speed of the mind we need to first control our intellect which means focusing on our contemplative intellect and seek to understand the greater purpose of our journey on this planet which is fundamentally important rather than get carried away by our gross intellect making us seek temporary accomplishments which are short lived and thereby carry the message of being urgently important to do. Being Emotionally Intelligent, for a start, helps focus on the contemplative you and start the journey of discovery within.

Children as potential

The recent instances of 2 children committing suicide shockingly at the age of 11 and 13 reinforces the ever increasing pressures that children face today by a societal belief that studies and marks define success and the need for children to grow up through self-discovery no longer exists. This is a trend that is now increasing due to parental beliefs that are skewed.

This extreme behaviour is driven by parents who want to live their dreams through the eyes of their children, and somehow pressurize them into doing what might not be a natural for that child. Parents fail to realize the potential that these children have as in the above case of the 11 year old girl, who was appreciated for her dancing and forcibly stopped from pursuing the dancing lessons that she was taking and instead hassled her to study. The sheer disappointment of not being able to pursue a strength in her for reasons unknown to her led her to believe that she had reached a dead-end and the only way that she could get back at her parents was by killing herself unaware of the consequences of taking the extreme step.

Imagine, if the parents of a Rahul Dravid or a Sachin Tendulkar had forced them to become Doctors, we would have all lost two great cricketers and got two doctors whom we would have been scared to go to!

The key lies in recognizing the potential children have in themselves and nurturing the same. This does not mean that studies take a back seat; it just means giving the child its due recognition and allowing it to blossom in its strength rather than force it to adopt an extreme behaviour unaware of the hidden costs.

The choice is obvious, do we as parents want to live our lives through the eyes of our children and live with the guilt of the penalty? Or do we accept the strengths and the potential available with the child and allow it to blossom?