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Emotional Intelligence, your in-flight dashboard

Jim Owens, Information Age

15/12/2006 14:43:43

Project management specialist Jim Owens looks at the emotional implications of this scenario and how your emotional quotient is shown to be more important than your intelligence quotient.

"Ding-dong! Ladies and gentlemen, please return to your seats and fasten your seat belts as we may er, um... experience some turbulence. We have locked the toilets until further notice. We apologise for any inconvenience."

"Oh great - turbulence!" you mumble as you break your flimsy, hijack-proof plastic fork in the mysterious "meat and sauce" portion in its little white plastic coffin-shaped dish. "I hope I can eat this thing before I end up wearing it."

Suddenly you become aware of the passenger beside you, removing a hideously rancid, steaming nappy from a crying infant that obviously has serious gastric problems.

"Pity the toilets are locked, "she laments, "This is such an inconvenience." You wholeheartedly agree as your entree threatens to return and join your main course.

The 747 whistles through the frigid, inky blackness over the vast expanses of the Pacific Ocean 13,000m below the soles of your Doc Marten's, and over 1000km from anything firm enough to support them.

As your head spins from the hideous, gagging vapours that are engulfing you, you become aware that the flight attendants are slowly working their way down the aisles, wearing unusually cheesy, "please don't panic, there's absolutely nothing to worry about" smiles, and whispering to each passenger in turn. And like a slow-motion Mexican wave, each passenger they whisper to seems to totally ignore the "please don't panic" smile.

Eventually an attendant arrives at your anxious shell-like and whispers into it: "Have you ever piloted a jumbo jet, sir? And by the way, I wouldn't eat that . . ."

"Oh my God" you gasp, launching your tray into space. The flight attendant, trained in body language, interprets this as "no", and moves quickly on.

Some 10 minutes later, after an obviously fruitless search, the attendants return to ask if anyone has ever played with MS Flight Simulator, version one or higher.

"I have only fought a dogfight in a Spitfire a couple of times in a Battle of Britain simulation on a Commodore 64, 20 years ago," you say, apologetically.

"Thank God! I've found one!" shouts an attendant, who rips open your seatbelt and half drags, half carries you, with the assistance of three other attendants, kicking and screaming to the front of the plane, where you are unceremoniously thrown headfirst into the cockpit, and the door slammed and firmly locked behind you.

Upon picking yourself up, you recoil in horror as you are confronted by the sight of the entire crew's purple-faced, contorted bodies strewn around the floor, each one clutching a half-eaten "meat" portion on a metal fork.

"The plastic forks do save lives," you gasp as your heart flutters erratically, and you wonder why all the air in the cockpit has suddenly been sucked out, "Mustn't panic! I can do this! Must remember the Spitfire simulator. Um... red was the machine guns, or was that the ejector seat?" Then you look up and totally freak out at the vast sea of instruments, gauges, switches, levers, buttons, dials, chewing gum and lights that fill the front of the cockpit like pop-art wallpaper, topped by a little windscreen that seems more suited to a 1940s crop-duster biplane.

Once more you call upon your favourite deity, and present your entree as an offering.

A safe landing? To be brutally honest, the chances of a reasonably pleasant outcome from this nightmarish scenario are somewhat less than that of an ice cream surviving the lake of burning sulphur. In fact the plane would "not so much fly, as plummet", to quote another flying circus. How could the outcome be improved? Obviously if you were in fact an experienced jumbo jet pilot (and hadn't eaten your meat portion) that would be a whole different kettle of fish. Why is that? Because then you would simply read the instruments, understand what they were telling you and then flick the necessary do-dads, and twiddle the right thingamajigs (hey - I'm not a pilot) to steer the craft to a safe landing, provided the hijackers didn't get to the metal forks first.

Suppose one of those gauges told you that you are flying too slow or too low or you are headed for a mountain - would you blame the gauges? No of course not; you would be very thankful for them, because they are warning you and guiding you, to help you safely reach your destination.

Can the gauges make the flight decisions for you? Again, no. If they could, then you could replace the entire flight crew with a laptop. The dashboard is there just to guide you; so you need to extract what information you need, discard what you don't and then you make informed decisions.

Daily flights As improbable as the above story seems, all of us are faced with frightening scenarios every day as we hedgehop through life, then we are thrust unceremoniously into our cockpits where we are confronted with a dashboard of our internal gauges and dials, which we call our "emotions".

