Conceptual time, our ability to uses watches and calendars to schedule, plan, and carry out those plans, is one of our most powerful tools for organizing our lives. It is essential in manifesting our creative insights.
But it can also be a trap, preventing us from experiencing our lives directly by feeling either bored (too much time) or stressed out (too little time).
In this video, I explore the nature of time and its relationship to creative insight and flow states.
https://youtu.be/6FWdnKRnwE8
Additionally, I am including a recent article from a friend and colleague of mind, Rachael O’Meara, who works for Google and is the author of the forth-coming book, Pause. In her article, she explores emotional intelligence in the workplace. And while you read it, notice how important it is to create temporal pauses in order to empower your own emotional intelligence. Here’s a glimpse of her Huffington Post article:
…how can you take your EQ to the next level? First, Pause & Empower your Own Emotional Intelligence.
By making an intentional shift in behavior — what I call a pause — you can tune into increasing your own EI capacity. Creating a shift means you’re getting out of routine, and doing something different. It also activates the frontal lobe of our brain, which is the part of our brain that engages in critical thinking and creativity.
Here are five ideas, one for each component, I call the Five Day EQ Challenge. For five days, practice one technique a day to help boost your EQ. These ideas are based on the curriculum I’ve learned over the past two years studying Emotional and Social Intelligence at the Wright Foundation.
1. Self-Awareness: Notice and name the five primary emotions in your body. Get familiar with the five primary emotions – joy, fear, anger, sadness, hurt – and how they feel in your body. Pause and take a day, an hour, or even longer to set a timer and name an emotion once an hour that you feel in your body. If you can’t feel anything, pause and pick an emotion you feel closest too. If you feel different emotions, name them each of them.
o Why it matters: You are flexing your mental muscles by naming emotions as you experience them in your body. Over time these will become more familiar and easier to spot. Naming emotions out loud (or on paper) helps activate areas of the brain that stimulate thinking about these emotions, vs. just reacting to them.2. Self-regulation: What emotion(s) comes easily? Which ones are absent or hard to feel? Each of us has some emotions that come easier than others, and everyone is different. For any emotions that you have trouble experiencing, try to spot these in other people or situations around you.
o Why it matters: You are noticing what is easiest for you to express, and where you can express more, or where you can self-soothe if need be. Imagine a continuum with pain on one side and pleasure on the other side.3. Social Skill: Use your influencing skills with purpose. Help others understand the thinking behind your words by sharing openly and honestly with others.
o Why it matters: By being vulnerable and sharing honestly with others, you build trust and rapport with others.4. Empathy: Put yourself in someone else’s shoes as they share a story, an experience or feedback with you. Get inside the head of someone you are speaking with. Ask yourself, “If I were the one speaking, what would I want to hear right now?” Or, “How would I want someone to react if I shared this right now?” As Alfred Adler a thought leader in developmental psychology once said, “Empathy starts the moment you start a conversation.” Stay present, make eye contact, and give your audience your full attention.
o Why it matters: The speaker will feel seen and understood by you, which leads to a deeper mutual understanding of each other. As a listener you can deepen your connection with someone through making eye contact and being fully present with someone.5. Motivation: Think about something you are passionate about and plan or take the time to do it. Be present while you do it. Give it your undivided attention. It could be your favorite activity, something that makes you feel happy or nourished, or something you do for someone else that makes you feel good.
o Why it matters: If you are passionate about what you do, you will be more engaged and present in your activity and with yourself. You will be more attuned to your emotional state and which of the five primary emotions you feel, which in turn bumps up your own self-awareness and self-regulation.
For Rachael’s full article, check out Boost Your Emotional Intelligence: Take The Five Day EQ Challenge
Thanks for helping me spread the good word on Emotional Intelligence and how to build up your EI muscles. I would love to have your readers take the challenge – once you try it it’s insightful to see what you notice and what you don’t, or what emotions come easily, and what others don’t. Putting yourself in the experience, a lot like the act of creativity, is where the magic happens. 🙂
Thank you, Rachael! I love your vision to bring pauses and emotional intelligence into the workforce, especially in an organization as well known and influential as Google. Indeed, without EQ and pauses, we become cold, machine-like, and lacking a sense of our connection to the whole. Great work!