EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
Having been supremely successful in his career, it was only when he reached CEO level that he started getting feedback from many quarters that people didn’t fully trust him, because he was a bit cold and distant. To his credit, he took this feedback very seriously. It did not take long in our work together for him to realise that his coldness and distance all stemmed from his experiences aged ve years old in the presence of a father who would unpredictably rage. Naturally frightened by this, my client had felt no choice other than to freeze his own fear and subsequently develop a narrative that emotions are dangerous and not to be trusted. As we worked, he greatly softened towards both his fear and his sadness, discovering how much more open and present he was when he allowed himself to have feelings. In a recent catch-up call, he described how this was changing him at work and spoke of engaging with a long-term client in a more human way. He then said to me: “I learnt more about him in 10 minutes than in the last 10 years.” The overdominance of our left-brain rational thinking and its futile e orts to control and ‘know’ everything must be stopped. Albert Einstein asked us to consider if your mind is your master or your servant. We are in big trouble when, as happens in most cases, the mind becomes our master because it means we live in a narrow, small version of reality, delusionally believing it to be far more that it actually is and using tools clearly not t for purpose in the face of more and more unprecedented complexity and instability. We urgently need what I call ‘whole-self intelligence’, something that brings all of our faculties to the table – mind, body, heart, intuition and soul, as well as the capacity to rest in a deep space of being within our frenetic doing, to listen to a much higher order of intelligence. In short, we must make heartfelt space for all of our natural emotions – I believe our future depends on it.
“The prevailing belief is we should block out or rid ourselves of fear, since sitting in this ‘negative’ emotion prevents us from taking the bold steps required to solve problems. Nothing could be further from the truth”
are most alive, most open to all the dimensions of existence. In our vulnerability is our power.” At its core, emotional intelligence simply means making appropriate space for human emotions. Who nowadays does not feel some underlying anxiety, be that about personal circumstances or the state of the world? However, if a majority of people present in a meeting are feeling some degree of anxiety, there is absolutely nothing to be gained by a culture in which one is not supposed to feel fear. The insinuation is that this somehow means we are ‘weak’, but this is a foolhardy mindset. In such a meeting, people will be sitting in such a state of extreme physical tension in order to suppress their fear that their critical thinking faculties will be severely compromised. So, I often invite clients to ask themselves at the end of each day: “How many times today did I open my heart?” Addressing our discomfort In this current age, there is an urgent need for us to break the deep disconnection from ourselves and each other that we have come to accept as normal. No emotion needs healing, xing or changing. Those impulses arise from our disconnection from, and discomfort with, our own emotions. Once a person feels safe enough to simply feel and be met with a warm heart, our emotions change within a very short space of time, without any apparent ‘doing’ on the listener’s part. That is the single most simple, radical and transformative fact about emotional intelligence. It changes everything. The failure to recognise and embody this truth is what blocks emotional intelligence in workplace culture. Earlier this year, I worked with the country CEO of one of the world’s largest consulting organisations.
Over the past 20 years, Nicholas Janni has gained an international reputation for his transformational coaching and leadership development seminars. He was an associate fellow at the University of Oxford Saïd Business School from 2010 to 2015 and now teaches regularly at IMD Business School in Lausanne, Switzerland. His book Leader as Healer was named Business Book of the Year 2023
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Business Impact ISSUE 4 2023
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