I’m in Kuala Lumpur eating breakfast in Times Square looking out over the city. All week I’ve been eating spicy Asian food, and today I take some toast with apricot jam. Taking a bite, I’m swept into homesickness and longing for the green gold fields and laughing children of home. Amazing how our senses and emotions are so intertwined, so visceral, and so unexpected.
Success & the Business Case for Emotional Intelligence
A completely revised and updated Business Case for EQ is now available for free download.
The new Business Case for Emotional Intelligence lays out a compelling array of research projects linking EQ and EQ skills to business success. But what about you? How do you define success, and does emotional intelligence have anything to do with it?
Experiment:
Think of 3-6 people you know that you consider successful. Maybe they are not “100% successful,” but each has some part of success well dialed.
- What are the key elements of success? What qualifies someone to be on your list?
- For each person, list their key strengths: Beyond luck and circumstance, what knowledge, attitudes, or skills sets this person apart? How many of these are linked to emotional intelligence? Without using names, post your answer to this question in the comments, below!
- What parts of list #1 do you aspire to? What parts of list #2 will help you get there?
This article appeared as a VitalSigns for EQ – one of Six Seconds’ great newsletters.
EQ Reflection: Monuments
Due to the foibles of flight schedules, I had some unexpected downtime in DC, and found myself wandering the Mall. I don’t think I’ve been here since I was in eighth grade, and it made a very different impression on me now. I suspect that the first time, I was much more concerned about the pressing matters of who I’d sit with on the bus, and what those girls were whispering, and when we’d be able to shop for trinkets that made us feel somehow more complete.
Now walking through these monuments I thought about the sweep of history. About the times of great challenge when exceptional women and men stand up and stand out, not for themselves but in service of hope. About Martin Luther King Jr standing on this very place, his magnificent voice booming over this wide arcade and around the globe. Giving himself utterly to a higher purpose, his message echoing through the hearts of those for, neutral, and even opposed, calling something deeper in them.
And in that same park, stones with golden signatures from the Declaration of Independence. People standing up for something “impossible,” something bigger than their own gain — and in so doing galvanizing hope and reverence and the power of human spirit. Again, in giving to a larger vision, these leaders opened a door wide enough for allies and enemies alike.
Sprinkled though this garden are monuments to wisdom and to sacrifice. It’s so difficult to tell in the moment-to-moment of our daily lives, but in the sweep of history it becomes clear. Great purpose requires the most exceptional commitment, but there’s a razor-edge between sacrifice for pride and sacrifice for promise.
On a more personal scale, I finally saw the Vietnam Wall — it wasn’t here when I was a boy-hoping-to-be-a-man. I thought of Hank, my father, and how many of these shipmate’s names were carved into his heart as indelibly as they are carved into the granite. I thought of all these other men who’s names are carved in the granite, who now might be grandfathers too.
In the brilliance of this monument I couldn’t help but see generations reflected in the stone. The passing crowds of all ages, bright colors dancing on the wall. Some faces closed in loss, some somber in reflection, others chatting about the pressing matters like who they’d sit next to on the bus… Then finally I willed myself to look at my own reflection in the stone, and thought of the legacy of war and how it’s a part of my own story. I could see myself through the names of those who died so far away fighting for a myth of pride and arrogance and fear.
I wondered what kind of monument we will make for the women and men fighting today. I wondered if those who toil in the marble corridors of power take time out to look over at this somber granite and consider the way their choices will reflect outward in the lives of ordinary people, into the faces of future generations who walk by remembering. It’s so easy to point a finger at “them,” but if I’m going to learn something here I recognize I also need to look at myself in this wall.
Here we are in an era of upheaval, with fear and uncertainty rampant, with nearly desperate problems on every side. Perhaps the most profound challenges humanity has ever faced. What can I do, one ordinary man, amidst all the difficulties we face? Isn’t there a new hero who can save us?
