Spirituality and Emotional Intelligence

Wisdom from the World's Spiritual Sources Applied to EQ for Leadership and Professional Development

Gilmore Crosby

• Publisher: Productivity Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000428445
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

This book weaves together spirituality and a systemic version of emotional intelligence that incorporates Kurt Lewin's social science and other sources. Emotional intelligence calls on us to be fully present "to the moment." It calls on us to be appreciative of ourselves and our relationships. Likewise, a calm and compassionate presence is almost universally recognized as a spiritual way of being. In other words, the overwhelming majority of the world's spiritual sources call on us to be emotionally intelligent and that link is explored with unique clarity in this simple yet powerful text.

We are all reactive at times. Becoming more objective and less attached allows us to feel our feelings without being a prisoner to acting on them in habitual ways. From a more detached perspective, feelings are neither good nor bad, but simply clues as to how we are perceiving our environment, especially our social environment. This is especially important in terms of our relationships at work. Our perceptions about what people intend trigger our emotional reactions. Think about the difference when you perceive critical feedback as a sincere attempt to help or when you perceive it as an attack of some sort. Perception evokes different emotional responses. Objectivity about our own perception is even more important than objectivity about emotion, because the former usually precedes the later.

Paradoxically, being detached allows one to appreciate and experience one's emotions more fully. Recognizing emotion as part of your inner guidance system instead of as something dangerous that must be controlled or denied is freeing. The less emotion runs you, the more you can accept feeling what you feel. Emotion is a form of physical energy. Fighting your own feelings takes energy. Allowing the ebb and flow of emotion is essential to physical and emotional health and to accepting ourselves as we are.

Section 1

EQ Theory

1

Crosby-Style EQ¹

There is nothing so practical as a good theory.

Kurt Lewin (Lewin, 1999, p336)

The proper meaning of “theory” is not idle speculation but vision, and it was rightly said that, “Where there is no vision the people perish.”

Alan Watts (Watts, 1951, p105)

We begin by building a mutual understanding of emotional intelligence (or EQ … from IQ, or the intelligence quotient). Much has been written on the subject. My own career as an MSW turned organization development professional has involved helping people acknowledge and shift the emotionality in relationships, groups, and organizations. To do so requires on-going study of my own emotionality, as well as the integration of many sources into practical theory that can easily be conveyed. What you will get here is my own unique version of EQ.

What is emotional intelligence? At its most basic it is using your cognitive mind to be aware of your emotions and the emotions of others. Cognitive theory related to EQ, such as The Interpersonal Gap which is covered in Chapter 8, helps us to understand the process that creates emotions in ourselves and in others. Theoretical models also help establish behavioral skills for expressing and responding to emotions in a manner more likely to create the outcomes we are hoping for. This text, while weaving in the promised spiritual sources, will address cognition and behavior, theory and skill.

I’m going to try to explain this model of EQ in a comprehensive way yet hopefully without getting bogged down too much in the details. The spiritual connection to the social science is my real passion here and I suspect the same will be true for most of my readers. On the other hand, I can’t help the reader make that connection without understanding EQ, and the version of EQ conveyed here is well worth understanding.

In my second book, Leadership Can Be Learned, I first called it “Emotional Intelligence, Crosby-Style.” I’m a little self-conscious about that title, yet I believe in the substance and the genuine uniqueness of this version of EQ. I could not go backwards to a more standard approach. In other words, I have some swag about this, and the image of “Gangnam Style” fits (if you aren’t familiar with “Gangnam Style,” see YouTube).

While you are busy visualizing my gangham style dance, it’s a good time to note that playfulness is important to EQ. One can be playful and serious at the same time. To paraphrase Edwin Friedman, the loss of the capacity to be playful means that your “deadly serious” reptilian brain is running the show (Friedman, 1999, p63). I would rather have my mammalian brain engaged (Warning: there is a barrel full of monkeys in my head). We will more fully explore this and many other implications of EQ and brain structure in the pages to come.

While I have made significant contributions to the synthesis and the ongoing development of this approach, the Crosby in “Crosby-Style EQ” really is a homage to my father, United Methodist Minister Robert P. Crosby. Over the course of his career dad synthesized and applied various sources regarding the role of emotions in interpersonal and organizational dynamics and gave birth to the unique approach that I have been privileged to build upon. The word “applied” is important here. Father’s “applied behavioral science” method, based on the work of Kurt Lewin, is to test our theories by applying them to ourselves, and through our work with organizations. That is a form of Lewin’s “action research.” The model and methods then stay practical because we evaluate the results in the field and only keep what survives actual usage. I encourage you to do the same as you read this book.

My father was first exposed to the action research approach to emotion in 1953. While studying for his master’s in theology at Boston University dad participated in his first T-group, the group learning process invented by Lewin. Father’s adaptation of the T-group first to church camp settings and then to industry and a graduate program has since raised the emotional intelligence of literally thousands of people in the United States and abroad, from many cultures and all walks of life. His T-group work in industry included more “blue collar” than “white collar” workers, although plenty of both and almost always mixed together. This extensive T-group work, which I have participated in for decades, has played an important role in the on-going development of our approach.

