Emotional Intelligence is Dead

Long live emotional utilization!

Emotions are our greatest power.

But for some reason, they are not very welcome in relationships.

“Emotional intelligence” is a must-have skill.

Many HRs seek to asses it during interviews with something called EQ.

But emotional intelligence in its definition can actually be a toxic behavior.

Why do we have emotions?

Emotions initiate actions.

Motivation is emotion.

I’d split emotions in three domains: body, heart and mind.

Three fundamental emotions polarize every emotional state: fear, trust and of course, the neutral state of indifference between fear and trust.

Physical emotions are those initiated by our body and its five main senses — touch, sight, smell, taste and hearing.

Relational emotions are those which are initiated by our relationships with other people or things (the environment).

Mental emotions are those initiated by our relationship with ourselves — our values, beliefs, how we think about ourselves.

Each domain of emotions can be polarized from the fundamental three, this is how we like or dislike a taste or a smell, we like or dislike a person, an animal or an object, we like or dislike ourselves.

Or we feel indifferent about any of these.

How do we decide whether to trust or to fear?

Based on experience.

On what’s known and what’s unknown.

We fear what we don’t understand.

What is the emotional charge bias?

Often we as humans seek for what is in our interest.

We have many biases, that alter the facts towards our interests.

The confirmation bias is one of the most popular: we seek for facts to prove our own beliefs and we at the same time disregard facts that prove the opposite of our beliefs.

We do that unconsciously and on purpose.

The emotional charge bias is something very similar. When we feel negative about something or someone, we focus only of the negative part of every action he takes. Although there is always two sides of the coins, we tend to see only one. This is how we create an attitude towards this person.

Read my article about the power of attitude:

Because relationships are two sided, the same happens with what we get in return from this person. We will alter every good intention into bad, we will interpret every action as harmful, we will add a negative connotation to every word, we would even construct a new reality to prove us right. But all that is a result of our inner state.

The same happens when we are in love or we like a person in the workplace more than the others. We will cover up every mistake, we will find an explanation for every failure, we will shift responsibility to other people to protect that person. If we become consciously aware about that state we will start limiting that bias.

All answers lie within us. Because relationships are two sided, if we change our inner emotional charge from fear to trust we will start changing our relationships with other people. We as people become trusted only after we start trusting the person or environment. We as leaders become trusted only after we start trusting our people.

What is emotional intelligence?

By definition it is the combination of the following four: self awareness, self motivation or self management, social awareness or social skills and relationship management or empathy.

Here is a gtreat book that worths reading on that topic:

The problem with emotional intelligence is that is aims to stop that jungle in the workplace by limiting emotions.

It steps on the wrong statement that decisions need to be rational and not emotional, but every rationale is created by the mind out of emotion.

And this is why I find emotional inteligence obsolete.

What is emotional utilization?

Simply said, it is using all your emotions in all three domains with all three polarizations consciously supported with arguments and facts to achieve a specific result.

But there’s a trap: people often like to stay in the emotional state without taking the action.

In fact, very often we as humans do not even think about actions, especially when the emotion is positive.

We want to extend the emotional state.

When it is negative, we want to find more supporters and to discuss, exaggerate, make an elephant from a fly, become true haters.

But the emotion is here to initiate action, remember?

My favorite trick I often use with my people: when they come to me with a complain about something, I start listening. It is often about who said what and how it made someone else feel. I listen very carefully till the end of the complain (it also makes people calm down), then I ask:

What do you what to change about this situation and how?

When we start discussing actions people often realize that some, if not a lot, of their emotions have no professional ground. Moreover, they may even harm their own professional development, but I never really needed to say that as people often realize it by themselves.

If you feel emotional about something or someone, think about it.

Find the reasons why you feel like that.

Then start looking for evidence and facts.

Sometimes evidence will show that your emotion is initiating actions that will lead to your own personal emotional state improvement and will have limited or no impact on the organizational development or the development of your career path.

Check for emotional charge biases.

Find the reason and try to alter your state.

Utilize your emotions to work in your favor, think about how could you personally benefit from a negative situation in the workplace.

Think about actions, what could you personally do and what consequences would your actions bring.

And remember, every spoken work is an action taken.

Before saying something, think about what you expect in return, what is the result that you seek out of this action?

Does it help you achieve your goals?

Some Fnal Thoughts

We all choose for ourselves.

Always.

When you feel something is wrong, and you do have the argumentation but you do not act, by doing so you let wrong things happen in the workplace, and you start accumulating negative emotional charge inside.

This negative charge comes from the created imbalance between your internal values (which require you to act upon what’s wrong) and your actions (inactions in this example).

This imbalance will then start building up, accumulating what we today call “stress”.

You see, it is our choice to become stressed.

When we are not being ourselves, when we are not authentic, when we are compromising our beliefs we are choosing to stress ourselves.

And nothing and nobody can help us if we cannot realize what is happening and address it by ourselves.

This is the simplest way that I can say it: emotional control brings nothing but harm to ourselves and to the organization. Emotional utilization builds the grounds of growth and development on every level.

See you next time!

Yana

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