Emotional Intelligence – A Crucial Element

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If you don’t understand and implement this essential step, no amount of counting-to-ten will help you handle your overly emotional states.

I’m immensely proud to say that Krys (my superstar wife) was emotional intelligence in motion this week. Her management of an infuriating situation provides an excellent example of this crucial element in action.

Monday
Our Internet service crashed…

Tuesday
After an utterly fruitless (and intensely frustrating) discussion with our service (sic) provider, Krys redirected her “bouncing off the walls” energy towards a concrete solution.

Earlier that day, she had seen a service technician elbow deep in the wire spaghetti guts of our local DSL connection box. And so, totally focused on fixing the problem, Krys grabbed our account information and jumped in her car.

She found the (friendly and helpful) service technician and (after making several tortuous phone calls) he was able to reconnect the line.

(Sidebar: How many companies – populated by wonderful people committed to providing excellent service - are undermined by their organization’s “system”.)

Relax – Retell – Redirect
Those of you who use the Triple-R-Strategy will know that the third step is redirect.

Every time one of your objectives is abruptly blocked, it triggers your Emotion Brain. And when your Emotion Brain screams, your blood stream floods with stress hormones…which stick around. And so you’re left twitching with energy and overwhelmed by the urge to act.

When this occurs it’s so easy to ”work off” the surge of excess (muscle-shaking, heart-pounding) energy by whining and bitching. However, a far more effective strategy is to focus your adrenaline rush on solving the problem that caused you to feel overly upset in the first place, get the idea?

And that’s exactly what Krys did. She reframed the situation as a problem to be solved (not just a stupid annoyance to get upset about)…And so, driven by this perspective, she tracked down the technician and got the DSL connection fixed.

Which, among other things, meant I could post this message…

Question: When one of your objectives is abruptly blocked, how do you handle the frustration?

I would love to hear your answers…