Developing Your Emotional Intelligence (EQi) Through Conscious Leadership

EQi offers a profound way to enhance self-understanding. This understanding covers our capacity to know and manage our emotional state and our capacity to know and interact effectively with the emotional state of others. The EQi self-assessment is a handy tool for gaining more self-knowledge – keeping in mind the limitations of any assessment of the self, by the self.

What EQi workshops generally lack is a methodology for developing our competencies in emotional awareness and management related to self and others. Tips like count to ten or take a break when you are high-jacked by your amygdala, the place in the brain that controls fight, flight or freeze, are helpful but hardly revolutionary.

Possessing a healthy level of EQi is extolled as an essential capacity for inspiring leadership.  “People may not remember what you said but they will remember how your words made them feel.” While experts agree that we can develop our EQi over time, there is scant agreement about the most viable means. 

The paucity of methods for developing EQi are both cultural and personal. Western culture values the intellect. Our schooling stresses analytical methods that assign numeric values.
While this objective approach has been the mainstay of technological advancements the more subjective approaches of spirit, emotion and physical sensation have been marginalized.  We can land people on the moon but we can’t inspire people to get along with each other on earth.

Fortunately, new methods of conscious leadership are emerging that will enable us to develop our EQi. These methods are based on a deeper understanding of how we interact with our inner emotional landscape, the impact of hot buttons and trauma and the influence of family systems.  If we use and practice these methodologies our leadership capacities that draw upon our emotional and creative intelligences will deepen. We will have more access to the creative impulses that enable us to inspire in others collaborative and productive actions.

The first step of EQi development is understanding our emotional landscape. There are six basic emotions; anger, fear, sadness, joy, sexual (which is associated with creativity by some experts) and shame. The first five have been a part of human behavior from the earliest days of mankind.  More complex emotions are combinations of the basic six. For example, guilt could be mix of anger and fear. The emotion of shame was a more recent development. It has the function of stopping action that is considered socially unacceptable. Shame seems so toxic because, according to Robert Bly, we only need a thimble full yet end up with buckets of it. Those who pour the most on others do so to avoid looking at their own inner burden of shame.    

Our emotions and the sensations in our bodies are related. If we can sense somatically what is happening internally we more accurately sense our current emotional state. Emotions are energy. Energy wants be in motion. If we unconsciously contract and tense up when anger arises that energy stays bottled up. At some point, if the pressure is too great, it releases in an uncontrolled manner, an explosion, and causes harm. 

Mastering this mind/body connection take practice. Being able to identify and express what we are feeling and the associated sensations develops one of the primary EQi competencies; emotional self-awareness.  As we become more skilled in accessing and moving the internal energy of emotions our ability to connect with our innate, creative intelligence deepens; enhancing our ability to innovate and respond to our environment.

The second domain of EQi, relating emotionally to others, requires we go deeper in our journey of self-awareness. Hot buttons, blind spots, compulsions and addictions are places where we operate on automatic pilot. This pilot is not intelligent. It does the same thing, responding the same way to a stimulus, no matter what the results. Mastering this domain calls upon the competencies of self-reflection and personal responsibility.   

Examining those automatic reactions to a certain stimulus is difficult. It is much easier to blame the stimulus, that annoying person who cuts you off in traffic, then take responsibility for the road rage that emerges. If we are willing to look deeper, through self-reflection, we might find a disowned or forgotten part of our self that is seeking attention. Those parts may have at one time a positive function that helped us cope or even survive.  Like old software they were never updated. Now they only manage to clog up our operating system; producing automatically and unconsciously the opposite of what we want and hope for.

One sign of obsolete software is a “hot button;” a small behavior or incident that triggers a disproportionate emotional reaction within us. We don’t decide to react. It happens automatically. Later we regretfully wonder why we “lost it” and overreacted.  Somehow, the adult in us disappeared and a raging or frightened or grieving or placating childlike sub-personality took over. If we hold a safe space for our emotions and sensations the door to our subconscious open might open and reveal the source of this button. Often we will find a disruptive event. The button was a reasonable even intelligent response to what happened in the past. Bringing all this to conscious awareness also brings about an updating of the person’s operating system. To paraphrase Carl Jung, what was hidden in the subconscious and how it played out in our life is no longer considered fate. New possibilities and choices become accessible.

Ironically, this personal dynamic for change also shows up in groups and organizations. The mind can propose all kinds of reasons and motivations for change but little happens because the emotional context and its relationship to the subconscious are overlooked. If change, personal or collective, was a democratic process with a hundred votes; the conscious mind would have ten votes and the subconscious the other ninety. The boss can give orders to the conscious mind, however the subconscious decides on the extent they will be complied with. This begs the question; are we always at the invisible mercy of the individual or collective subconscious mind?        

Thankfully, no.  There is a way we can bring to awareness and work with this hidden context.  The way is called systemic mapping. It is also known as organizational or systemic constellations. Moving material from the subconscious to conscious awareness is a significant competency that often takes outside assistance. Without that movement most change efforts don’t go very far or soon return to where they started. The competency of “seeing yourself” is akin to waking up. When people gain enough psychological space to see how the component parts of themselves and others interrelate something shifts.

This process makes what has long been unseen, seen. It starts with a clear and concise statement of the issue or problem being explored and the desired outcome.  Developing this statement is a significant intervention in itself. Keeping the statement in mind the problem or issue is discussed and the key components of the system it resides in are identified. Representatives are selected for those components and positioned spatially to illustrate how they relate to each other. Most issues or problems are symptoms. They call attention to and even may have even been a way to cope with a past trauma or a disruptive event. As mentioned before, hot buttons, blind spots or addictions show up as ways to cope. Using systemic mapping the relevant events are identified and the associated feelings are addressed. Word or phases are provided that restore the harmony between the different parts of the system. When inner harmony is restored energy in the form of emotions can move more freely; enhancing our EQi and enabling more intelligence, insight and relatedness. Dysfunctional ways of coping loosen their grip.       

We can try these concepts and tools on our own but the most effective way to master them is engaging with others in a structured and facilitated learning environment.  We believe we are isolated individuals and it up to us on our own to resolve our dilemmas and issues. That sense of isolation feels as hard and real as any rock on the road, yet there is the more encompassing truth of our connectedness and how we co-create reality. The anchor points of our problems and limitations are not only in us, they exist simultaneously in our family, linage, group and society. In a group setting we can access those multiple anchor points and facilitate insight and change with greater efficacy and ease than struggling on our own.    

Harrison Snow (yours truely) offers a two-day training in conscious leadership in the Washington DC metro area and other locations. His most recent book about this work, published by Regent Press, is The Confessions of a Corporate Shaman: Healing the Organizational Soul.  For more information visit: http://leadconsciously.eventbrite.com