“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
Victor E. Frankl
Hey, Jay here from The Coaching Room, thanks for checking out this article. Once you have read it, my hope is that you will have more clarity on what emotional intelligence is and how you can achieve health, wealth and happiness through emotional mastery.
Our ability to be aware of our states and state or mood management (mind-body-emotional states) sits at the heart of what NLP offers us. What and how we communicate to ourselves (and others) creates our states, so the NLP and its models and technologies is smack in the middle of developing what is referred to as Emotional Intelligence (EQ).
So, what is emotional intelligence? I will answer this from 4 Key perspectives. The more of these perspectives a person can take at any one time, the higher their line of development in EQ is, where; the highest competence of EQ is the capacity to take all 4 perspectives at once.
The first part (1st person perspective) of EQ is the capacity to understand your interior – how your thoughts (movies in mind) create your states (mind-body emotional states) and ultimately ground your experience.
The movies that I run in mind (visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, auditory digital self-talk) about reality, drive how I feel and my emotional state based experience which then grounds and filters how I experience the world, and create new movies in mind.
A high level of emotional intelligence from the 1st person perspective is understanding how I create meaning, the capacity to bring awareness to this, enabling me the choice to give the power to myself respond over reacting, through realising that I do not have to give the power of my thinking and feeling away to the situation at hand.
The second part (2nd person perspective) of emotional intelligence is being able to understand and recognise how other people do the same thing in their interior.
Well-being on the interior effects well-being on the exterior. When we have taken responsibility inside it affects how our reaction or responses to the outside. This shifts and changes how other people react and respond to us which has an immediate effect on the relationship that exists between us, the understandings and therefore how both of us feed forward into that. (empathy)
A high level of emotional intelligence from the 2nd person perspective is understanding how physiology, body language or semantic gesturing communicates on the outside the experience happening on the inside and through calibration, and the communication loops of checking in, understanding how other people do that for themselves.
The third part (3rd person perspective) is the capacity to objectively separate my state from their state and the capacity to work with and induce states on purpose in self and others.
Projection with emotions is the most common expression of average level of emotional intelligence on the planet. That is, where one human being says you make me angry; which indicates to us to be a low level of emotional intelligence, because the other person cannot possibly make us angry. If this is the case then they are unable to objectively separate their emotional experience from other people’s emotional experiences.
A high level of EQ from the 3rd person perspective is understanding that if a person gets angry I do not need to take on their anger which is becoming objective to and separating their state from my state. What they’re doing is projecting their anger upon me.
The fourth part (4th person perspective) is recognising how states interact with and are impacted by the environment and social systems.
Most people would operate from a low to medium level of emotional intelligence, where they experience the up and down of the emotional rollercoaster based upon what is happening out there in the environment. What happens when we are able to move to 4th person perspective and beyond is the realisation that I have constructed and created a self that chooses to maintain itself through feeling its way through the world.
So, if I choose to switch on and bring access, amplify and apply joy to something – it’s a volitional choice on my part – the 4th person capacity to be able to see that’s my choice to or not to.
A high level of EQ from the 4th person perspective is understanding that I do not have to react to the environment as I can indeed respond by doing nothing, by feeling nothing or experiencing nothing – if I choose to become transparent and allow that to pass through, like a train passing through a tunnel – to feel it but allow it to pass. I don’t have to hold onto it, identify with it, value it, believe it or experience it as part of the psychology of myself; I can simply allow it to be.
Now here is the thing with that, people say to us “isn’t that living in beige or greyed out world?” From my perspective, absolutely not.
Why? Because I have chosen to switch on joy within myself and it’s not about anything in reality, it’s my birth right, my system, my emotion. I can experience it about a cup of coffee, a glass of clean water, about walking my dogs, the pain of exercise, sitting inside of a movie, in a meditation, in the spaciousness of nothing, of being.
We use EQ and the NLP communication model as a coaching model, because a human being’s freedom (in our world) is based on their capacity to free themselves from the environment having power over them. We use it in coaching as a model of understanding how we take the world in through our senses, how we filter it and make sense of it, how we run a movie about it, how that movie affects our mind-body emotional state and therefore reaction/responsiveness.
The distinction between map and territory is an example of that. In The Coaching Room, through NLP and Neuro-Semantics, we have created a pattern we refer to as the “Acceptance Pattern” – that is the capacity for me to bring radical acceptance to anything to allow me to just be with the experience of it, without having to feel up or down about it.
See you in the room
Jay
