Leveraging EI in Leadership Coaching

What is Emotional Intelligence?

How would you define emotional intelligence, from your perspective?

It describes the interaction between the thinking part of your brain where rational decisions are made and the part of your brain that controls emotions. It is your experience, your environment, day to day, your senses gather information. And that information comes into your brain, literally at the top of your spine, and goes through a portion of your brain that controls emotions. And so that notion of understanding that what emotional intelligence provides us the ability to know is how our rational and emotions are being interacted with each other- the friction, the constant friction.

So you know, imagine that is an example that you’ve got a pen, and you got a bowl of jello, and you’ve got a bowl of water. And you want to just stick that pen, right through each of those two materials. It’s going to go through the water pretty fast. It’s going to take a little more effort, and maybe in some cases, a lot of effort to push that pen through that bowl of jello. Imagine that this part of your brain, right back here, it’s called the limbic system. Imagine that it’s, you know, fluid. And you’ve got to take those electrical signals and send them through that. If you’re upset if you’re worried if you’re feeling anxiety if you’re distracted in any way, if you’re angry, you know that that simple passage of the electrical signals through that part of your brain to the part of your brain that controls your decision making your rational thinking becomes that much more difficult in It slows it down. It certainly affects it. And in fact, if it’s a tremendous amount of feeling or emotion, and makes it impossible for you to think rationally, that’s again my pedestrian way of describing what emotional intelligence is. Difference between men and women.