Introspection and Emotional Intelligence
Most of our mistakes come down to one crucial error: our failure to understand ourselves well enough.
That’s why we need to learn the art of introspection (which helps us to know ourselves) and the necessity of emotional intelligence ( which further extends to understand others)
[ DISCUSSION | Introspection and Emotional Intelligence ]
▪️ INTROSPECTION
Knowing yourself sounds like a good idea but it can be hard to see why it should matter so much.
The fable below can be usefully read as an allegory about self-knowledge.
Androcles and the Lion
Earlier version by Aulus Gellius
Once long ago, there was a Barbary lion nine feet long with a splendid dark mane who lived in a forested foothills of the Atlas mountains in what is today Algeria. Usually, the lion kept far from human settlements but one year in spring, he started approaching the villages at night – roaring and snarling menacingly in the dark.
The villagers were terrified. They put extra guards on the gates and sent out heavily armed hunting parties to try to kill the lion.
It happened around this time that a shepherd boy named Androcles followed his sheep far into the high mountain pastures. One cold evening, he sought shelter in a cave. He had just lit a candle and was setting his blanket on the ground when to his horror, he saw the ferocious beast staring at him.
At first, he was terrified. The lion looked as if it might be about to pounce on him and rip him to pieces but Androcles notice something: there was a thorn deeply embedded in one of the lion’s front paws and a huge tear was running down his noble face.
The creature wasn’t murderous; it was in agony. So, instead of trying to flee or defend himself with his dagger, the boy’s fear changed into pity.
Androcles approached the lion, his mane and then gently and reassuringly extracted the thorn from the paw and wrapped it in a strip of cloth torn from his own blanket. The lion the boy’s hand and became his friend.
Many years later, Androcles got into trouble with the authorities, shipped to Rome, taken to the Colosseum and thrown before a lion to be devoured in public for the pleasure of the people and the emperor.
But when the lion saw Androcles, it became quiet and went forward and lowered its head in a bow. It was the same Barbary lion that Androcles had taken pity on as a boy.
The emperor pardoned Androcles and he and his lion lived together in Rome and they used to go for walks together through the streets with the lion peaceable and contented led only on a slender leash.
🔹[ INTERPRETATION ]
The lion is in terrible pain but has no capacity to understand what is hurting him exactly and how he might put it right. In its blind distress, it acts in horrifically aggressive and threatening ways. It makes blood-curdling noises and frightens everyone.
• The LION is all of us when we lack insight into our own distress.
• The THORN is a troubling, maddening element of our inner lives – a fear, a biting worry, a regret, a sense of guilt, a feeling of humiliation, a strained hope, or an agonized disappointment.
• But just out of range of our standard view of ourselves, there’s a potential ANDROCLES side of us. The side that is able to calmly to see past the fury to what the problem really is and then calm our untargeted anger and help us find constructive solutions.
🔹 [ ANALYSIS ]
However, it’s not always easy.
Some of the following can happen when we try to locate the stubborn thorn.
01 | We make the wrong diagnosis of what’s upsetting us
We’re in no doubt we’re in pain but we don’t correctly attribute the source of the distress. We lash out innocents – usually the kindest people around us.
🔹 EXAMPLE SCENARIO
[ ] Situation — Perhaps, we get tetchy around our partners.
[ ] Lion-Side — We accuse them of some incoherent and unexplained feelings.
[ ] Thorn — Maybe there’s a new colleague at work and awkwardly, we’ve developed a sort of crush on them. We don’t admit to ourselves that something so unexpected and challenging might be upsetting us.
We don’t know where to look for the thorn but others close to us who are kind, forgiving, and easy targets for our frustrations end up taking the blame nevertheless
[ ] Androcles-Side — Realization and the awareness of the fact that we’ve been unreasonable of our actions and acknowledgment of the problem that caused all of it.
02 | We try to ignore the pain when the paw hurts too much in ways we don’t grasp
We try to numb our distress. We search out an anesthetic that can reduce the discomfort but fails to address its causes we might take to drinking, playing non-stop games of solitaire, or working obsessively.
The thorn is still firmly lodged in place but we notice it less and yet the numbing move extracts a high price. It eats away our time, undermines our self-respect or leads to debilitating symptoms. We might not be able to sleep; insomnia often being traceable to the turbulent impact of issues we haven’t paid proper attention to during the day.
