How Emotion Impacts Working Intelligence
At school for students with behavioral issues one of the things that are taught to Teachers and Aids, is that before you can help a child you must know where your head is at. This is important because situations can escalate quickly which often allows emotions to creep in on otherwise level-headed adults. Why is this important? The simple answer is that it affects our decision-making and intelligence.
As humans, our brains are not quite as logical as we believe them to be, and more often than not we make decisions with emotions. There is no logic in grabbing a second cookie or yelling at your child when frustrated. That is the emotional part of our brains at work, and they control a lot of our day-to-day decisions. This is why in a school where fights can break out, aggressive language is common, and emotions run high the very first thing a teacher needs to do to handle a situation is consider where their head is at.
Shortly I will explain how this tactic of assessing one’s emotions can be used on a daily basis, but first, let me give an example from the classroom. Let’s say you are teaching Algebra to a group of 12 students who aren’t particularly interested but are at least pretending to pay attention and engage. Then some words are exchanged between two students, which quickly escalates in to one student abruptly getting out of their seat, pushing their desk aside, and posturing the other student saying “what are you going to do about it?” What is your first move?
If you jump right into acting you defer the thinking to your subconscious brain and it probably is something like “not this again, why does this student always have issues, my job is annoying, why do I have to deal with this all the time, maybe I should work at a regular school.” Then you act with your frustration which will have a direct effect on the tone of your voice, regardless of what you say. And guess who is good at picking up tone of voice or the subtle emotional queues we all give off, you guessed it, everyone.
In this scenario what effectively has happened is that you let your emotional brain take over and you acted in a manner that is below your potential intelligence. I like to think of it as your IQ dropping 20 or 30 points. This is why in TCI or Therapeutic Crisis Intervention they teach adults to first assess their own emotions before acting.
What this looks like when you first evaluate your emotions is like this. You pause for a few milliseconds and think “man I am frustrated right now.” Then simply by having this thought, you can adjust your reaction accordingly, which in this case means to remove or soften the level of frustrations in your voice.
In both cases, the words that come out might be identical, but by managing the tone of voice and acting within a person’s maximum intelligence capacity the outcome will be different.
What you can do with this information, in many situations throughout your day, is to just stop and ask yourself how you are feeling in the moment. This could happen when you are on a call with your boss and they aren’t understanding your point, when a waiter is being rude, or when your kid is screaming at you. In each of these situations and in many more you will be able to get your outcomes closer to what you desire by simply asking the question, how am I feeling.
