What's your PB?

To any track athlete or swimmer, a Personal Best, or PB, is all: it is the single best indicator of their progress . . .  and place on the global stage.

But how can we adapt this simple and useful measure to progress on our personal growth journey? When our goal is not to win gold but to become more whole, better at coping with life, is there an equivalent to a PB?

Yes, there is!

For anyone engaged in personal development, improving Emotional Intelligence (EI) or such self-improvement process, there is a simple, easy to measure indicator of your progress:

My PB used to be about a week. When one of my biggest issues cropped up it would get me angry and/or depressed for about a week before I was able to let it go, accept what had happened and get on with the rest of my life. The time between the gun going off and regaining my full, calm, composure was typically 7 days. That’s how wound-up I was!

The trigger will vary between us: it might be something a politician says, it might be smoking, it could be anything: there are few of us who don’t get irritating by something. And it’s these triggers that help those engaged in EI improvement to know what to focus the growth process on. Then as we face our demons, undertake appropriate forgiveness and inner-healing, so our PB comes down. An enlightened person’s PB will be seconds, or less. At the start of the process we might never really let-go of some issues!

So the PB scale isn’t linear. It might go something like this:

Never – Years – Months – Weeks – Days – Hours – Minutes –
Seconds – Blink of an eye.

It’s an on-going process and having such a simple measure can reassure us that progress is indeed being made. Thus, for example, as an open-minded engineer I like to think I can accept new ideas pretty easily. But I do get frustrated by those scientists who insist on ‘evidence’ before they’ll even consider the possibility of any theory than varies one iota from the long-established norm. Faced with such a situation I would have been cranky and depressed for weeks. Earlier today I found myself, quite by chance (LOL! The university of life works in wondrous ways) listening to just such a unmoving scientist on the radio. I got angry. Then I felt depressed. But now, an hour or so on, I can smile at it knowing that ‘they can’t help it’. My PB has improved from weeks to hours! OK, still some work to be done, but practice makes perfect.

We’ve all got a heart!

What a lovely, and moving, opening ceremony to the Rio Paralympics. Such a powerful message: we’ve all got a heart. Whatever our ability . .  or disability, wherever in the world we come from, we all have a heart. OK, for a few lucky transplant patients, it might have started out as somebody else’s but we, every single one of us, have a heart.

And not just a heart that pumps blood around our body: we all have a heart that

needs to feel it belongs, that needs to care and be cared for. That’s what makes us human beings!

Worth remembering that.

Zeitgeists

There is little doubt that we live in interesting and many would say, troubled, times. Across the globe we’re seeing more terrorist attacks, or at least more reported ones, spanning a spectrum of isolated individuals with mental health issues to highly planned attack by an extremist group. Then we have the Americans nominating Donald Trump as a presidential candidate and the British voting to leave the EU: neither of which were in any way predicted 12 months ago. What’s going on! Are these developments, puzzling and worrying to many, a sign of some underlying trend, a Zeitgeist?

If so, it’s not the only one.

Since probably the 1980s, the Reagan/Thatcher era, we’ve had the Zeitgeist of personal ambition, or going for and getting whatever you can get. And that’s applied at the level of individual, corporation and nation.

Since the 1960s there’s been the ‘alternative’ Zeitgeist, closely linked to the peace movement: all sorts of campaigns against war, exploitation and over-commercialisation.

One facet of the above, the ‘anti-establishment’ Zeitgeist, may underlie the Trump bandwagon, the UK rebellion against the EU and a rise of far-right, fascist or nationalistic parties across Europe. Many folks are just fed up of being told what to do by career politicians and bureaucrats who are out-of-touch with how ordinary folks are feeling.

And it’s not just establishment politicians who are feeling the brunt of popular back-lash. In the UK at least, high profile corporate scandals (e.g. the failure of BHS and ethics of Sports Direct) are highlighting the need for a better moral compass in all walks of life. 

Perhaps underlying all of this is a ‘we’ve had enough’ Zeitgeist: a coming together of the desire for personal freedom with the realisation that many of those we’ve been trusting to run our business and governments actually don’t have our interests at heart . ..  because they no longer have a heart!