03 | We might apply the wrong medicine.
We might come up with unfounded confused schemes to solve a pain we don’t understand. We may take to blaming our partner, the city we live in, the government, or our employer.
Searching through a cabinet of cures, we might pick a journey to somewhere or pick the decision to break-up or divorce; we decide to quit our jobs; dismiss, get rid of, and let go of someone.
🔹 [ CONCLUSION ]
It can be hard not to inflict severe pain on ourselves or others when we don’t have an accurate handle on our own agony.
Fortunately, there is almost always in information to hand about what is really wrong. Our stream of consciousness contains a reservoir of muddled hints about our difficulties which need to be gathered and decoded.
The art of living is to a large measure dependent on an ability to locate our thorns accurately and in good time, so that we will not forever be condemned to suffer our symptoms and terrify strangers with our roars.
▪️ EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
It is the quality that enables us to confront with patience, insight, and imagination the many problems that we face in our effective relationship with ourselves and with other people.
🔹 [ INSIGHT ]
We don’t tend the highlight the value of a distinctive sort of intelligence which currently does not enjoy the prestige it should.
Every sort of intelligence signals an ability to navigate well around a particular set of challenges:
Mathematical, Linguistic, Technical, Commercial.
When we say that someone is clever but they’ve made a mess of their personal lives or that they require a fortune but are restless and sad or that they are powerful but intolerant and unimaginative : we’re pointing to a deficit in what deserves to be called emotional intelligence.
🔹 [ CONCEPT ]
In social life, we can feel the presence of emotional intelligence in sensitivity to the moods of others and in a readiness to grasp the surprising thing that may be going on for other people beneath the surface.
Emotional intelligence recognizes a role for interpretation and knows that for example
01 – a fiery outburst might be a disguised for help
02 – a long political rant may be provoked by hunger
03 – or that concealed within a forceful happiness may be a sorrow that has been sentimentally disavowed
🔹 [ ANALYSIS ]
A. Emotional intelligence shows up the skepticism around our emotions especially those of love, desire, anger, envy, anxiety, and professional emotion.
The emotionally intelligent refused to just trust their first impulses, or the inherent wisdom of their feelings.
They know that:
01 – hatred may mask love
02 – anger may be a cover of sadness
03 – or doubt may be a cover for a need of reassurance
And that we are prone to huge and costly inaccuracies around whom we desire and what we really want.
B. Emotional intelligence is also what distinguishes those who are crushed by failure from those who know how to greet the troubles of existence with a melancholy and it points darkly humorous resilience.
The emotionally intelligent appreciate the role of well-handled pessimism within the overall economy of a good life.
C. Emotional intelligence isn’t an inborn talent.
It’s always the result of education – specifically education in:
a. how to interpret ourselves
b. where our emotions arise from
c. how our childhood influence us
d. how we might best navigate our fears and wishes
🔹 [ CONCLUSION ]
In the ideal society, it would be routine to be taught emotional intelligence from the youngest age before we’ve had the opportunity to make too many mistakes.
It’s because we have until now not taken emotional education seriously enough.
It appears that the fate of civilization depends on our capacity to master the mechanisms of emotional education before it’s too late.
🔹 [ VERDICT ]
The central vehicle to the transfer of emotional intelligence is culture from its highest to its most popular level.
Culture is the field that can ritualize and consistently promote the absorption of emotional intelligence. The lessons might be embedded in a tragedy or a TV series, a pop song or a novel, a work of architecture or a YouTube film.
We can envisage the entire apparatus of culture or a subtle mechanism designed to point us towards greater emotional intelligence.
We will never progress as a species and will indeed grow into ever greater technologically armed menaces to ourselves until we’ve accepted the challenges and opportunities properly education ourselves in emotional intelligence.
Our Technical Intelligence is great, of course. It’s led us to tame nature and conquer this planet.
But a wiser, saner future for the race must depend on a capacity to master and then seductively teach one another the rudiments of Emotional Intelligence – while there’s still time.
[ REFERENCES ]
Video Materials
01 - Emotional Intelligence - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgUCyWhJf6s
02 - Why Introspection Matters - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-NiJzwdN0Y
03 - https://www.theschooloflife.com/…/innovation-empathy-and-i…
04 - https://www.theschooloflife.com/shop/emotional-intelligence/
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