Emotional Competence

Content

1. Instead of an I ntroduction

2. Thou ghts that led me to write this Book

3. The Cooperation of Emotion, Mind and Body

Our Emotional System

What are Feelings and Emotions?

Emotional Markers

Competence

Empathy – the most important Requirement

4. Emotional Competence in Practice?

The four fields of Emotional Competence

Vigilance for myself and my Emotions

Vigilance towards Others

Vigilance for common Interaction

Ability to regulate Emotions and Motivation to act

5. Why do we need Emotional C ompetence

Emotional Competence in our private Lives

Significance of Emotional Competence in each Individual’s Career

Emotional Competence in Leadership

Emotional Competence and its Significance in Business

Future Perspective: Encouraging Emotional Competence in Business

The “Sports Side” of Emotional Competence

6. Nurt uring and Developing Emotional Competence

Educational Examples for Emotional Competence

Vigilance in Self-Nurturing and Development

Vigilance in Nurturing and Development of Others

Vigilance for mutual Interactions

Ability to regulate Emotions and (self) Motivation to act

7. Further Thoughts

Warning – Feelings are infectious

A Self-Experiment in the Area of Sports

A Tree must be bent while it is young

Happiness – the Dopamine of Life

Humor Research

To lead, you must arouse Emotions

Action and Sports

Nature as “the Skill of Lingering”

Earth yourself

Arts and Crafts - artistic Activities

Music

Writing

Drifting in Quiet

8. Your Fountain – an Outlook

Glossary

Appendix

Further Literature

Acknowledgments

1. Instead of an Introduction

You don´t want to read a long introduction but want to know what this book is all about? You will learn how emotional competence can help you succeed in your personal, business and private life.

You will find the answers to the following questions:

 What exactly is emotional competence?

 How can emotional competence benefit your personal, business and private life?

 What possibilities and methods are there to encourage and develop your own emotional competence?

2 Thoughts that led me to write this Book

“What is the use to reach the moon if we cannot overcome the chasm that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important expedition and without it, all others are useless.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, French writer and pilot (1900–1944)

A strong trend for new key qualifications (such as the capability for teamwork, cooperation and motivation) has been noticeable in the last few years, which are associated with social or emotional competence.

According to many studies and reports, it is increasingly important to bring a certain portion of these qualities such as emotional competence into our professional as well as private lives.

The psychotherapists say that people are threatened with self-alienation through their lack of self-perception and the overload of external stimuli; and so our innermost, emotions and needs will be neglected.

Futurologists are predicting that values such as empathy and emotions will be in great demand.

Psychologists know that the key to all social competence is in the presence of emotional competence.

At the same time, the educational ideals of our western culture stress the importance of intelligence, logic and rational thinking. Grades, Pisa tests, exams and minimum duration of studies are the focus of the educational discussions.

Where are, in fact, the sensitization and encouragement of emotional competence in our culture, which should be supported in all areas? It has little room in our school system, as well as serious support for emotional competence in areas of adult education - mostly in professional life -, which is of very little value at this time. It is present only in a few curriculum or master courses just as it is not present in leadership training programs.

A further consideration, which led me to this subject and motivated me to write this book, was my many years in adult education, human resources development, consultation and coaching.

I realized - repeatedly - that the participants had the right tools for good communication or recognized the solutions to their conflicts. However, they lacked deeper competences such as the needed amount of empathy or sensitivity to solve the misunderstanding or conflicts in the team, to see the other person´s point of view or at least to try to understand him or her.

Social education has also strongly influenced and inspired me. The subject of how to strengthen our sensibility towards others has often been brought up in seminars that I have held as a trainer. Yet, it is my observation that especially the area of social education needs an awareness of one´s own feelings and emotions. For the percentage of burn-outs in these jobs are growing (but not only here) as the people involved are so devoted that they often forget to look after themselves. The awareness of one´s own psychological well-being is often forgotten.

Likewise, I had the impression that conflicts took place because of the lack of ability for maintaining social interaction, as well as not knowing one´s breaking point and the inability to regulate and motivate oneself.

These four areas are what emotional competence is all about:

 To have vigilance for myself and my emotions

 To have vigilance towards others

 To have vigilance for relationships and common interaction

 Ability to regulate one´s own emotions and motivation to act accordingly

The ability to recognize emotions and to deal with them accordingly is not to be underestimated. In this way, emotional competence plays a very important role, if not the most important role – as expressed by Saint Exupéry in the introduction.

