How to Ride Your Emotions Like a Horse...
I’ll never forget when I first read the book, “Search Inside Yourself,” by the great creator, Chade-Meng-Tan. The book is based on Meng's renowned training program at Google that he started in 2007. And it shows how to find inside yourself the knowledge, skills, and motivation to apply to your own life as you search for meaning, peace, and love.
The story goes like this…
“Once upon a time in ancient China, a man on a horse rode past a man standing on the side of the road. The standing man asked, “Rider, where are you going?” The man on the horse answered, “I don’t know. Ask the horse.”
This story provides a metaphor for our emotional lives. The horse represents our emotions. We usually feel compelled by our emotions. We feel we have no control over the horse, and we let it take us wherever it wants to. Fortunately, it turns out that we can tame and guide the horse. It begins with understanding the horse and observing its preferences, tendencies, and behaviors. Once we understand the horse, we learn to communicate and work with it skillfully. Eventually, it takes us wherever we want to go. Hence we create choice for ourselves. We can then choose to ride into the sunset and look cool like John Wayne.”
Key Takeaways from Meng’s Wisdom
First, we explore self-awareness…
This first part is all about understanding the horse. It's like a self-assessment, going beyond the emotions we feel to include knowledge of ourselves as human beings. Here we ask questions like:
What are my strengths and weaknesses?
What are my resources and limitations?
What matters to me?
These competencies and questions are very useful at work and in life.
Second, we explore emotional mastery…
Then we have to make use of our newfound self-awareness to gain mastery over our emotions. In other words, we will learn to ride the horse. As Daniel Goleman says, “Those who can manage their emotional lives with more calm and self-awareness seem to have a distinct and measurable health advantage, as has now been confirmed by many studies.” (Source: Goleman, Daniel. Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ)
Daniel Goleman identifies five emotional competencies under the category of self-regulation:
Self-control: Keeping disruptive emotions and impulses in check
Trustworthiness: Maintaining standards of honesty and integrity
Conscientiousness: Taking responsibility for personal performance
Adaptability: Flexibility in handling change
Innovation: Being comfortable with novel ideas, approaches, and information
What do those five traits have in common? Choice. Everybody wants to have all these qualities. We all want to be in control of our emotions, be adaptable and innovate for example. But a lot of us do not succeed at upholding these qualities all the time.
Why? Because we feel overwhelmed by our emotions and we let them guide us instead of using the ability to turn compulsion into choice. If we choose to exercise all these beautiful qualities, then we will enable competencies.
How To Apply This in the Workplace
Sometimes the question comes up, especially in the work environment: “Yes, very nice, but what can emotional intelligence do for me?”
Benefits of emotional intelligence enables three important skill sets:
Stellar work performance
Outstanding leadership
The ability to create the conditions for happiness
The moral of the story?
It’s so important to find time to…
Manage your emotional lives with more calm and self-awareness.
Take care of yourself and discover ways to accomplish more while doing less.
Learn how to calm your mind and concentration and creativity will improve.
Uncover your ideal future and develop optimism and resilience necessary to thrive.
You will realize that you can improve empathy with practice. Emotional skills are not innate talents, they are learned abilities. And the very best is - it is trainable for everybody!
And as Meng likes to say:
“You never know what you will find when you look within - there may be hidden treasures.”
