Hi gang! Thanks so much for your participation and thoughtful questions tonight. I had a great time, and hope you did too.
If you want to continue talking about EQ or have any thoughts or questions you'd like to share, please click on "Comments" right below this post. In the spaces that pop up, enter your name, your email address (you will never get spam from me!), leave the url field blank, type in your comment and when you are done, click post. I'll receive your message and will respond within a day, so come back and check to see if there are more comments from me or anyone else.
If you don't want to leave a comment, no worries. Hope you enjoy surfing my blog! See you next Wednesday.
Aron,
So glad to hear from you! Thanks for your comment and for the link on listening as well. I'm glad to know you liked the course, but I'm more glad to know you are doing your own research...self improvement in any area requires commitment and a learning attitude. It sounds like you’re on your way.
I think your idea of reading books together is a great one. I'm not so confident that I have a big enough audience in this blog that you'll get many takers. So, we have a few options:
1. We can wait a couple of weeks to see if anyone does respond (maybe my audience is bigger than I thought!).
2. You can round up your own set of friends and family who would want to read a book together and we can use this blog to capture your discussions.
3. Finally, if there aren't any other takers, you and I can read a book together. I'd be willing to go back and re-read any of the books you want to start with.
What do you think about these options?
As for your question impulse control in communicating: what a fantastic question. I'd start our discussion by saying that impulse and intuition are two different animals. Let's say someone yells at you a scathing insult. Your impulse might be to want to yell an insult right back. That impulse comes from inside your "reptilian brain"; your limbic system that within 250 milliseconds, research shows, will decide if it's appropriate to flight, flee or freeze. That impulse, that raw emotion, didn't check in with the thinking part of your brain, just the emotional part.
Intuition is not an emotion. It may FEEL like an emotion, but it's not an emotion. It's more like an antenna that reads information at different levels.
Here's a story that might makes things clearer. Back in the 1960s Walter Mischel, a psychologist at Stanford University, gave marshmallows to groups of four-year-olds and then left the room, promising that any child who could postpone eating the marshmallow until he came back, some 15 to 20 minutes later, would be rewarded with a second marshmallow. Years later, Mischel discovered that the kids who triumphed over their desire to eat the marshmallow had grown into teenagers who were socially, emotionally and academically more competent than the four-year-olds who ate the marshmallow at once.
Mischel went on to discover that the successful children stood out not only because the simply quieted an impulse. Instead, they were able to think of something else in order to quiet the impulse. Some would sing, tap their feet, tell themselves stories, imagine the marshmallow was a fluffy cloud--anything to avoid eating it. One even held out by falling asleep.
My point is that if you want to communicate "cleanly", it may require more than just impulse control. It requires that AND it requires you to think of something else. This is the "intelligence" part of "emotional intelligence". For example, as you delay yelling an insult back, you may ask yourself questions like "Why is this person angry?" "Is this person dangerous?" "Will this person get angrier if I respond?", "Where do I want this interaction to go?" and more.
Tell me what you think and let's continue the conversation.
Dear Martha:
It has been a while since the end of the class and I still remember how wonder it was! Thank you! I am reading your reply to Kevin and checking out these two books "How to Talk to Kids so Kids will Listen and Listen so Kids will Talk." and "Seat of the Soul." on Amazon. I am wondering if anyone out there reading this message will be interested in reading through the books together? I will sure come back here for more discussions after I read the books!
Like Kevin, listening skills are something I am particularly interested now. Here is an interesting site I happen to come across. I think you may be interested.-- http://www.rc.org/. (Click on "The Art of Listening" on the left section of the page.)
One more question that I meant to ask in the class was about having impulse control in communications. Will such control get in the way of one's intuition--the basic instinct one has in handling unfamiliar situations? Were you suggesting letting go of the intuition and simply trusting a more cognitive approach. (with all the guidelines we learned from your class in mind)? I am intested in your opinions and experience on the usefulness of intuition or so-called "gut-feeling".
Again, I want to say thank you. That was a great class. I enjoyed learning through your style of teaching, that was full of energy and spontaneity.
Sincerely,
Aron
Great question, Kevin. I'll begin with two books that are my favorites. One is "How to Talk to Kids so Kids will Listen and Listen so Kids will Talk." I don't have kids, nor do I intend to have them, but this book made empathy clear for me. It really was a life-changing book for me. (You can review a little of the book by clicking on the book icon and "look inside"....it will show you the few first pages. Also, if it's difficult to see the page in the small comment box, hover your mouse over the title of the book and right click. Select "copy shortcut" -- it might also say "copy link location". Then go to the address bar and paste it in there by pressing control v.)
Another book I highly recommend is "Seat of the Soul." This one's hard to explain. It doesn't really talk about communicating; it's more about how you are perceiving your environment. And as I like to say, your environment contains emotions (or data) too.
For work and a more targeted EQ angle, see "Executive EQ". I believe this is a much better book than the more popular Daniel Goleman book that really put EQ on the map, called "Emotional Intelligence."
I'm glad to know you enjoyed our class last night and I'm glad that you are on a path of self-discovery. Already you are ahead of the game!
Martha
I am not sure if my message came through?
I found the course invaluable last night a very practical way of learning listening skills. I am wondering if you could recommend any books that are very practical for improving people skills? I just read People Skills by Robert Bolton - it was ok - but did not find it as practical as it could have been
I have been on a journey of self discovery since breaking up with my ex. I have been reading a lot & have a much better understanding of myself, what makes me tick, what I do not do well - listen, lack of being assertive etc. And I want to continue this learning as I know I can grow as a person
Thanks for your advise
Your approach to teaching is fun through your energitic & enthusiastic style
Best Regards
Kevin