The reason I've taken the time to mention where I am coming from relative to the topic of emotional intelligence is because this book represents an evolution in my own thinking, not only about EI but of my understanding of the neuroscience of emotions and their profound role within perception itself. My own training on the topic of EI stems not only from my graduate studies but from having worked for 25 years in companies like the ones whose competency models helped define this particular articulation of EI. I was responsible for implementing leadership competency models and making sure people's performance reflected them. When I saw this wasn't happening nearly as much as one might think, I realized defining what makes a good leader is a different value proposition than what it takes to become one.
I also observed that one of the most common reasons leaders fail to take on board what they've conceptually learned is due to a lack of specificity and practical application of what they are being trained on and the runway and needed forums to practice these new skills. The way we tend to teach doesn't adequately account for learners' need to practice new habits and skills while they are learning about them. Rather our approach typically emphasizes declarative or intellectual knowledge over and above procedural knowledge or the knowledge about how to do or apply something. We tend to overlook the supporting mechanisms needed to create both the conditions within ourselves and our immediate environment as we apply and learn new ways of being. Like IQ, while helpful to have, just because you have a competency structure that supports an individual development plan or an organizational strategic plan with key performance indicators (KPIs) to chart the path ahead, doesn't guarantee you'll arrive at the desired destination or have a successful journey along the way. Far from it. It takes much more than simply documenting or articulating your goals, although I'm not suggesting it isn't a good place to start. Mapping out a plan is a great first step, so long as you don't confuse map making with the emergent and ongoing nature of change itself.
The key is whichever model of EI we ascribe to, it shouldn't just point the way; it needs to give us specific practices and methods for working with our own minds. Moreover, our emotions are but one factor—albeit a critical one—in the constellation of what determines how we behave. It turns out, our capacity to reframe and shift both our perceptual stance and our interpretation of what we perceive are vital to the conversation. That's the part of the discussion we're delving into now in this book. Whatever we do, let's not leave the EI competencies at the level of mere words or concepts trapped within the confines of a framework or their colorful bubble graphics. Let's also strive to live and embody them!
The Neuroscience of Emotion
While there are many neuroscientists engaged in researching how our emotions intersect with what we understand about the brain, I am most familiar with and take my lead from Richie Davidson's work. And though I've only recently become acquainted with Lisa Feldman Barrett's research, she makes an extremely compelling case in her book How Emotions Are Made for the constructed basis of emotions in which she covers vast territory between the historical and current understanding of the human brain, emotion, and perception itself (Barrett, 2017). Her departure from classical notions of emotion processed by a triune model of the brain in favor of a whole brain, constructed view of emotions, resonates with my own assessment of where we have wherewithal and say in the rather complex process of perception and interpretation.4 She offers readers both a novel and sophisticated articulation of a topic we've had the collective tendency to misunderstand—despite the feeling I had at times like I was wearing an itchy, wool sweater as I had to inch my way out of positions no longer tenable. Meanwhile, my head has been left delightfully spinning as I continue to contemplate and puzzle the practical implications of her brilliant work. Had it not been for me rescuing her book from the bookshelf where it had been peering out at me for well over a year, whispering “read me,” the one you're reading now would likely not have had the richness nor depth of scientific understanding to lend to the practical insights and observations underlying the methods I've spent the past six years developing to train our coaches and clients to operationalize EI within their own lives.
And though I'm not a neuroscientist nor have I been able to visit with her yet about her work—though I'd very much like to—I'm admittedly flying a bit by the seat of my pants. I've done my best to synthesize and integrate key insights from her research into how I'm thinking about my own work and theories as they continue to evolve and mature, not to mention how I'm parsing the science with my own understanding of the nature of reality relative to my Buddhist practice. It has been both remarkable and entertaining for me to see the notable parallels between the latest neuroscientific findings on perception and emotion and the insights I've gleaned from having studied and practiced Tibetan Buddhism for more than half of my life—that and the uncanny overlap with certain themes from the remake of Battlestar Galactica, a television series my boyfriend coerced me into watching at the outset of the pandemic, which I'm now completely hooked on. All this is to say, let this serve as my apology in advance if I've missed the mark in any way in my attempts to explore the practical implications of any of the scientific insights I've tried to incorporate along with her absolutely remarkable contribution to how we conceive of our own emotions. Now, let's look at both schools of thought on emotion, the classical and constructed views, summarized by me in my own words as she portrays each in her book.
The Tale of Two Emotions: Classical and Constructed
Emotions play a variety of notable functions in our lives, including elevating and drawing our attention to their signals. Like a carrier pigeon, our emotions transport salient messages between the brain and the body, forming a powerful feedback loop. The way the scent of a skunk dutifully follows its owner, our emotions forewarn of their approach in the form of bodily signals and affect as if to let us know they're on the premises. And like a skunk's musky trace, they leave a lingering impression you can almost taste. Emotions set a definitive tone, a palpable atmosphere to whatever is already present. As our emotions make themselves known, their valence and salience flood our bodies like the vibrant colors of a sunset we behold but briefly before its glistening rays of light suddenly fade to an icy blue gray.
Even though we've been trained to use single words to describe how we feel, words like happy, sad, mad, or glad, when pressed, we each define these words, as well as our experience of them, quite differently. The moment we look at emotions from the individual perspective of how we experience them, the way we describe them necessarily shifts away from single-word or one-dimensional descriptions. “Sad” is just a word we assign to an entire complex of sensory signals interspersed with mental impressions evoked in the process.
According to the constructed theory of emotions, in contrast to the classical view of emotions, emotions are created, not triggered. Moreover, they do not have unique fingerprints, footprints, or any kind of print for that matter, other than perhaps the subtle or not so subtle mental imprint they make on us as we experience them. Rather, there is wide variation in emotional expression from one person to the next and even between two instances of any given emotion, such as sadness, happiness, or fear. In this paradigm, the meaning our brain assigns our emotions ties predominantly to our learned behavior about them in various situations and contexts versus any kind of universal or primal existence in which we only need recognize them. In the constructed interpretation of emotions, they are conventions, reflections of the contexts we are a product of. The brain doesn't have an emotion manufacturing plant where emotions with identifiable characteristics are produced exactly the same each time in response to certain stimuli. Rather, when we experience emotion, it's more like your brain has called ahead, having already set into motion what it anticipates you'll need as you're about