Checklist For An Emotionally Intelligent Team
The emotional climate of a team or workplace affects performance and productivity. So here’s a checklist for an emotionally intelligent team
Get Everything In Writing
Psychologists at Washington University report that
the memory function of people in their mid-60s and up is easily swayed by the
power of suggestion, making them more vulnerable to memory-related scams. A
full report appears in the May issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology
(JEP): General, which is published by the American Psychological Association.
For example, an unscrupulous contractor can tell an older customer, “I
told you it would cost [a much higher price than was originally quoted] and
you agreed to pay!” Without a written estimate, the customer is likely
to “remember” it that way, too, and be overcharged. Another scam,
“you forgot to pay me,” also underscores the need for written receipts.
Some con artists even run their own rudimentary memory tests on the elderly,
checking to see if their memory is bad enough to make them good victims.
Get the full story here.
My own experience (of being on the receiving rather than the perpetrating end) suggests that you don’t have to be that old to not always remember clearly what was said – just being preoccupied with something else and not giving something your full attention will do it.
Consciousness in a nutshell
What is consciousness? The best summary I’ve found of where we are up to in understanding this is an article by Susan Blackmore. Susan brings an extra dimension to her understanding – as well as being a psychologist, she is also practises Zen meditation (though she says "I am not a Buddhist", and has experimented with psychedelic drugs.
After discovering her fascinating site, I will definitely be reading her book The Meme Machine
One perspective she doesn’t mention is Ken Wilber’s Four Quadrants model, in which subjective experience is a different, yet linked, realm to the objective world studied by science. In this model, the sense of self is not reducible to the physical functions of the brain (as most researchers into consciousness in the neuroscience field believe) but they are linked. Makes sense to me.
Most of the information about Wilber’s ideas on the web get very complicated and jargonised very quickly – why I’m not sure. The most accessible description of the basic model is here.
Emotional Intelligence In A Nutshell
Someone asked these questions on a coaching forum recently:
> Can emotions be intelligent? How can emotions be intelligent? How can the
> lymbic emotional brain learn from the intelligence of the cortex and vice
> versa?
I had time for a brief answer, as technically I was on my day off. I’ll reproduce it here in case it helps anyone:
Emotions provide information which is not available in other ways – including information about how other people are feeling (and hence how they are likely to act), and about the state of our health and energy levels, and what we really want.
It’s impossible to make decisions on rational criteria alone – in Descartes’ Error
How the limbic system can learn from the cortex: by mutual communication. If emotions are too strong, they shut down the ability of the cortex to think, reframe and make sense of things; but without emotion, nothing matters.
The ‘them against us’ thinking that <contributor> mentions is probably more to do with the brainstem, an even more primitive part of the brain concerned with fight or flight and territoriality.
We all have the capacity to think about things, we all have the capacity to love, *and* we all have the ability to revert to ‘them against us’ thinking under pressure.
If anyone wants a more academic answer about how emotions can be intelligent, they can have a look at some of the links from my site at www.practicaleq.com/eqlinks.html.
How To Deal With An Incongruent Coaching Client
One of the students on my NLP practitioner training called me today with a problem that every coach will recognise. She is doing some ‘practice’ coaching for a friend, by telephone. Each week the client very positively identifies and commits to their actions for the coming week – and by the following week, there is