After decades of society being dominated by the belief that humans, or rather a few powerful ones, can control everything (from financial stability to the world food production) and that this will mean health and happiness for all of us, the truth is beginning to dawn: money, power, technology are merely tools. It’s the intent behind them that matters. And, what we all need is to feel valued, to feel that those in charge care about us.

All that’s going on in the world today, with the worst aspects of human behaviour hitting our screen and streets are no more and no less than the results of how we’ve been living and thinking over recent decades. They are a wake-up call. Yes, this dis-order and unhappiness is the current Zeitgeist, but it need only be temporary phase.

If we heed the underlying message, if we respond to the real needs that have triggered all these worrying developments, then a very different Zeitgeist can and will be enabled: let’s call it the Zeitgeist of and for ‘decent human beings’, the restoration of balance between those in power and the rest, the restoration of balance between how we think and how we feel.

Some call it Emotional Intelligence, some call it conscious evolution, but those who understand it best know that it’s something, like any true Zeitgeist, that cannot be put into words: it’s no more and no less than the irrepressible human spirit reasserting itself.

The more we acknowledge it, the more the Zeitgeist will build. The more committed we all are to balancing our heads, heart and hands, the sooner we create a balanced, harmonious society.

At times it won’t be easy. I can see and admit how spoilt the ‘personal ambition’ Zeitgeist has encouraged me to become. I’ve become aware of how easy I like things to be. But I’ve also seen that progress comes not by trying to control things or other people, but by taking the time and effort to understand other perspectives and by finding empathy and compassion for those who, for whatever reason, are different from me. The emerging Zeitgeist is of ‘one humanity’. Not just a global economy and ecosystem, but a genuine, practical, recognition that we are all in this together. In order not just to prosper but to survive, we have to recognise our common humanity and remind ourselves what that means: we are all thinking, feeling, human beings.

There’s no denying it.

‘East is East’ & Emotional Intelligence

That powerful 1999 film East is East was shown on UK TV the other day: I’ve just watched it. Stunned. Timely.

Timely because I’m in the throes of developing my approach to Emotional Intelligence (EI) and this painful story of deep cultural clashes highlights many of the issues prevalent in describing and improving our EI: our ability (or not) to relate to others at a deep and meaningful level.

I’m reminded, for example, of This Be The Verse by Philip Larkin (see http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178055 ): 

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   

They may not mean to, but they do. 

Our East is East dad, George Khan, played so realistically by Om Puri, cannot help his behaviour. His views on respect, marriage and many other things are part of who and what he is: his cultural heritage. Long suffering wife, Ella (Linda Bassett, current starring in the BBC’s Call the Midwife) knows this only too well. We see how much they love each other, beneath the cultural divides, and how Khan really believes that what he is doing is for the best for his children. No matter what anyone else says or does, he cannot see it any other way.

We, from the outside, can see, only too clearly, that he is in denial about how the rest of his family thinks and feels. Such is the nature of denial: when beliefs and conditioning (cultural or otherwise) blind us to the reality around. 

And that, in my personal and professional experience, observed and felt from many perspectives, is also at the heart of the lack of Emotional Intelligence: we fail to respond to the emotional needs of others by being blinkered in our thinking. It’s nobody’s fault; no one in particular is to blame: but millions, as Philip Larkin so ably highlights, are fucked up by it.

But what can be done about it? As Ella and her sons found out to their cost, standing up to a closed mind, fighting it, merely results in getting seriously hurt: resisting denial usually makes it even firmer. So is it fight or flight? Or perhaps strategic withdrawal. Elder son, Nazir, denied totally by Khan manages to make a new a new life for himself away from the situation: he had the courage to leave.

But wherever one sits in such situations, the first step is awareness, as to what is really happening. Perhaps there is a spectrum: from total denial to total awareness, the light slowly dawns  . . .

For more on the link between EI and awareness, and suggestions on how to become more aware, see my free webinar.