Along the way, father met John Wallen. Wallen’s aforementioned Interpersonal Gap in my opinion is unmatched in terms of teaching behavioral skills about emotions and clarifying the process of how we generate emotions within ourselves. Add family systems theory (Virginia Satir, and Bowen and Friedman in particular) and neuroscience, and father’s multidisciplinary approach evolved into a truly unique framework for EQ.

In 1995 Daniel Goleman added his voice, popularizing EQ with the publication of his best seller, Emotional Intelligence. Goleman built on reams of existing research both to provide a model of EQ and to assert that the critical factor in career success is not IQ, but rather EQ.

Building on all of the above, I’ve come to the following: while high IQ can be a blessing, it can also be a curse if coupled with an inability to connect with others or to be detached from mental activity. For ages, people have put cognitive intelligence on a pedestal, and unwittingly settled for and even fostered lower EQ by trying to control their emotions through denying or ignoring them. Ironically, such an attempt is based on fear of emotion, and hence is an emotional/irrational approach to emotion. Worse, it blinds the individual to important data available from their own “inner guidance system” (more on this later). To the extent one is blind to emotion, one is more likely to act out of emotion without understanding the root cause of their actions. To be rational about one’s emotions, one must use their cognitive brain to pay attention to the messages that emotions are providing. Fortunately, science and spiritual practice both indicate that by working on awareness of emotion in yourself and in others, you don’t have to be an Einstein to increase your emotional maturity, which research indicates is a major determinate of success and happiness.

Speaking of Einstein, he was a model not just of intellect, but of playfulness, the important EQ ingredient mentioned above. Complementing his magnificent neocortex, Einstein probably had two barrels of monkeys in his head. He was playful from the beginning until the end, without which I doubt his IQ would have been unleashed with such creative force.

Regarding EQ in general, Daniel Goleman tells us (in Working with Emotional Intelligence):

EQ accounted for 67% of the abilities deemed necessary for superior performance.

EQ mattered twice as much as technical expertise or IQ.

Unlike IQ (which is understood to be essentially a fixed capacity—we either use it, or we don’t, but it can’t be increased in any significant way), whatever your current EQ, with intention and guidance, you can enrich this aspect of living, and in so doing enrich your soul.

1. If you can think of something better to call this version of EQ, let me know! Every descriptor I attached to it, like “Systems EQ” seemed corny!

2

The Crosby EQ Hierarchy

Figure 2.1
The Crosby EQ Hierarchy.

The Crosby EQ Hierarchy gives you a quick visual of the elements of Crosby-Style EQ. The foundation is self-awareness. As Gandhi put it, “Be the change that you wish to see in the world.” If you don’t understand yourself the odds are low that you will truly understand others (empathy) or develop skills. Start with yourself.

Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, “Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,” when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.

Jesus (Luke 6:41–42)

When your emotional intensity increases, if you are imbalanced by focusing more on others than on self, there are consequences. Reflect on yourself: when the heat is on, do you focus more on self or on other? Focusing primarily on the perceived faults of others and/or blaming them in moments of conflict is a common habit. Focusing on self, not just on my opinions but rather on what have I done to increase tension and what can I do to decrease it, empowers me and de-escalates tension in myself and likely in the other.

First you have to notice in a reflective way when your emotional intensity has gone up, and not just wallow in the adrenaline rush. With that awareness, emotionally intelligent action is possible. A reliable first practical action is some sort of self-calming. That can be done in many ways. Mindful breathing and/or by skillfully tuning into the other are two such skills.

If, on the other hand, my habit is to start by critiquing and trying to change others, I will predictably create a counter force. Homeostasis in the relationship will be maintained, even if it is undesired. I will be able to explain my position, but I will have trapped my own cognition in the service of attacking and defending, which is a very narrow and self-limiting focus. Confirmation bias, only seeing what I expect to see, is inevitable in human cognition, but it can be reduced through awareness and an intention of open mindedness. Confirmation bias increases when we allow ourselves to get stuck in a loop of explaining (in our heads and possibly to others) that they are wrong and we are right. Such defending is how most people handle critical feedback.

As evidenced in the Bible, blame goes way back in human history. It didn’t help then, and it doesn’t help now:

The man said, “The woman you put here with me – she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it” … The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

Genesis 3:12–13

Edwin Friedman playfully suggests that blame was the actual original sin:

… if there was an original sin that has been transmitted down through the generations, it was not an act of disobedience, which, after all, could also be seen as an act of differentiation, but their response after they had disobeyed.

(Friedman, 2008, p6)

If I stick with blaming the other, if I believe the problem is completely or even primarily outside of me, then the power to change lies outside as well.

Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them.

Jesus (Mark 7:15)

Sometimes, of course, the problem is primarily outside the self. A Jewish person in Nazi Germany, as Kurt Lewin was, would have been best off fleeing if they could. A woman who is beaten by her spouse would be wise to also flee. EQ in such extreme circumstances is to respect one’s own fear and get to physical safety if possible.

On the other hand, Gandhi’s words were spoken in the context of confronting the British Empire. He still chose to start with himself even though much of the problem clearly lay outside himself. He still chose to be the change he wanted to see, and in so doing created a mass movement in the fac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Section 1 EQ Theory
• Section 2 Emotions—Red, Yellow, and Blue
• Appendix: The Religions of Man
• Bibliography
• Index