Perhaps in times of greatest challenge it takes both the most ordinary and the most exceptional women and men stand up and stand out, not for themselves but in service of hope.
In the past, we’ve needed someone stand on the marble steps and call forth our commitment. Perhaps today’s challenges will also require us each to do so. There is a quiet voice of wisdom that dwells in every one of us, but it is easily shouted down by the clamor of what we each want now. That quiet voice of wisdom speaks quietly through a feeling of what’s truly precious — we know when we are in integrity because we feel it.
So where do we find the wisdom to step out from those compelling immediate concerns of daily life and to commit to something larger? This commitment is not comfortable, it’s much easier, and perhaps even more in our nature, to attend to the “seat on the bus matters” rather than the “sweep of history matters.” In either case it’s emotion driving us, but perhaps there are multiple voices of those feelings. For example, fear can sweep us unconsciously into matters of unimportant urgency, into a bid for comfort. But if we use emotional intelligence and look deeper, that same fear can tell us something truly vital is at stake.
When we do get that deeper insight, we also get an important benefit. Emotion is information, and it is power. When we tune up our awareness and attend to what’s truly important, we liberate the energy of those strongest of convictions. Then we can use the power of our feelings to commit, to sacrifice for what matters.
Perhaps in a hundred years there will be a new monument here, not commemorating a great woman or man, and neither honoring lives cut short, but reminding future generations of how people like you and I did what was right. About how we shifted our attention away from comfort and convenience and toward the survival of our communities. Away from being right over others and toward caring-in-action. Away from taking and toward healing our shared home.
Are you ready?
Hope and Loss: Back to School
I’ve always loved+dreaded this time of year. Dreaded because it meant the end of lazy afternoons stretching from freedom to boredom.
But more, loved, because as a child (then as a teacher), September meant a clean slate – infinite possibility – even redemption.
Maybe this would be the year I stopped having yogurts break open in my backpack and get all over my books.
Maybe this would be the year I stayed on top of my homework and didn’t feel contantly behind.
Maybe this would be the year the cool kids would include me playing four-square at lunch.
These examples sound a little sad to me, but I wasn’t sad, I was abundantly (overly?) hopeful. I’d say “optimistic” but I didn’t have a plan, I didn’t take the ownership of the solution.
I could hardly wait to start school and to see if the long summer afternoons had transformed something in me, in us. I had this sense of discovery, of boldly going someplace new — and possibly wonderful.
On the one hand, it was nonsense, and each year led to inevitable dissapointments and dashed hopes. But at the very same time I was right, year after year. Somehow I learned to leave my yogurt in my locker instead of my lunchbox. Somehow I because a straight-a student. Somehow I met wonderful people who love me for who I am.
In the magic of passing summer days, I learned something about work, something about participating in the world, something about integrity. In my child-mind it would all happen by itself with the dawning of a new year. Now, as an adult I see that change mostly came from doggedly sticking with it.
In any case, these days of raw potential — of renewal, of hope, of infinite possibility — have stayed with me, and still fill me with a trieste for the end of summer mixed with a wonder at what we can become.
Behavior or Deeper?
Our society, especially in business, seems fixated on “behavior” as a magic solution. For example, recently I was talking to a potential client about a leadership development program and he wanted to know what “EQ behaviors” the participants would learn.
Talking about the behavior is an easy short-hand. We want leaders to be proactive, to engage, to give feedback, to listen, to hold people accountable, to execute. All behaviors that sound great on the surface – but the HOW is essential… and maybe even more essential than the behavior itself?
My belief is that we need to look more deeply at what DRIVES the behavior. One can execute a certain behavior in so many different ways – and thereby create completely different results. Just imagine all the ways one could say the words “thank you.” If the underlying feeling is gratitude the same words have a totally different impact than if the underlying feeling is irritation. Thus the emotion that’s “beneath the surface” drives the result.
