Emotional Intelligence: why you should care,
what it is, and how you can build more!

by Joshua Freedman

Source

Six Seconds, training and materials for emoitional intelligence.

Contents

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Why EQ?

Consider what is most important in life. Most people answer:

• belonging
• love
• happiness / contentment / joy
• success

which are all totally linked to emotions. And even if you answer power, control, sex, status, or money, chances are, you can only get them (in a lasting way) if you use your emotional intelligence.

As a parent, you should care about EQ because your child is growing up in a complicated, changing world -- one where her experiences will be very different from your own. Faced with new situations, we can not simply pull one of our parent's solutions from our bag of tricks -- we must be able to invent solutions.

You want to be sure that those solutions help her live as a whole and healthy human being. And the most essential tool we have to accomplish that goal is our ability to sense and communicate emotions.

In addition, all other areas of learning and growth hinge on emotional intelligence. Our emotional brain is the part where we decide what to pay attention to, the place where long term memory is stored, and the area where we set priorities. As Plato wrote, "All learning has an emotional base."

What is EQ?

Emotional intelligence is a way of recognizing, understanding, and choosing how we think, feel, and act. It shapes our interactions with others and our understanding of ourselves. It defines how and what we learn; it allows us to set priorities; it determines the majority of our daily actions. Because emotional intelligence is so closely tied to the ways we relate to ourselves and others, research suggests it is responsible for as much as 80% of the “success” in our lives.

The idea of emotional intelligence is not new. The first known writings about the emotional basis of learning come from Plato. What is new, however, is the recognition that the cognitive, emotional, and social parts of ourselves are deeply interconnected and interdependent -- that our feelings dramatically influence our thinking, that our behaviors are inseparable from our emotions.

• There is no thinking without feeling, no feeling without thinking.
  
  
• Action, feeling, and thought all affect one another.
  
  
• We literally make choices about how we feel.

Six Seconds' EQ Model

To help learn and teach emotional intelligence, Six Seconds considers how emotional intelligence is lived in our daily lives. There are three key areas:

• Know Yourself
• Choose Yourself, and
• Give Yourself

Know yourself means increasing your own self-awareness, your ability to perceive and communicate emotions (emotional literacy), and coming to see how your moment-to-moment choices are part of the patterns of your life.

Choose yourself means aligning your beliefs and your actions; it means changing the patterns that move you away from your real goals and commitments, and replacing those patterns or habits with behaviors that move you in the direction you want. You are literally choosing the kind of life you want to lead -- the kind of person you want to be.

Give yourself means that you are making choices that connect you to others. That you are taking a place in the larger context of society and humanity. That you are giving and taking in balance, because that interdependence is the most meaningful and powerful expression of your self knowledge and self choice. When you give yourself, you move from "human having" to "human being."

Six Seconds has a page that helps people define and apply this model.

EQ Fundamentals

Building Emotional Intelligence

• Most importantly, to teach a child EQ skills, you must model them. Begin a new routine where each morning, you recommit to modeling one fundamental that day.
  
  
• Often adults are doing great modeling, but they are not "letting the child in." Does your child know why you are bringing soup to the neighbor, or do you simply assume they see your service to the friend in need?
  
  
• Around age five, most people begin "self-talk" -- literally, they start talking to themselves either out loud or silently. While essential to language development, self-talk is also critical to moral reasoning. Sometimes we discourage it in ourselves or children, but we should do the opposite.
  
  
• Be present for 5 minutes more per day. Often we get so caught up in "dealing with life" that we stop living. Give the gift of 5 minutes to yourself, to your children, to your spouse. Just be there, feeling, listening, communicating -- no rushing around, no planning what's next.
  
  
  For more, visit Six Seconds online journal, the JPC.

EQ Questions

"High order" questions engage the whole brain. Six Seconds calls these "Fusion Questions" because they combine emotional intelligence with other kinds of thinking. Try these on your next car trip:

• What would if be like to have no feelings?
  
  
• What is the opposite of anger? Of grief?
  
  
• What is the difference between shame and remorse?
  
  
• How many emotions can you have at once?
  
  
• If you were able to give someone a gift of a new feeling, what feeling would you give her/him?
  
  
• What color would you put with each feeling or emotion? (Love, joy, fear, sorrow, etc.)

Credits

January 1999

Six Seconds is a nonprofit educational service organization supporting emotional intelligence in families, schools, corporations, and communities.

Handle With Care Emotional Intelligence Activity Kit / Calendar, Freedman, Jensen, Rideout, Freedman. San Francisco: Six Seconds, 1998. ISBN 0-9629123-3-6

Handle With Care Emotional Intelligence Activity Book, Freedman, Jensen, Rideout, Freedman. San Francisco: Six Seconds, 1998. ISBN 0-9629123-2-8