Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence encompasses many things. It involves the ability to recognize your own emotional state, along with those of others e.g. to be able to verbalize to yourself, your's and other people’s emotion – using the vocabulary of “feelings” is one way that we do this. It also involves using this information to guide our thinking, our actions, and our behaviors e.g. “I am feeling scared, so I should look for whatever or whoever it is in the environment that has triggered my fear system.” Part of our self-protection training should involve educating our emotional systems, and improving our emotional intelligence. This will both speed up our responses to threats and danger, and prevent us from having emotional disconnects, that stop us from listening to what our fear system is telling us e.g. denying or discounting why we have become adrenalized; not believing there is a legitimate and real reason for our emotional state changing.

Anyone who has worked in the security industry or the military in active/live situations for a period of time, will tell you how their senses have been sharpened, perhaps to the degree where they have a sixth sense about telling when things are wrong, or are about to kick off. Basically, their experiences have educated their emotional systems, so they are more “intelligent,” or finely tuned. In some cases, their fear system may become over-educated to the point where emotional responses occur in incidents that shouldn’t trigger an emotional shift. This also occurs in people who have phobias, such as a fear of snakes, where anything that looks remotely like a snake, gets identified as a snake e.g. a person sees a piece of rope, an electrical cable, a piece of hosing - something that resembles a snake - and their fear system immediately identifies it as such and adrenalizes them. The same may happen to martial arts instructors who jump, flinch or start to respond violently to any movement or physical contact, even when it doesn’t contain any harmful intent – I have lost count of the stories told to me by individuals who “nearly” applied the death touch to someone who bumped into them in a bar, or who tapped them on the shoulder in a non-threatening manner, etc. This is nothing to be proud of. Being emotionally able to recognize and respond to danger, also involves being able to discern when danger isn’t present, and when a person’s actions and behaviors aren’t threatening or nefarious. This is all part of emotional intelligence.

One of the skills we need to develop is the ability to guide our emotional responses in the moment, and this involves developing a synopsis of our self-protection information, so that our emotional systems can quickly look up, understand, and make an appropriate response, and/or guide our conscious thought processes so that we make a better-informed response. One myth that often gets talked about in this process is that of time slowing down. It doesn’t. Our recollection and memories, of us trying to make sense of our thought process in this moment, has us believing that more time passed than actually did, however our thought process didn’t actually speed up – which would cause us to feel that time was slowing down, and everything was happening in slow motion e.g. your life doesn’t actually flash before your eyes in that moment of danger, it is your memory of how you felt at the time which remembers this happening; and our memories of what and how things happened is extremely unreliable – and lawyers or police officers who have had to work with witnesses will tell you this.

To improve our emotional intelligence, we need to create “anchors”, for our emotional systems to hold on to, these are brief synopsizes and sum-ups of more complex and involved self-protection/personal safety concepts. For example, when we look at the geography of crime, and consider factors such as crime attractors, crime preventers and crime promoters, we can develop a fairly rich and in-depth picture of the types of locations various criminals frequent and target e.g. a good supply of potential victims, a high number of potential escape routes, and areas within such environments where there is a lack of natural surveillance, etc. We can also look at how our awareness changes in different locations; that we’re naturally more aware when we are on our own, and less aware when we are in crowded places (we naturally lower our own awareness, trusting that those around us will help us to identify and pick up on danger – unfortunately, they’re relying on us to do the same for them). This is all interesting from an academic perspective, and allows us to look at different locations analytically. There are, however, too many variables and ideas contained, to be useful in improving our emotional intelligence – here we need to come up with very simple statements and instructions e.g. criminals are active in crowded locations, so we need to raise our awareness when in these places. Actively accepting this, gives permission for our fear system to actively alert us, if it picks up on a threat or danger, otherwise it may believe that such an “alert” would be filtered out or discounted, and may therefore ignore making us aware of the possible presence of danger. It is okay to have complex models that explain how violence works, but for practical purposes, and for the education and use of our emotional intelligence, they need to be boiled down to simple, actionable statements – we can go into the whole psychology of why the best survival option is to hand over the wallet to a mugger, but in the heat of the moment, all our fear system needs is the response i.e. to hand it over when asked.

In raising our emotional intelligence we also need to acknowledge its messages when we receive them. Most of us have had the experience when walking of feeling that someone is behind us, following us. Most of us will then go into a state of denial, convincing ourselves that we are imagining it, or discounting the footsteps, coming up with a list of other, more plausible reasons as to why it might appear that we’re not being followed, etc. The reality is that our fear system identified movement that is associated with being followed, so that we can investigate it, determining if the movement does actually contain harmful intent. Instead of taking this information/warning seriously, and making an appropriate investigation concerning it, our default response is to throw it away, and hope that the potential danger isn’t real. This is a terrible way to train emotional intelligence; in fact, all we are doing is instructing our fear system that its alerts are wrong and unnecessary. It doesn’t matter if in 999/1000 cases, the movement is benign, our fear system has identified the intent it could contain, and we should make the effort to investigate it e.g. change our movement pattern – direction, speed, etc. – and see if it’s matched/mirrored.  

Our emotional intelligence increases with our education of reality – through experience as well as understanding – and our acceptance of its value and worth. It needs to have simple responses and rules to follow, because to work fast, it can’t work in a complex manner; and the advantage that it has over our conscious intelligence is the ability to react and respond quickly.