Emotional intelligence lets leaders see beneath the surface of their own and others’ actions. To focus on the HOW – on the alignment between the behavior and the underlying intention.
Emotional Intelligence Helps NFL Players “Win at Life”
“We’re learning that emotional intelligence is an important ingredient in helping professional athletes live healthy and successful lives”
– National Football League Players Association Executive Director Gene Upshaw
A study of retired NFL players and EQ compares players’ emotional intelligence with life success — including good health, positive relationships, avoiding drug/alcohol use & violence, financial strength, and quality of life. Among the 30 athletes we studied over 60% in the variation of these important factors are predicted by emotional intelligence scores. So there is a massive correlation between high EQ skills and life success.
This is an important study because NFL players are extremely influential as role models – and despite their incredible success in making it to the top of the game, there are so many struggles off the field. We can now pinpoint specific, learnable skills that will make a difference for these guys – for life. While the NFL is a very big, economically driven business, the growing interest in emotional intelligence could be a sign of commitment to the larger impact of the sport in our society.
6S Network Meeting in Italy
Last weekend we had our first Six Seconds EQ Network meeting in Italy. Max Ghini (Director of the 6S-Italia office) and I presented – here’s Max (and look at the lovely room in the basement of an old old building, just off the main square of Bologna):
And me… I talked about using emotions and emotional intelligence to create change – with some personal stories of starting Six Seconds and our commitment to change starting with ourselves. I also shared stories of paradoxical feelings about my father, and finally the legacy of a Hawaiian woman committed to rebuilding a community space.
Here’s more of the wonderful Italia team, from left: Lorenzo, Dani, Federica, Veru:
Max introduced the Corporate Social Responsibility campaign and we all discussed the vision of partnering with business to create a context for thriving. It seemed simple and natural that we could help businesses meet their essential goals by bringing EQ to the communities where they operate:
Then teams started working on how to bring EQ to all the children and adults of Italy and beyond:
Thank you to the 50+ who joined the meeting! I look forward to the next one – which will be the Choose to Change conference in San Jose, CA, Oct 4-5 ’08.
Freedom and Love
Dear ones,
Tomorrow the Jewish holiday of Passover begins, so I’ve been thinking about freedom and about love.
Passover commemorates the time when Jews were enslaved in Egypt and then Gd, through Moses, led them to forge a path toward freedom. Moses didn’t want the job — he felt unqualified, incapable… uncertain and hopeless, but he chose to say yes.
It was a terrible journey — both the journey of enslavement, the journey of release, and then the period of cleansing in the desert. At Passover we do not celebrate a defeat of Pharaoh and his people, instead we express our sorrow at the suffering and our gratitude that so many before us have accepted the struggle for freedom.
Freedom does not mean getting to do whatever you want. Patty and I were talking about what our kids would say — they seem to think freedom would be growing up so no one would tell you what to do. And we might imagine freedom as being eight and getting to come home from school and play ’till dinner. But neither is true or possible.
Freedom means taking responsibility to walk in the path of what is right. It a process of ongoing effort and care. It is a terrible burden, but also a joyful one. It is terrible because when you accept freedom, you can no longer take the easy path of blame. You can not ride along and then be mad when someone takes you to a destination that isn’t what you wanted!
There are so many ways to give up freedom. Being on “autopilot” and blindly following patterns. Being a victim. Being a dictator. Deluding yourself. Breaking your own integrity. Letting yourself be seduced by superficial wants — or maybe confusing “wants” and “needs.” Compromising your values, or devaluing yourself to seek approval, status, affirmation, or power from the outside.
But at the same time there are so many gifts. Not just gifts of freedom itself, but gifts from the struggle to be free. Perhaps without the struggle there is no real freedom — or at least none of the heady bliss of finding it. In the struggle we have the opportunity to confront ourselves and one another. To question what truly matters. To challenge assumptions and the status quo, not changing for change’s sake, but changing for the sake of liberating our highest and best selves.
