My intuition was on fire as a young child
I heard, sensed, felt and saw messages all the time. I have vivid memories of receiving them.
Whenever I excitedly shared them I was ridiculed, shamed and told I was crazy. As a result, I stopped paying attention to the ideas and messages and subsequently they became quiet and less frequent.
I dimmed my own light trying to fit in!
Intellect over intuition
What I realized years later was that I was being conditioned to use my rational mind, my intellect, rather than my intuition, my gut, my inner wisdom.
I was being told subtly – and sometimes not so subtly – to use the analytical, rational left side of my brain rather than the intuitive, wise and creative right side of my brain. They trained me to use the negative, saboteur brain of my brain over the positive, sage part of my brain.
Only 20%
Effectively, I was accessing only a small portion of my potential!
When you default to using your intellectual toolbox, you only tap into 20% of your power.
Sadly, our society values intellectual over emotion. Even sadder is the fact that many ‘do’ relationships from thinking intellectually rather than feeling emotions. Yes, that’s another thing I did in my younger years!
Is it any wonder then that we have such high rates of dis-ease and unhealthy relationships and not-so-well-wellbeing rather than optimal relationships and wellbeing?
Your potent potential
The truth is when we rely so heavily on our rational minds, we squander the potential of our emotional minds.
Once you realize the potential of your heart, soul, and intuition you will never revert to ‘doing’ everything from your intellectual toolbox.
“All of my best decisions in business and in life have been made with heart and intuition – not analysis. When you can make a decision with analysis, you should do so, but it turns out in life that your most important decisions are always made with instinct, intuition, taste, heart.”
Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, which is undoubtedly one of the most prominent data-driven organizations.
Unnecessarily hard work
From a neuroscience perspective, relying on intellect alone means you’re only using a fraction of your brain. No wonder it feels like hard work!
You will handle life’s challenges more efficiently as you increase your mental fitness. Your PQ Score delineates this for you by measuring the strength of your positive mental muscles versus your negative mental muscles. Take the assessment to discover how often your mind serves you versus works against you.
What is emotional intelligence (EQ)?
Emotional intelligence is your awareness of your own emotions and those of others, and using that awareness to make better decisions. When you increase your emotional intelligence you’re better able to use your non-rational tools rather than merely relying on your rational mind.
In the Positive Intelligence (PQ) world we call these tools your sage powers. These are empathize, explore, innovate, navigate and activate.
Being emotionally intelligent allows you to recognize your most common causes of sabotage.
Be mentally fit
Through increasing your mental fitness you increase both your positive intelligence and your emotional intelligence.
You become adept at intercepting your saboteurs and activating your sage powers so that you experience improvements in your relationships, performance, selling and persuasion, creativity, leadership, resilience and happiness.
How does emotional intelligence benefit you and your team?
Corporations in the US alone spent over $87.6billion on corporate training and development programs in 2022. This equates to around $1,700 per employee. Sadly, much of this does not result in lasting, sustainable change in organizations or individuals.
In comparison, when you increase your mental fitness you raise your emotional intelligence alongside of your positive intelligence. In fact, 98% of people who focus on this for only six weeks experience improvements in 17 of the 18 emotional intelligence competencies. Specifically:
- 97% report improved empathy
- 92% experience teamwork and collaboration improvements
- 91% feel more optimistic
- 84% find it easier to manage conflict
Ripple effect
Naturally these benefits have profound ripple effects across your personal and professional life; strengthening relationships, uniting teams in a shared experience and potential problems becoming opportunities.
Growing your emotional intelligence can appear overwhelming when you consider there are 18 competencies. Thankfully, there is no need to handle them individually when you choose to focus on improving your mental fitness as a route to develop both your emotional intelligence and your positive intelligence.
Lasting positive change
Most attempts at lasting positive change fail because we don’t recognize the power of building new behaviors incrementally over time.
Sustained change towards being more positive requires you to lay down neural pathways to form new habits through consistent daily practice. That’s what PQ and Free to Lead make possible for you.
Great outcome
Personally, I know that improving my emotional intelligence and mental fitness through Positive Intelligence (PQ) has undoubtedly helped me respond positively more than negatively, changed how I handle stress and anxiety, and improved my mental health and wellbeing exponentially.
To find out how Positive Intelligence can help you:
- as an individual,
- for your business, team or your organization schedule a call with Daphne at https://www.speakwithdaphne.com
In sharing this with you, I acknowledge with deep appreciation Shirzad Chamine, author of Positive Intelligence, as my teacher and mentor in Positive Intelligence and Mental Fitness. Without a shadow of doubt, connecting with and learning from him has changed my life for the better.
