watch tHe skies

“I you do the things that you are afraid of, the fear goes away” says Brian Tracy. I love this idea, and yet it is so hard to do because it’s outside of what we believe is possible, isn’t it?

I was coaching someone the other day and she was telling me about the things that hold her back. We explored this some more and got to the root cause… that she was afraid to do them. So I asked her a question:

“Have you ever been chased by Lions or some other creature intent on rending you limb from limb?”

“No” came the answer, with an odd expression that I expected meant that she wondered where I was going with this questioning.

“So I wonder, if you’ve not experienced very real danger, where fear is a given, how do you know what you feel in those other situations is actually fear?”

That’s a tough question to answer. The truth is, emotions aren’t digital… we have an analogue set of feelings that we code, or generalise in to words. The words aren’t the feelings.

And even if they were, what is fear? Fear is a very real and practical emotion if you are in physical danger. Fear fires off adrenaline, which primes our bodies for fight or flight, handy in the jungle, annoying and fairly pointless if you are only anticipating stating your name and occupation at the beginning of a Health and Safety workshop. Thus, for most of us in our everyday lives, fear is redundant, and actually annoying.

And yet I said it doesn’t exist, didn’t I? That’s right. It’s just a name that we give to something, so if we aren’t really feeling fear in those moments where we get butterflies and the blood is pumping in our ears, what is it?

I wonder, is it excitement, anticipation, and a load of other “emotions” that are positive?

It could be, after all you name your emotions, it’s up to you.

So the next time you feel the fear, check that you aren’t in a jungle or similar, and feel something more productive instead! (more…)

Whenever I decide to review a book I always have a quick google to see what others are saying about it. I don’t mean reading the reviews on Amazon - people who review on Amazon either love a book or hate a book, I rarely see objective reviews on there. That isn’t to say that my reviews are objective, in fact they are highly subjective. After all we all read for a reason, and my reason is very specific when I tackle a tome such as this. “What does this book tell me about being a better xxxxxx (customise to suit)”. In the case of this book I was interested in empathy. I was hoping to understand what makes some people “people persons” and other people not that people-friendly.  From that I wanted to know how I could improve my own people skills, and hence improve team performance, and make working with me in whatever role I adopt an enjoyable and rewarding experience. I digress. If you want to read an objective, in-depth review of this book, go here.

Back to my thoughts. Interestingly before I read the book, based on a primitive understanding and assumption of what emotional intelligence was, I believed myself to be fairly emotionally thick. Not a good characteristic for a coach.

Fortunately this book caused me to reassess my own view. The EQ concept argues that IQ, or conventional intelligence, is too narrow; that there are wider areas of emotional intelligence that dictate and enable how successful we are. Success requires more than IQ, which has tended to be the traditional measure of intelligence, ignoring eseential behavioural and character elements. We’ve all met people who are academically brilliant and yet are socially and inter-personally inept. And we know that despite possessing a high IQ rating, success does not automatically follow. The essential premise of EQ is: to be successful requires the effective awareness, control and management of one’s own emotions, and those of other people. (more…)