There are many very good books about emotional competence. But I found that they lacked ideas how to increase one´s own emotional competence. In this book, I also want to give guidelines and suggestions that can support the promotion of emotional competences. I developed these guidelines from my personal experiences in coaching, training and adult education courses. Clearly, they can only be suggestions. How intensively you will follow them is your own decision. Furthermore, the application is dependent on your own experience and what focus you want to place on developing your own fountain of success.

I would be happy to hear from you if you have questions, suggestions or thoughts which you want to share with me:

E-mail address: info@training-steinbauer.at

3 The Cooperation of Emotion, Mind and Body

“Emotion is the living mother of the entire spirit.”

Friedrich Theodor von Vischer, German philosopher (1807–1887)

To understand emotional competence and thus to understand how emotions affects our lives, we need to think about how we function as human beings. Actually, it is quite simple:

We think, feel and act automatically, without having to think too much about how the process takes place. We have control of a wonderful network of emotions, understanding and body in which thoughts are linked with emotions, emotions link themselves to behavior and our behavior links itself to bodily activity or functions.

The human emotional center is not in the stomach, as many had believed, but in the brain, exactly in the emotional center of the brain, called the gyrus cinguli, amygdala and insula¹. This emotional center is directly connected to the pre-frontal brain (center of intelligence/rational thinking).

Brain research has already given us the insight that our emotional center is activated when we make an analytical- rational or cognitive decision.

The emotional center and the cerebral cortex memorize occurrences independently but also function in parallel.

This can be seen in a simple example: should the eye register information e.g. sees a snake, this information will be processed first of all by the eye and then will be forwarded in a switching reaction through the thalamus to the emotional center as well as to the visual cortex. Both will compare this information with an earlier experience and then cause a reaction. These reactions are different from person to person. Therefore, these reactions could be one of the following:

Rational reaction: “run away”.

Emotional reaction: the feeling of “fear” arises.

As we see in this simple example, the interaction of the rational and emotional can actually be used in every different situation. Thus, human activity cannot be reduced to simple logic-analytical competences. In fact, the emotions react faster than the logic, more precisely: emotional processes operate faster, thinking processes operate more accurately.

A typical example: how often do we overreact emotionally e.g in anger or hurt, and say hurtful things to the person that we feel has spoken out of turn. Later on, as soon as our logic has been activated, we regret what we have said.

Our emotional System

“People are not disturbed by things but by the view they have of them.”

Epiktet, Greek philosopher (about 50–125 A.D.)

We have an emotional system, a very distinctive network, which acts as a connection between emotions and understanding. In the course of a life, each human being builds up their own special network, which functions as a circle; thoughts are linked with emotions, emotions are linked with thoughts. Emotions color or influence our impressions and our impressions are colored by our emotions.²

The view or meaning we give to different occurrences, combined with our feelings are very individual for each one of us. Each person has his or her own system of evaluation³ that develops and manifests itself through conscious or unconscious perceptions and opinions. When something has been evaluated, this evaluation is stored in our mind.

Thus it can happen and will happen that in situations that we have cognitively experienced previously, we automatically connect them and recall feelings from a former situation.

This can be disastrous, as an emotional bias can occur and new feelings cannot develop. Even when the overall conditions are different as, for example, when dealing with another person.

A simple example: assuming you have had a bad experience with a police officer who did not treat you right during a traffic control. What will be your reaction when you see a person in a police officer´s uniform or have a traffic check weeks, months or even years later? Your whole individual ratio-feeling network will be activated and the feelings that you experienced the last time will be recalled, possibly with the necessity of resistance and defense, until the current officer, being nice and polite, tells you that your right headlight is not working.

In many daily situations, our emotional network can be inhibiting. Unintentionally, we fall back on old familiar patterns and thus build up our own, not only rational but also emotional reality. Thereby, we are our own worst enemy because we do not let ourselves feel anew and evaluate situations for themselves.

Let us look at this in a sport´s setting: as a golf player, you may have one hole on the whole course where you happen to have difficulties. Alone the thought that you cannot manage this hole, cannot get over the pond or are always out of bounds cause anxious feelings every time you are in an aiming position. This anxiety cramps you, which affects your muscles and the whole energy flow of the body. This results in a bad shot. Again one has had difficulties at this hole, you were again proven right, namely that you have problems with this hole. We fall back on old patterns, although a new pattern of thinking, new feelings could make us successful.