Emotions are there for a very important purpose. They are not there just so you can get weepy watching "Sleepless in Seattle" (or the end of "Terminator 2" if you're a guy). They are meant to provide you with invaluable information about what is happening deep inside you, well below the radar of your conscious mind. They are nudging you in the direction you need to go in your life, and helping you avoid or overcome obstacles. So you should never resent emotions or judge them. Stop right now and listen to them, and then change your course accordingly. I'm being kind of course, not everyone has a 747-sized emotional dashboard; indeed many are more of the 1940s crop-duster biplane variety, but the principles are the same, except for the crop spraying. But the wonderful news is that you can actually add to and improve your emotional dashboard, just as you can add gauges to your biplane dashboard.

If our luckless "pilot" in our story had the right training then he or she would have been able to read all those gauges and use them to fly the plane confidently and keep it, and the passengers, safe. And so it is in life, you need training to read and use your dashboard of emotions to your advantage.

To boldly go But you have to fight your culture to heed your emotions. How often have you heard someone say something like, "You are being emotional, let's just look at the facts", or "If you only do things when they 'feel right', you'll never get anything done"?

It is as if emotions are wrong, and only logic is of any value. But remember the original Star Trek series, which had both the totally logical Mr Spock and the more emotional Captain Kirk at the helm. Which one could they have done without? Obviously neither, because logic needs to be guided by emotion, and emotion needs to be moderated by logic.

Let's look into the black box There's been a lot of talk in recent years about, "Emotional Intelligence" (EI), and your "Emotional Quotient" (EQ), which is a way of quantifying your EI, just as your IQ (supposedly) quantifies your intelligence.

The main reasons for the focus on Emotional Intelligence is that psychologists claim your success in life depends more on your Emotional Quotient than on your Intelligence Quotient, and that people with a higher EQ are more likely to have a better quality of life.

Not just another fly-by-night fad But first of all, just in case you are tempted to think that Emotional Intelligence is just another fad, it actually has its roots back in the 1930s with the publication of a book called "Social Intelligence" by Robert Thorndyke, but some work goes back even to the 1920s. And the first major publication of modern EI was a book called "Emotional Intelligence" (pretty logical really) by Daniel Goleman in 1995

Emotional intelligence is still in its infancy and so there is yet a lot to learn, but it is based on a huge body of scientific research, and so is not "New Age". My tip is, if you go to an "Emotional Intelligence" seminar and they start handing out crystals, essential oils and tarot cards - ask for a refund, but don't get emotional.

Flying in the face of logic The deceptively simple concept of Intelligence Quotient was developed over 100 years ago by psychologists proposing four fundamental areas that they believed demonstrated a person's intelligence: 1. Linguistic skills, 2. Analytical skills, 3. Spatial orientation, and 4. Logical reasoning. All typically "nerdy" qualities, so Mr Spock would have performed well! To determine one's IQ, the subject's "academic age" is calculated for each area, against previously established benchmarks, and then divided by the subject's chronological age. So if a child aged 10 scored an academic age of 12, then their IQ would have been 12*100/10 = 120 per cent. The method went unchallenged for a long time, but one of the anomalies with the system was that many people with a higher IQ did not fare well in life, whilst some with a lower IQ did very well.

The central problem with the concept of IQ is that there is very much more to intelligence than just these four areas, and IQ focuses much more on "hard skills" (as opposed to "soft skills"). Hard skills are easier to learn than soft skills, and that means that with the right training (or the wrong training - whichever way you look at it), people could noticeably increase their apparent IQ. It is very important to note that such training does not increase the subject's intelligence, it just fudges the figures.

But the other huge problem was that some people who were clearly "gifted" in the area of sport, dance, music, artistic works, and so on, were scoring lower on IQ scales, despite their obvious high "intelligence".

In response to some of the criticisms, the IQ test was revised, resulting in the following seven areas being measured: 1. Linguistic, 2. Mathematical/Logical, 3. Visual/Spatial, 4. Musical, 5. Physical, 6. Interpersonal, and 7. Intrapersonal. Superficially, this answered the critics, because it included areas of "intelligence" that were previously ignored. However it was later found that it merely reduced the problems, rather than removing them.

OK - so how can emotional quotient plot my course? According to Daniel Goleman and others who piloted (sorry) EI studies in the 90s, there are five primary components to Emotional Intelligence: 1. Self-awareness, 2. Self-regulation, 3. Motivation, 4. Empathy, 5. Social skill. Note that these are quite different from the areas considered in IQ tests. Let's look briefly at each area. 1. Self-awareness: • Recognising that you have an emotional dashboard, and the ability to read it. • Understanding your strengths, weaknesses, needs, and drives. • Self-love - no, this won't make you go blind, it means being able to accept yourself as you are, without judgment (Author's note: self-love is not conceit. Conceit is a sickness that affects everyone except the person who has it). 2. Self-regulation: • The ability to understand and manage your impulses • The ability to adapt to change and not fear the unknown (but not at the expense of caution). 3. Motivation: A high level of internal motivation means that you push yourself to higher levels of excellence, and go the extra 1.60934 kilometres, without waiting for more wealth or status.