In the struggles there are an abundance of difficult feelings. My dad (stepfather) is struggling w cancer and it’s brutal. On one hand I am feeling so sad and afraid and hopeless — and on the other hand these terrible emotions feel good. They feel “right-but-hard” and are reminding me of our love and the gifts he’s given me and our whole family. So the pain is really love in disguise.
Recently Max was in struggle because he left his “best Pokemon cards” in his pocket then put his jeans in the laundry — they did not fare well. On the one hand he was helpless, a victim of bad fortune. On the other it was an opportunity to receive loving support from us, and to take action, to take ownership of the future. To be free.
While I was in the midst of struggle post-emergency-knee-surgery I was feeling pretty low. I felt helpless, powerless, dependent, stuck. But at the same time I was able to receive so much love and care. I thought a lot then about what it meant to be free. Did it mean being able to put socks on myself? (that felt like great liberation!) Or did it mean being able to choose to be grateful for the care? Even grateful for the pain? (because it was a sign of the process of recovery)
I’m struck that freedom is so much about feeling. About feeling despair versus hope. About feeling unworthy of and unable to love versus abundant in it. So many people are afraid to love and to be loved. They are so hurt that the hurt itself becomes a kind of shelter. They make walls of rage to barricade their fear, they keep their hurt close at hand in a desperate attempt to prevent it from overwhelming them. Maybe this is the ultimate slavery, the self-imposed slavery of denying that we are worthy and capable of love.
This is a prison whose wall grow thicker each day. The more we see ourselves as unworthy of and unable to love, the more depleted we become. We become more and more closed to love from all around, and less and less able to love others. Paradoxically the door opens by giving; it swings open outward from self acceptance.
The good news is that no matter how thick we make these walls, freedom can come in the blink of an eye. So impossible, then so simple. It can feel like betrayal of a promise, though, because we do not stay free.
We must choose again. Each time it feels impossibly hard, then suddenly, miraculously, easy. Then we find another challenge; this is the journey of freedom. Without the opposition we go back to autopilot, back to coasting. So the walk toward freedom is embedded in struggle — we find jewels among life’s travails. While there will be struggle, there is also choice — a balance that is a process.
Freedom, then, is decision made over an over; a string of choices. Not choices of circumstance and power, but choices of heart and will. Love and effort. Made over and over, strung together on a necklace, each bead buffed to luster by the challenge inherent in the decision to be free.
Does this perpetual struggle sound grim and dark? I don’t see life that way. I see it as beautiful, part of the abundance and wonder of our world. Each time we choose freedom we become stronger, deeper, and brighter — contributing, as have so many before us, to the vast pool of liberation.
With love,
– Josh
Jasmine, Insecurity, and Being Stuck
It feels like summertime here – glorious, peaceful, and relaxed. The scent of jasmine is pouring in through my office windows along with the gently cooling evening air.
Yesterday I was talking with a client/friend about where he needs to put energy in his business. Hands down: “relationships.” Reaching out and connecting, mostly externally and also internally. He admitted he wasn’t doing it the way he wanted, and part of me wanted to say, “but that’s so easy!”
Then I realized that his reason for not doing this is much the same as my reason for not exercising (something he’s great at, by the way): In two completely different challenges, we each feel inadequate – incompetent – and without real hope that our efforts will work.
And we each find it incredibly difficult to persevere… and all too easy to slide that task to the bottom of the pile. I am sure there is value and insight in this feeling, some clarity to be found, but even in this quite jasmine gentleness of evening, the wisdom is beyond me.
Randy Pausch Reprise – Gratitude, Humility, and Commitment
A few months ago I blogged about Randy Pausch’s “Last Lecture” about Achieving Your Childhood Dreams. He didn’t use these words, but he talked all about what we call emotional intelligence. Here’s a reprise he gave on Oprah:
Plus here are a ton of other videos about Randy.