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Leading with Emotional Intelligence E-Zine - Issue No. 20/ November 2007

Dear Reader,

Few of you know that my first university degree was in Mechanical Engineering and how I got into coaching and leadership development.

Let me briefly share with you this story because it relates to Sebastien’s article below.

About 20 years ago, when I studied Mechanical Engineering, I have to say that I found most of the subjects I had to study rather boring. I went into this field because I liked mathematics (and still do today) but I didn’t enjoy most other subjects. At that time already, I started to get curious about psychology and read books written by Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung (the latter remained my most admired scientist until today). It was also around that time that I read for the first time about the concept of coaching. I found it very interesting and thought that’s something you may want to do one day, perhaps when the first grey hair appear...

Fast-forward to 2002 with first grey hair appearing: For a number of reasons I contemplated a career change, in particular, I wanted to start my own business. The first thing that came to my mind was consulting. But somehow, it didn’t feel right, I didn’t feel passionate about it.

Then, one day, I opened South China Morning Post (the largest English newspaper in Hong Kong) and read an article about coaching. My intuition immediately told me that this is the right thing to do. The rest is – as the saying goes – history. It was one of the best decisions in my life to go into this field of work.

Wanna know more about how you can capitalize on your intuition? Then read Sebastien’s article below.

Let's keep progressing!

Charlie Lang
Executive Coach and Founder of Progress-U Ltd.
Author of The Groupness Factor

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Can we be fooled by our Emotional Intelligence?
(Some benefits of tapping into intuition)

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by Sebastien Henry,Executive Coach & Trainer Emotional Intelligence Expert for Progress-U Ltd.

Part of Emotional Intelligence is awareness of our emotions – the ability to see them as signals and messengers bringing us important information about ourselves.

For example, an episode of anger tells us that some of our needs have not been satisfied. After getting this message, our next step is to act towards the fulfillment of these needs.

At the other end of the spectrum, joy signals that our most important needs have been met.

Emotions are very precious signals and are worth paying close attention to.  The problem, however, is that sometimes, these emotional signals can also be misleading in decision making or in handling interpersonal relationships. When it comes to business, there can be a significant impact.

At this point, intuition comes in as a very precious resource -- more reliable than mere emotional signals.

I have recently developed a keen interest in intuition, specifically how to listen to it and how to develop it. I was privileged to attend a very interesting two-day workshop on this topic in Paris in November .

The beauty of intuition is that it cannot mislead us. However, we can mistake mere passing emotions for intuition and fool ourselves into making wrong decisions. 

Why then can emotions mislead us, whereas intuition cannot?

Intuition is an aggregated message from a huge amount of information that we have collected out of awareness As a matter of fact, we process an incredible amount of information everyday through our five senses, yet, we are only aware of a tiny part.  

Our intuition gives us an aggregated and often clear message from this pile of information. It has the capability of synthesizing and getting to the core message. And this is why it is so reliable.

Emotions, on the other hand, reflect a small part of the picture only. For instance, a surge of anger in a relationship may be sparked only by one particular need that has been neglected at one particular time. But it does not really take into account the other dimensions in a relationship.

Whether or not this relationship is worth nurturing goes well beyond this episode of anger. Tuning in to our intuition at this point will prove  to be very useful.

But how do we tune in to our intuition and how can we differentiate intuition from emotion?

Intuition can be easily mistaken as emotion because it is very much like a “gut feeling” like how it “feels” right or not to make this decision or how it “feels” right or not to build a partnership with this person. Intuition therefore has an emotional dimension.

Here is how to differentiate intuition from emotion.
 
To be able to listen clearly to what our intuition is telling us, we need to be in a calm state.  To be in a calm state, we need adequate preparation.

In the workshop on intuition that I attended, we went trough a preparation stage of around 10 minutes (similar to a meditation process) before starting to listen to our intuition.

Whereas emotion is instantaneous or literally “jumps to your face”, intuition is very different. Only by going through a preparation process can we be sure that intuition is filtered from emotional messages.

For us, business people, this exercise does not seem to be very practical! 

The key idea here is that intuition is like any other skill -- the more we practice, the less time we need to put this skill into action. Experienced practitioners can tune in to their intuition almost immediately. 

I will share more on this topic in future issues of “Leading with Emotional Intelligence”. In the meantime, do not hesitate to get in touch with me for any question or comment.

With warm regards

Sebastien

Feel free to contact me if you wish to discuss the content of this article. I am passionate about this issue and always enjoy sharing views and ideas.

For more information related to Progress-U Leadership Training and Coaching, please click here.

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