I’m not sure that anecdotes can be ‘gory but cute’, but here goes. When I was about five years old, our cat proudly delivered a freshly killed mouse to the kitchen. Thomas (she was actually a girl cat but let’s gloss over that) sat proudly, licking the entrails off her paws. The mouse was a goner for sure. Its tummy had been expertly slit and some of its insides were hanging out. I squatted to examine this new information. “Hey mummy,” I remember saying. “I can see its feelings hanging out.”
I’m not entirely sure why I would confuse its liver and kidneys as ‘feelings’? The only thing I can think is that, even aged five, I knew ‘feelings’ were inside you.
I’m putting a new book together. The core is what boffins call ‘emotional intelligence’ but as those who know me well readily acknowledge, I ain’t no boffin. So to dumb it down, it’s all about feelings. And I’m discovering that, back in 1971, I wasn’t a million miles away. We talk about ‘gut instinct’, an instant feeling that often provides a quicker response than your brain. For example, females can walk into a pub, take a look at a man and take an instant dislike. They haven’t made eye contact or spoken to him, but there is a feeling, somewhere in the pit of the stomach, that says something’s awry. Gut instinct is remarkably powerful stuff.
So, back to the book. Psychology has forever mired itself in the study of phobias, disorders, anxiety and depression. All worthy topics, but dare I say, rather heavy. I’ve spent the last 10 years researching happiness and flourishing. It struck me that we’ve never studies or learned from happy people, we’ve just tried to drag them down to our level! So the new book will be less about telling you what emotional intelligence is or how to ‘do it’? The aim will be to reveal, as simply as possible, how your mind and gut instinct work together. I’ll attempt to throw in a few things that make me chuckle (I appreciate that my humour might not make you chuckle, but so be it) but more than that, the aim will be to challenge your thinking in the hope that it generates some new understanding and you apply yourself differently.
Organisational change is talked about as being top down or bottom up. Well how about ‘inside out’?