Need to know your needs and drives?

What gets you out of bed in the morning? • Is it still your mother? • Is it $10,000? (this one applies mainly to models) • Do you love your work, or a portion of it? • Do you enjoy challenges? 4. Empathy: Understanding how other people feel, and why they feel that way, and then using that knowledge to influence them.

Note: empathy is not sympathy. Empathy enables you to understand what someone is feeling - sympathy, causes you experience what someone is feeling.

5. Social skill: This includes: • The ability to build rapport, and relationships, • Being able to build effective teams, • Leading people through change, • Reading the social signs, and • Influencing individuals and groups in the required direction.

Your flight map, and all that RAS Every waking moment of every day, your senses are bombarded with information, much more than you could ever manage. As a simple experiment, become aware of your eyes and head moving as you read this page. Now notice what is in your peripheral vision, the ceiling, the floor and either side of you. Now hear the sounds around you - near and far. What colours do you see? Is the room bright or dark? Feel the floor beneath your feet, the chair on your bottom and back. Are you warm or cold? Are you hungry? Can you feel tension, discomfort or pain anywhere in your body?

This information and much more, is flooding you all the time. You just can't deal with it all, so you need a way to focus on what is important. Think of managing a project - there is just too much to concentrate on, so what does the project manager do? The PM filters out what is unimportant, and then creates a model of the project - using diagrams, charts and reports. Then mostly the project manager and team deal with just the model (the mapping) rather than with real life.

And that is exactly what a part of your brain, called the Reticular Activating System (RAS), does too. It filters out what it thinks is unimportant and then it builds up a model which it maps to your life, so that mostly you just have to interact with the cut-down model than with life itself. This is wonderful; we couldn't survive without the RAS mapping function. By reducing the information "Jumbo" to an RAS "crop duster", we can focus on the more important issues, and then we can reason, interpret and infer from those key mapped items and from various social clues and our past experiences, knowledge and intuition, to the circumstances that we find ourselves in. This enables us to act on incomplete information and take proactive action in subtle circumstances.

Paradoxically this is also one of our biggest weaknesses, because we don't see what is really there, instead we filter and colour everything through our emotional system. Often this is just fine, but the problem is that we mistake the model for real life.

Flying blind As an example of this problem, consider a blind person in a room with which they are well familiar. They can navigate the room at least as well as a sighted person, but if the furniture were removed, they would still continue to navigate the room as if it were fully furnished. Conversely if a chair were moved to a new place, the blind person would take no evasive action, because it does not exist in their "map" of the situation. But once the blind person becomes aware of the problem, then they can remap the room in their mind.

Baby jumbos The mapping can also constrain us unnecessarily. For example, when working elephants are very young they have dreams of escaping, and so they are chained each night to a very strong post. They try everything they can to break free, but eventually learn that the post is immovable and just stop trying to escape. Then when they grow to be massive adults, they can be chained to a comparatively weak post, which they could pull out if they really tried, and yet they don't attempt to, because their map of the situation tells them that it can't be done. So we need to test our maps (our beliefs and our interpretation of our feelings) to ensure they are accurately aligned with real life.

In-flight snack A very simple experiment conducted in 1998 on a group of four-year-olds in Stanford University had a profound effect on how researchers viewed the measurement of intelligence. Each child was placed in a separate room and given a single marshmallow. They were told that they could eat the marshmallow any time they liked, but if they waited until the researcher returned to the room, without taking even a single bite, then they would be rewarded with a second marshmallow.

Children do as children do, so most of the marshmallows lasted no longer than our ice cream in the burning sulphur lake. A few managed to hold off for a little while, while a small minority of four-year-olds managed to tough it out, usually by singing or playing, to distract themselves from the temptation, and were justly rewarded with a second marshmallow, when the researchers returned.

Of course, being part of a psychological experiment is a bit like saying "yes" to a telemarketer, religious zealot, spam mailer or PhD candidate - they never leave you alone for the rest of your life (author's note: if you ever get spam mail with a "Click here if you don't wish to receive any more e-mails", never click "here", it just confirms your existence. And if you are waiting for the $3m from Prince What's-his-name, or the bottle of blue pills that will help you "Plez Ur Wuman", you deserve to be pestered).

So the researchers continued to hound all the children, and found that after 10 years, the "two marshmallow" children were doing better at school, better adjusted, more focused and better able to handle stress, than their "one marshmallow" peers.

