I bought the book Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goldman when I was about 18 years old. It has moved with me 4 times now and I have literally never read the whole book yet. Although I love the idea, it’s a bit technical and doesn’t hold my interest.
The irony of a book about emotional intelligence being technical is not lost on me.
Emotions and the whole world of feelings are what keep life interesting. Without them we would be robots going about our business and our jobs.
When I pick up a book about Emotional Intelligence and it’s technical, I get bogged down and it doesn’t hold my interest. To be fair the whole book may not be technical, I wouldn’t even know yet – maybe in my next 25 years I’ll finally get through it all and I can tell you. Lots of smart people speak highly of the book, so this could just be me.
However, I was able to read one story I enjoyed when I opened the book to the middle (this is how I hijack a book I’m having trouble getting in to). The story is of a man who was successful as a lawyer. He had a tumour on his brain that needed to be cut out, and when they took the tumour they also took part of the temporal lobe that processes emotions.
In the story the man couldn’t make a decision because he didn’t have feelings. He would intellectualize everything. In a decision making process we need to be able to put emotional weight on one choice or the other, and he couldn’t do it. Making the next appointment with this man was painful because logically everything on his schedule was equal and he couldn’t figure it out.
Feeling is the most magical part about us. It’s a nuance that we need to tap into and it holds a world of treasure, the deeper we go the more rich we become.
This was the beauty of growing up on the back of a horse.
Communicating with an animal is all about feel. There is really no other way to do it well… I have based my whole world on feel.
Feel the music.
Feel the energy of a space.
Feel someone else’s energy.
Feel when you’ve said too much, or not enough.
Feel the connection with another person.
Feel the way words land, or the feel how one word in particular stands out.
One of my favourite movies ever is Reel Steel. In it, they teach a robot how to feel. Teaching someone how to feel is really really hard.
The whole movie is great, and if you haven’t seen it, it’s worth tracking down. I picked this clip because it’s showing how the Robot, Atom, is feeling the music. The nuance of how his body moves shows him feeling it, it’s totally not robotic at all.
Wouldn’t it be beautiful if we could dance our way through life?