“We define emotional intelligence as the subset of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions.” — Salovey & Mayer: From “Emotional Intelligence,” 1990

You will see that in this definition (one of the earliest as these guys were first movers to commercialize and popularize, before Daniel Goleman, a NY Times Writer, became "interested" (partly because of relationships with those at Hay-McBer Consulting, now the HayGroup, which David McClelland founded, btw, Boyatzis was the CEO for around 7 years, as I remember him telling me…) …in Emotional Intelligence and created the best-sellers that continue to inform BS today.

I won’t say there is not a bit of @F-L-O-W in the work, but to me, it needs serious repurposing to be optimal.

Using the Goleman model in Emotional Intelligence, there are some real key notions:

Self-awareness is pivotal, without it, there is low ability for social awareness, and even lower ability for self-management, going back to the tenets of recognition and regulation as an underlying model.

You can read my paper: https://www.leadu.com/ODJ.pdf and in the first part I summarize the EI model as it’s related to executive coaching, as the model is there in graphic form as is the research I’ve quoted about self-awareness.

Yet, that is not what I want to discuss here about Emotional Intelligence?

Note the "?" mark?

Because what I discovered and is unique to @F-L-O-W, is that Blank Slate focuses on you controlling yourself, and teaching you to fix all your broke-ass weaknesses so you can behave… and yet, we know that in large part, to try to reason with an oncoming train is rather stupid. However, here we have in the entire field of emotional intelligence a focus on fixing ourselves so we can behave better and reap the rewards for "nice little people" society’s hand-outs, and all the while the idiots without any self-control continue to abuse, beat, maim, and kill those "nice emotionally intelligent people"!

DON’T POKE THE SHARKS!

They don’t teach this in emotional intelligence and that’s why you see me referring to EI? with a question mark.

With @F-L-O-W, we know people are mostly, especially under the gun of emotions, irrational. In fact, Khaneman won a nobel prize in economics for demonstrating the obvious, we are not rational decision-makers… go figure!

Therefore, the emotional intelligence lies not in fixing yourself, but in learning that you and others will behave irrationally and if you don’t want to get bit, abused, maimed, or dead, that you learn to recognize the emotions in others and run like hell, forget about them being rational and you being "emotionally intelligent?"

What I discovered is that whenever there is an amygdala attack, an emotional arousal causing the person to choose one of the 4fs..as a basic category of functioning, there are two emotionally stupid persons, at least…usually there are a lineup, or causal loop of these emotionally intelligent idiots who fail to realize that someone is being pushed to and often past their limits.

YOU SEE, I put the onus of emotional intelligence on the person who is actually "creating and triggering" the amygdala attack because they are completely unaware and full of BS about how THEY are not the one’s behaving without emotional intelligence and clearly they think it is the person having the attack who is at fault, as taught by the main-line of EI?.

Helpful Hint: IT TAKES TWO TO TANGO.

With @FLOW, we abandon the notion that emotional intelligence is something for you to work on yourself with and use it to understand the emotions of others, which the defintion covers, but no one teaches!

We’re so busy learning about self-awareness we forget that the entire model is built on recognition first, then regulation. When the whole jist of it all, is us not being a party to amygdala attacks, either infected with, or being a carrier, as most people are and most people do.

Action Step: Try this next time you are in a situation where things you recognize and notice, are not going well, and in your new found emotional intelligence, you have compassion for the person who is being triggered, realizing they have the low-road invoked in their neurophysiology, and that the high road has been shut down and they will not respond rationally —> give them a break, defuse the situation, and usually it can be just as simple as asking for some time to think, go to the bathroom, see a doctor, meet your boss, if it’s not your boss you are triggering, something that will allow you to remove yourself from the situation, and let’s see how time helps the half-life of the amygdala threshold we all have…allowing hormones to begin to return us to normal states..

Warning: some people have a very low threshold for amygdala response, and others maintain the "excited state" for some days, which is why emotional intelligence focuses on the wrong thing in my view. Be careful with people who you notice are sharks, they do and will bite you —> hard.