Discovering Heaven

A couple weeks ago my pastor shared a Thomas Hobbs quote upon which I've been pondering.  "Hell is truth seen too late."

A few days after the pondering began I had the breakthrough I shared in my last post.  In that post I shared my focus on the negatives of my new position, and when I was able to see that was in my perception rather than objective reality, everything shifted.  

In the days since, however, I have continued to notice my posture going reflexively to one of being "gut-punched."  The truth is no one in my present world is gut-punching me, either literally or figuratively.  The "puncher" exists totally in my imagination and memory. 

Which brings me back to emotional intelligence about which I've written several times in recent years.  The first key to being emotionally intelligent is self-awareness.  Because I have been able to notice the gut-punched posture, I am at least moving toward self-awareness.  The second key is to self-manage or to choose a different behavior or response.  When I take that split second for a deep belly breath and adjust to an open, relaxed posture, I am demonstrating self-management.

...at least to a degree I am self-aware and self-management.  It seems to me that I am at the stage of needing to intentionally tell my body to shift my posture.  I look forward to the point when a natural, open, and relaxed posture will occur automatically, but I am clearly not there yet.

Over twenty years ago when I was struggling with the worst of my chronic pain, resulting from an accident, a doctor recommended a book to me.  Tom Hanna, the author of Somatics, described neuromotor amnesia.  The condition results when some part of the body forgets how it is supposed to work.  Back then, it was my hip and neck.  Now, it would seem it is my abdomen and the low back that supports it in pulling back to gut-punched. 

Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend a workshop on somatic dimensions of various aspects of our personalities. During the lecture portion, the workshop leader projected an X-ray of a person in a posture similar to the gut-punch.  He related that just being in that particular posture produces the hormone cortisol, which has been nicknamed "the stress hormone."  It causes progressive shutdown of the immune system.  (Small wonder that after 20 years without one, I had a cold, including one debilitating one, each of the last three winters at my old job.)

The particularly remarkable twist is that, changing nothing else, a person can induce stress by simply going into that posture.  Conversely, I can elicit confidence and relaxation by moving out of the posture.  That's all that is necessary.

So it should also not be a shock that the morning that I noticed the gut-punch posture the first time that as soon as I changed how I held myself physically, everything else seemed to change as if flipping a switch, and in a way that is just what happened.  By opening myself to expectation of positive outcomes, I switched off the cortisol and turned on oxytocin, the hormone associated with giving birth and trust, among other functions.

Harvard professor Amy Cuddy detailed in her recent book "Presence" that body language is not necessarily a reflection of what we are feeling, but instead the reverse is true: our body determines what we feel.  (If you haven't seen her TED talk, it is the second most viewed of those popular lectures.)

There are two other aspects of emotional intelligence.  The third is our awareness of others, and the fourth is how we manage our relationships different because of that awareness. When I walked into the room the morning I made the shift, I noticed openness and hopefulness.  Because of my heightened awareness of both myself and participants in the event, I managed the relationship that I had as the facilitator with my participants differently.  I recalled earlier days before my last job when I listened deeply to my inner knowing and didn't do what I planned.  At the end of the day, the leader said I had been "masterful."

As the evolution of pondering the Hobbes quote, I've come to understand that I don't have to wait until it is too late to see my truth. I can avoid that hell by choosing to hold myself in the place of trust, openness to my inner knowing, and birthing things instead of stress.  That is discovering heaven in every magical moment.

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Emotional Intelligence and Intention

Way back in graduate school, I remember studying the levels of learning: the next-to-highest level of learning was teaching. I intellectualized that concept, but it was much later, when I actually was teaching on a regular basis, that I really started to "get it."

Probably in my second year teaching at the university, I remember presenting something one day, and all of the sudden having a personal Aha! moment during which in an instant I connected content that I knew well in a whole new way.  It was like a jigsaw puzzle that suddenly rearranged its pieces and created a totally different picture.  It happens to me now and again, even with topics that I've written about significantly. If I say the new understanding out loud, it doesn't sound all that different than what I may have written, but on a gut level my understanding is quite different.

Spiritual teacher Carolyn Myss has said that her understanding of "energy anatomy" came to her while she was teaching a related class. I suspect that most of us who have taught material we know well have experienced something like this.

That is how one day I related "emotional intelligence" to "intention." Now I understand why I've enjoyed writing  and teaching about both.

Because I am an Organization Development consultant and not a trainer, I rarely stand at the front of a classroom and teach any more. Instead, my coaching and consulting often afford me "teachable moments." By far more frequently than any other topic, emotional intelligence presents itself as a teachable moment. One day when I was coaching someone and writing on the board in back of my desk about emotional intelligence, it just came to me that my words were similar to ones I'd used with intention.

A number of authors and researchers have written about emotional intelligence, so the language is slightly different depending on who is writing.  Five generally accepted elements comprise emotional intelligence:

1. Self-awareness
2. Self-management
3. Self-motivation
4. Empathy
5. Social Skills

Simply put, self-awareness underlies all of the others.  The next two are internally focused. Once we are aware of what we want and need, then are we able to manage and motivate ourselves to do what we want or need to do?  The last two are externally focused. Self-awareness feeds both.  Am I aware of how I react to others? Do I have the social skills to behave appropriately?  Of course, self-management and self-motivation are key to those last two as well.

My Aha! about emotional intelligence (EI) and intention came when I was talking about EI the day after I'd been writing about intention.  The self-awareness piece of intention is that in order to live my intention, I need to listen to my heart and to learn what is written on the back side of it. Then, can I manage and motivate myself to act in accordance with what I know in my heart?

As simple as that.  I say that tongue in cheek because I know full well how very difficult self-awareness, self-management, and self-motivation are.  I've written in blog posts as recently as yesterday about my struggle being able to do what I know I need to do. Slow down, rest, exercise, skip sugar...you've heard them all.

I believe that none of us ever gets those pieces 100%.  At least not in this world.  A coaching client once surmised that when people got close to the 100% they were "called home."  They had nothing more to learn.

What is important is that we have an awareness of what we want to create and, when we don't succeed, like falling off a horse, we climb back on and give it another try. I actually sat and ate lunch today.  For two nights in a row, I've left the office only 30 minutes late, and I walked for 30 minutes through the beautiful spring weather and abundant blossoms.  And, instead of preparing for a job interview I have tomorrow, I am doing what I love--writing.  For this moment, I am totally at peace, and this moment is the only one that really counts.



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