Through evolution, we know that body, emotion and mind can be seen as one unity.⁴

This system can be equally observed with humans as well as with animals. It is a sort of alarm system, which signals change (internal or external) and causes an appropriate reaction. This is what happens with the feeling of hunger (emotion): most of the time our stomach growls (body), our mind tells us that we need nourishment and so the unity body, mind and emotion has been established.

To understand how this unity works, imagine the reaction plans in the brain or in the amygdala.⁵ In these plans, the different groups of commands are issued to the body; e.g. with anger and rage, the muscles are tense and blood pressure rises, blood circulation increases which results in a red face or skin and produces more sweat.

That these emotions and emotional stress can have a permanent harmful effect on the body is evident in the list of psychosomatic diseases. Many medical studies demonstrate the longstanding damage on the heart and circulatory system resulting in years of unresolved feelings such as anger. According to this study, even 5 minutes of anger can negatively influence the circulatory system.⁶

Many popular expressions demonstrate this cooperation of body and emotions: to “break one´s heart”, to “make one´s blood boil”, it “sits heavily on somebody’s stomach”.

We feel something, our body recognizes this and our language expresses it. The amazing thing is that many people (I think too many people) do not understand the language of their own body or ignore their bodies´ signals. It may be that they do not feel these signals, are imperceptible to these signs, have forgotten how to be aware of these or no longer know how to feel.

What are Feelings and Emotions?

“One can unconsciously have much knowledge, when one feels but does not know it.”

Fjodor Michailowitsch Dostojewski, Russian writer (1821-1881)

Feelings and emotions are often colloquially given the same definition or are confused. In this book, I also do not want to make a big difference between these two words. In my opinion, the two words “feeling” and “emotion” are as similar or as related as vacation/holiday or noodles/pasta.

Scientifically, the difference between feelings and emotions can be explained in the following way:

Emotion is a very complex process, which affects different mental but also psychological levels and represents something primary and permanent. Emotion (Lat. ex: out and motion: movement) is thus a process which is triggered through a conscious or unconscious perception.

Feelings are rather a subjective experience of the emotion; in a manner of speaking: the side effect of an emotion. Feelings can be identified as the complex affective component of human experience. It can be manifested through different forms such as pleasure-displeasure, love-dislike etc. Müller-Commichau⁷ describe feelings as following:” Generally feelings are the part of the “I” that has different senses that are called feelings- as can be evaluated by others, when one is a part of something, may it be only for a fraction of a second.”

Try to think of honey or of rock climbing in climbing. Depending on if you like honey or have no fear of heights, you may like it or maybe even take much pleasure in it. A person that does not like honey or has had a bad experience with heights will experience negative feelings.

Therefore, even though we connect them with rational thinking, feelings are actually subjective and are a result of personal experience and views.

We give a personal value to each of the impressions we collect in the course of our lives. In this way, we determined how this experience will influence our further actions and feelings.

Thus, it can be that the word “work” is seen as something pleasant or even fulfilling, as very positive; maybe this person has finally found work after having been unemployed for a long time, after a long sick leave or this person has found their dream job. For other people, the same word can be connected to a burdensome feeling resulting from a bad work atmosphere, an underpaid or demanding job. The same word is assessed differently because of the different feelings brought on through this word. An emotional marker is developed through the rational part of a message, a word or situation influenced and manifested through a feeling.

Emotional Markers

“Our life is what our thoughts make of it.”

Marcus Aurelius, Roman king and philosopher (121-180 A.D.)

Our emotional markers develop individually during the course of our life according to our personal perceptions, experience and individual feelings. These emotional markers stay with us our whole life and give us orientation daily. Thus, we do not need to examine every situation anew since we have already had this experience and have memorized the related feelings.

It is important to accept that this is our personal and thus subjective assessment, which is also very individual. It may be that a friend feels the same as we do in some situations. However, just as often, we will find that other people feel quite differently. To accept and to allow this is an important part to promote one’s own emotional competence.

On the contrary, the different feelings of our counterpart should give us reason to examine our emotions and see if we are reacting in a suitable way to the things, situations or words involved.

In the same manner, we should always examine our cognitive knowledge to complete it or to exchange it for new knowledge. A good example for this is an example from our technical daily life: you probably are no longer working on one of the first computers. You probably have a laptop with the newest programs, maybe even an iPad, an iPhone you write e-mail instead of letters and google information instead of ordering a pamphlet with new information. You did not hesitate to throw out old technology to replace it with the new.

When was the last time that you thought about your memories and renewed your emotional capacity?

