This Isn't Going to be Touchy-Feely, Is It?

From MAD Magazine, long long ago, "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions:"

Stupid Question #1: "This isn't going to be touchy-feely is it?"

Your Options for Snappy Answers:

* "We wouldn't want our senior executives to be too in touch with each other, would we?"

* "Is it your position that unfeeling executives are more effective?"

* "Only for those who still believe this company is a big dumb machine."

* "No, this is only for emotionally mature executives."

* "Why? Are you concerned your wife and kids might recommend it?"

* "How much TOUCH is too much for you , personally?"

* "We'd like you to lead us in the chorus of that great 80's hit FEELINGS."

OTHERS?

The Five Steps to Emotional Competence

Post #2

Not being one to judge and hang back, I'll own my judgments about Goleman's contributions and offer this up:

There are five distinct steps in developing our emotional competence:

1. Acknowledge how profoundly we have been and still are being programmed by mother culture to devalue our emotional experience.

2. Learn to recognize a basic set of primary emotional families in myself and others
(We recommend Mad, Sad, Scared, Peaceful, Powerful, Joyful as a good starting point.)

3. Learn to understand the meaning of each family's signal, what the purpose of each emotion is.

4. Engage the action behavior appropriate to the meaning of each emotion.

5. Repeat each of these steps regularly with a group of intentional and supportive colleagues.

That is the crux of it. Beyond this basic rehearsal there are practically an infinite number of applications. More to come on that.

From Emotional Intelligence to Emotional Competence

So, I looked and I looked and I looked, all through Goleman's fascinating and thoroughly researched books, Emotional Intelligence and Working With Emotional Intelligence. Know what I was looking for? Did you have the same experience?

I sure appreciate Goleman for laying out the cultural argument. I could not agree more that our culture here in the west has systematically trashed emotion as a valued currency of human experience, and that we are dangerously, frighteningly ignorant of the most basic tenets of the emotionally competent life.

I was looking, looking, looking....

Where are the core, basic emotions? What are they called? What does all this rhetoric boil down to as key words? And what are the simple, fundamental meanings of each of these primary emotions? How do we understand their universal purpose? How are we to act when we become aware of these basic human signals?

Did anyone else have this same strange experience?

I couldn't find answers to these anywhere.

So, I was both sad, and excited, encouraged because this is exactly where my book takes up the conversation: specific skill development in emotional competency for adults in the workplace.

Any one else interested and waiting for such an instruction manual?