But one mind-boggling outcome of this experiment then, is that your ability to resist marshmallows (providing you actually like them) might be a better predictor of intelligence and future success than the IQ test. I'm sure Daniel Goleman could have resisted a whole plateful of them.

Earning your wings - increasing your EQ In this, the last section, I want to talk briefly about beefing up your emotional dashboard (I'm sorry; I don't know the vegetarian equivalent). The experts tell us that Emotional Intelligence is part learned and part genetic, and your intelligence quotient tends to increase with age (ok, we all know exceptions) and your emotional quotient can be genuinely increased with training, unlike IQ testing where people can practise to fudge the figures. Just follow this flight plan:

1. Recognise that your emotions are your dashboard; they are meant to be there, and you are meant to use them. Some people treat emotions as if they are a disease, something to be cured instead of listened to. But your emotions are an integral part of who you really are. But more than that, your emotions are designed to send messages to you that your conscious mind is probably totally unaware of. EI means using your emotions in conjunction with your logical mind, just like Captain Kirk and Mr Spock on the bridge of the Enterprise. 2. Learn to read your dashboard. Have you ever had a premonition, "gut feeling" or a warning in a dream and then it actually happened? Your emotions are pretty smart; they can pick up on all sorts of things that your logical mind misses. When you feel a premonition or a check in your emotions, spend a few moments "reading your gauges" and try to work out just what your emotional system is trying to tell you, and why. 3. Maintain your dashboard. To operate effectively you will need to maintain your emotions. This means getting sufficient sleep, eating correctly, reducing caffeine, alcohol and nicotine etc. Because ignoring your emotional maintenance will start to cloud the issue, so if you eliminate the background noise, then you can tune in to the messages from your emotions. 4. Don't judge your dashboard, experience it. You are entitled to experience emotions, they are part of your guidance system, so never feel guilty for feeling a certain way, just learn to recognise what you are feeling. Many people resent their emotions and dry to silence them through drugs, alcohol, violence or whatever, when what they really need to do is to work out what they are feeling, why they are feeling it, and then take positive action. This may require the help of a professional counsellor, but it is well worth doing. 5. Don't just experience emotions, work out what they are. The basic divisions for emotions are: happiness, anger, fear, sadness, disgust and surprise. Usually you can drop your emotions into one of these boxes without too much trouble. But with practice you should be able to divide them down further. If you don't know what you are feeling, then how can you manage it? It also helps to know which parts of the body are involved in your emotions. You could feel something in your stomach for example, or tension across the shoulders. 6. Review your flight map from time to time Spend time reviewing your belief system. For example if you watch a debate on abortion, work out why you feel the way you feel. Did you feel differently a year ago about the same issues? Why is that? Perhaps you are watching a news article and you hear about a number of people being killed and you feel almost nothing - or you see an injured kitten and you have a very strong reaction. Think over your feelings and beliefs and see if there are any adjustments necessary. 7. You are the flight captain, so read the gauges, and then give the orders to achieve a positive outcome. If you recognize that as a result of the messages from your emotions that something needs to be done, then doing nothing will at best increase your stress. But as well as knowing that you should do "something" you need to decide on the best course of action. I.e. don't just obey your first emotional impulse, you need to listen to Mr Spock as well. Your emotions are supposed to help guide your logical mind, not replace it. 8. You are also the flight crew, so after giving the orders, you need to actually follow them. Giving yourself permission to act is vital, but it doesn't actually accomplish anything until you take the first step. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single physical step. And without a physical first step, even a tiny "journey" of just a few steps can never be accomplished. 9. Be your own best friend. Most people are better at giving advice to others and to themselves. So imagine you have a close friend who is going through problems (remarkably similar to yours) and this friend tells you how they are feeling and what emotions they are experiencing. Empathize with them, work out what non-judgmental advice you would give, and then switch hats and take that advice. 10. Smile more, dash it! Psychologists have demonstrated that when we are sad, we begin to feel happier if we smile. You don't need a big cheesy grin, like John Cage in the Ally McBeal series, just a natural smile, and at once you will start to feel a bit happier. In fact it's difficult to feel sad while you are smiling, but it has to be "real", the rubber bands and paper clips from your ears to your mouth trick doesn't really work (hey - you smiled, I bet you're feeling better already).

"Ding-dong! Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard EI Airlines. You will be flying higher and further and faster than you ever dreamed possible. We trust you will have a pleasant journey, and arrive refreshed at your destination."

Jim Owens, PMP MACS, is Director PMTI (Project Management Training Institute) Australia & NZ Operations, Project Management Co-ordinator, Department of Treasury and Finance, Government of Western Australia and Director of Certification, Project Management Institute, Western Australia Chapter. He is Director Intelligent Development Services and can be contacted at jim_owens@acslink.net.au