In a normal lifestyle, examining our feelings happens more often without even thinking about it. (Women will maybe understand this example more than men will. I just ask of the men to think about this example).

Women friends (maybe even men friends) often tell each other their emotional worries or what has made us angry and in this way, we are asking their opinion about the situation. When this is a good friend, this person will understand your feelings, maybe they will even agree with you. It may even be possible, that this person will tell you that you are right and will support you and reinforce your emotion.

When this is an even better friend, this person will also tell you if they think that you are wrong in your assessment of the situation. She referrers to her personal emotional marker, which helps you, examine your own. As the same is true for our emotional being as for our rational being. We need to examine our emotions as accepted or not acceptable, as appropriate or inappropriate. Just as false information can lead us to bad decisions, false emotions can also lead us astray.

Unfortunately, this process is often underestimated even though it could take place daily in an autodidact learning process. On the contrary, some friendships end because our counterpart does not feel or think the same way and conflicts start because we do not feel accepted.

Food for Thought and Exercise

 How do we react when someone doesn´t think or feel the same as we do?

 Which emotions occur in this situation?

 Which emotional marker have you registered? (Which situation do you connect with this emotion?)

 Do you recognize when your emotions are not appropriate? Can you correct them?

Competence

“Humanity and social competence cannot be studied.

Justus Vogt (*1958), thinking living and living thinker

The word “competence” is used in many different ways, competence in languages, in management, in leadership, in learning and many more. The list of knowledge or competences required of the working population is never ending.

The core of the work competence is in the ability and the skill to do something; to be able to do something, to perform, to apply oneself to doing it. Competence (Lat. Competere, competentia: to meet (as in meeting a need)) indicates the ability (psychological) or the responsibility (juristic) of a person to perform a task independently.

In a psychological sense, competence can be understood as a disposition of self-management or organization. In an educational sense, competence is tested ability through scholarly measures.⁸

Andre Stern⁹ describes competence as something much more important than knowledge, as only through competence one can come to success- and success makes you happy. Andre Stern – a young man that never went to school, (is today musician, composer, luthier, journalist and successful author) couldn´t really read until he was eleven years old and thinks that it doesn´t matter how old you are to learn something. It is only important to be excited about it, and then you will persevere and so develop this competence.

Everyone can learn competences at any time, no matter of age, educational status, gender or background by means of self-teaching or further education. Competences can be developed alone through experiences and the knowledge collected through these means. Intelligence can be of help but it is not required. This fact should give us courage.

A person that has enough competence to be able to do certain things is thus regarded as a specialist. This is why in this book we are speaking of emotional competence and not of emotional intelligence, as:

Intelligence comes from the Latin “intelleger, intelligentia” which according to the Collins Dictionary means to “is the ability to think, reason, and understand instead of doing things automatically or by instinct¹⁰”. Here we are talking about perceiving, realizing and understanding. However – what is the use of perceiving, realizing and understanding, to have knowledge about these things if one cannot use this knowledge successfully.

So emotional competence is perceived in the direct application and not alone in its knowledge.

I want to remind you that only reading this book will not enough to further your emotional competence. You must be ready to use this knowledge successfully in your professional and private life. (You will find more information in the chapter „Nurturing and Developing Emotional Competence.”)

Empathy – the most important Requirement

“But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.”

Honoré de Balzac, French author and novelist (1799-1850)

Maybe you have been in the following situation, you see persons hurt themselves, e.g. they get their finger caught in a car door. Just looking at the situation, you feel the pain, wince and suffer with the person involved.

Jerome Littlefield, played by the actor Jerry Lewis has the same experience in the movie: “The Disorderly Orderly”. In this movie, Lewis plays a caregiver in a mental hospital, who wants to be become as well-known as his father: however, this caregiver has developed the psychological peculiarity of feeling the same pain as his patients first hand.

What is amazing is that this film was made in 1964 and 30 years later, this peculiarity has obtained a scientific background.

Giacomo Rizzolatti discovered this form of sensitivity through the discovery of mirroring neurons in the cerebral cortex in 1995.¹¹ Mirroring neurons have amazing mechanisms in which different areas of the brain always react the same, no matter if one is carrying out an action or just observing someone else. This is why we involuntarily wince when a person we know well recounts a painful medical intervention.¹² The closer this person is to us, the more we are able to perceive and so mirror their pain. Thus, explaining why feelings are contagious and we can understand what others are going through. Therefore, mirroring neurons contribute to sensitivity so that we can react with empathy.¹³