Garbage In, Garbage Out: How to develop greater emotional intelligence

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Almost 20 years ago I was sit­ting on a class­room at the ‘Uni­ver­si­dad de Los Andes’ learn­ing about System’s The­ory. In that class-room, I learned a very use­ful par­a­digm: Almost any­thing you care to look at, can be inter­preted as a sys­tem that takes some inputs; processes them; and pro­vides some outputs.

Through­out my career as a con­sul­tant, I ended up call­ing this frame­work the ‘I.P.O’ equa­tion , which con­fused many of my col­leagues who were con­vinced IPO stands for ‘Ini­tial Pub­lic Offer­ing’ instead.

One of the corol­lar­ies of this the­sis is that with any sys­tem there are three ways to improve it:

1. You stream-line its processes, mak­ing them quicker (more effi­cient) or bet­ter (more effective)
2. You inter­cept its out­puts before they reach the end-user by estab­lish­ing strin­gent Qual­ity Assur­ance rules, and dis­card­ing any­thing that does not meet those rules
3. You con­trol its inputs and ensure that they are of the high­est pos­si­ble quality

So what hap­pens when we apply this level of think­ing to our­selves? One of the crit­i­cal inputs we have in every day of our lives is our emo­tions. But how do we con­trol our emo­tions so that our inter­ac­tions are more pos­i­tive and fulfilling?

Sorry to say, but you can’t. At least, I have not found any­one that can truly con­trol how she or he feels. This leaves us with a seri­ous dilemma: If we can’t con­trol a very impor­tant input into how we expe­ri­ence every moment, what can we do about it?

The answer is rather obvi­ous: We find ways to improve the way we ‘process’ our emo­tions. This is par­tic­u­larly impor­tant for neg­a­tive emo­tions. How do you process them? Wen you process them, do you try to ‘release’ or ‘dis­card’ them?

Let’s take a closer look at a few of them:

How do you release anger? Do you punch, throw objects, or scream? What impact does that have in oth­ers and in your­self? Are there other ways in which you could process anger? Maybe you can try to iden­tify songs, places, even thoughts that make you calm down. How about next time you’re angry, you process that anger by think­ing of a calm­ing idea, or going to a place that makes you feel peaceful?

How about Hurt? Do you with­draw or go on the attack? ‘Fight or Flight’? Do you talk things over, or do you make assump­tions that you know ‘why’ the other per­son hurt you like that, and you know it was mali­ciously intended? Maybe you can try instead to put your­self in the shoes of the other per­son for a sec­ond, and under­stand their sit­u­a­tion. What could be going through his mind to make him act like that, despite his typ­i­cal good nature and car­ing attitude?

You can do the same exer­cise for Resent­ment, jeal­ousy, despair, sad­ness and even grief. Deny­ing those emo­tions in your life will only bot­tle them up until the pres­sure escapes through a very destruc­tive explo­sion. Instead, you can pre­pare for them by devel­op­ing a higher aware­ness of what you do when in ‘auto­matic pilot’ (we all have one of those), and iden­tify alter­na­tive ways to deal with them.

You may be won­der­ing what made me think of this topic. Over the last year, I had a cou­ple of instances at work where I got extremely agi­tated about the way things were done, and my auto­matic pilot drove me to become more vocal and aggres­sive on the topic. I wanted to ‘win the argu­ment’. Later on, one of my men­tors made me realise that feel­ing pas­sion­ately that an injus­tice was being car­ried out was actu­ally a very good emo­tion to have; but that the way I decided to act on it had not taken us on a pos­i­tive path.

Then last week, I got some news at work that made my blood boil. I felt hurt, angry and betrayed by some of my lead­ers. I had to take some time out in order not to go straight to their offices and ‘sing a cou­ple of truths’ to their faces. I had to actively choose to process those emo­tions in a very dif­fer­ent way than what I would have done a year ago. And I think the out­come achieved was far more pos­i­tive than if I had allowed my auto-pilot take control.

So there you are. Sys­tems the­ory applied to the realm of human emo­tions and life as a sys­tem itself. I encour­age you to reflect on your own auto­matic ways of react­ing to stress, injus­tice, or loss. Are they serv­ing you well? If not, how else could you process them? What can you do to ‘kick you out’ of your auto­matic pat­terns, and con­sciously choose a dif­fer­ent path?

COn­trol­ling your emo­tions? You can’t. So if you can’t con­trol a crit­i­cal input, what doyou do about it?

You fig­ure out how to process them; and as impor­tatly, how you ‘dis­pose’ of them.

How are your emo­tions being actively released, par­tic­u­larly neg­a­tive ones?

What do you do to release anger? Hurt? Resent­ment? Jeal­ousy? Despair? Sad­ness? Grief?

Tagged as: Anger, Automatic patterns, Emotions, Essays, Grief, Hurt, Injustice, Jealousy, Life, Philosophy, Reflections, Systems Theory, Work