Have you ever known the right thing to do but been unable to do it? Have you ever wanted to say or do something – or not say or not do something – but seemed powerless to act according to your best and highest self. This is the question that my colleagues and I ask in the open chapter of our book, The Leader’s Journey.
This week I was preparing for a conversation with someone I love deeply and with whom I was very angry. I didn’t want my anger to derail the conversation but I also wanted to be authentic in saying that I was angry. Could I say that calmly – or at least with the volume turned down enough that the conversation that I wanted to have didn’t get derailed.
In advance of the meeting I prayed and I talked to my coach about how I wanted to show up in this conversation. I went in really clear about what I wanted to say, and the meeting went better than I had hoped. When I look back over my life, I realize that there have been hundreds of conversations like this that have not gone well. The difference is the ongoing practice and coaching that I’m getting. Practice doesn’t make perfect, but it does make progress.
All of us have experienced knowing the right thing to do but being unable to do the right thing. Why is that? In the simplest of terms our brain has two kinds of processes – thinking processes and feeling processes.
In our thinking processes we hold our values and convictions and it is there that we imagine our lives, dream about friendships or marriage or meaningful work or life-giving activity. All that takes place in our thinking processes.
However as we interact with other human beings in pursuit of our goals and dreams, our feeling processes get stirred up. Depending on how much they get stirred up, the feeling processes will override the thinking processes. When that happens we revert automatically to, what in the Faithwalking community we call, our autopilot.
Your autopilot is a set of automatic defensive routines that were learned in your first spiritual formation – in childhood. These behaviors were the ways that you responded to a sense of threat as a little person in a big person’s world. As an adult, unless you really do some important internal work to change the autopilot responses, when you feel threatened, you will automatically revert to those childhood and childish behaviors.
We often say that unless you do the work I’m describing in this post, you will have an 8-year-old running your life in these moments of emotional intensity. We don’t let children run adult’s lives for some obvious reasons.
We get a lot of training in our education as children and adolescents with our thinking processes or intellectual intelligence. Until just recently there was very little training related to the feeling processes or emotional intelligence (EI).
The patterns that our EI follow are learned first and most powerfully in the family. A growing body of research reveals that violence is increasingly common in families and that at least 40% of all American adults have had at least one traumatizing experience as a child. These are huge contributors to the loss of EI. Add to that a cultural marketing machine that colludes to repress healthy emotional development and you have the making of a perfect storm for the rapid deterioration of EI – because for EI to develop it has to be safe to feel your feelings.
Cultural Impact On Emotional Intelligence
How does the cultural marketing machine add to the problem? The implicit and often the explicit message is that we must sanitize our emotions. In 1984 the Gillette company had an ad campaign for its anti perspirant, Dry Idea, that had this tag line: Never let them see you sweat. The ad clearly had a double entendre that was about your physical perspiration and about your internal fear. Ads with a similar message are everywhere today.
In many cases both in our homes and in our culture, we are taught that the so-called negative emotions are taboo.
The average person is not allowed to have and explore any number of the normal emotional states. Anger, depression, envy, sadness, fear, distrust, etc. are all as normal a part of life as breathing or sleeping. Yet, there is almost a cultural conspiracy that these feelings are to be avoided. The message is that these feelings are a shameful part of the human experience. This is tragic because all of the human emotions have enormously important functions in a wholly integrated inner life. Unless we learn to experience and express these feelings in healthy ways, they go underground and take on a life of their own.
For emotional intelligence to develop it has to be safe to feel your feelings. Click To TweetI have a mantra that goes like this. Feelings that are experienced and expressed die a normal death. Feelings that are not experienced or expressed go underground and take on a life of their own. They come out in passive aggressive ways. Or they cause an ulcer. Or they cut us off from important people. Ultimately over time we get cut off from ourselves and live an emotionally numbed out life, and this makes connection to others almost impossible.
I believe that the experience of being fully human and fully alive is the experience of being deeply connected to one’s self, deeply connected to others, and deeply connected to God. This is not possible if we can not experience and express (in healthy ways) all of our emotions – not just the positive ones.
Daniel Goleman defines emotional intelligence as our ability to successfully recognize and manage our own feelings and to healthily respond to the feelings of others. I love myself in a healthy manner to the degree that I keep my heart open to myself in all my emotional states. And I have intimacy with my friend as we offer this type of emotional acceptance to each other.
A person with a healthy emotional life will accept the fact that the human feeling nature is often contradictory and frequently vacillates between opposite polarities of feeling experiences. A healthy emotional life shifts from happy to sad, from loving to angry, and from forgiving to blaming ongoingly.
Because of the deadly one-two punch of familial and societal attacks on our emotional selves, we need to recover our innate emotional intelligence. The popularity of Disney’s recent movie, Inside Out, reflects a growing awareness of the need to learn emotional intelligence.
But for many of us the possibility of finding a safe environment to learn these skills seems almost impossible.
Families, congregations, synagogues and mosques were once a place where these skills were learned. Today that is often no longer true. Last week I wrote about a learning community that I’m in where we are working on these skills. The Faithwalking community is one of the best communities around for this kind of learning.
It’s hard work, but as one friend said, “It’s the good kind of hard.”
One pastor did the Faithwalking work with her spouse. In a conversation one day she said, “We are experiencing a level of intimacy that I did not even know was possible in a relationship. We are learning to be vulnerable with each other. We are learning to disagree without damaging each other. We are more connected than we have ever been and more than I knew was possible. It’s a level of being alive that I’ve never experienced.”
It’s that kind of good, hard work that must be done if we are going to live into our truest, highest, best selves. Growing our emotional intelligence is essential in that journey.