Last weekend we had our first Six Seconds EQ Network meeting in Italy. Max Ghini (Director of the 6S-Italia office) and I presented - here’s Max (and look at the lovely room in the basement of an old old building, just off the main square of Bologna):

And me… I talked about using emotions and emotional intelligence to create change - with some personal stories of starting Six Seconds and our commitment to change starting with ourselves. I also shared stories of paradoxical feelings about my father, and finally the legacy of a Hawaiian woman committed to rebuilding a community space.

Here’s more of the wonderful Italia team, from left: Lorenzo, Dani, Federica, Veru:

Max introduced the Corporate Social Responsibility campaign and we all discussed the vision of partnering with business to create a context for thriving. It seemed simple and natural that we could help businesses meet their essential goals by bringing EQ to the communities where they operate:

Then teams started working on how to bring EQ to all the children and adults of Italy and beyond:

Thank you to the 50+ who joined the meeting! I look forward to the next one - which will be the Choose to Change conference in San Jose, CA, Oct 4-5 ‘08.

I was talking with my dad about feeling sad and hopeless about his cancer. “On the one hand,” he said, “I know every day is a blessing and there’s so much to be grateful for. But that seems so abstract. So far away right now.” Here are some thoughts about feeling hopeless, and building a ladder toward hope.

 

 Good Sad - Finding Moments of Hope [6:58m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Did you see the little blurb in the Sunday NY Times business section? MBA students from the top 15 schools were asked to select the 3 topo factors they wanted in a job. #1 was ‘challenging job responsibilities”. The second was money - not the first as many think. Work-life balance followed and then came ‘potential to make a contribution to society’. These are MBA students, not teachers or social workers, and although money is important to them they want to contribute.

Observing a scene play out between a waitress and an Indian family gives rise to reflections about emotions as a doorway to social and cultural intelligence.

 

 Emotional Social and Cultural Intelligence @ Indian [7:27m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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I love this Manifesto.

A lot of this is familiar, but I like how he has managed the principles based on the 24 Character strengths and virtues from Positive Psychology. Essentially Michael Lee Stallard describes how our individual efforts can bring about good organisational climates… I particularly like to include schools in this….

The bottom line is that connection plays a critical part in improving individual performance. People who are more connected with others fare better in life than those who are less connected. Connection, because it meets our human needs, makes people more trusting, more cooperative, more empathetic, more enthusiastic, more optimistic, more energetic, more creative and better problem solvers. It creates the type of environment in which people want to help their colleagues. They are more open to share information that helps decision makers become better-informed. The openness that emerges in a trusting and cooperative environment creates a robust marketplace of ideas that stimulates innovation.

“Happy” on Visual Thesaurus

Dear ones,

Tomorrow the Jewish holiday of Passover begins, so I’ve been thinking about freedom and about love.

Passover commemorates the time when Jews were enslaved in Egypt and then Gd, through Moses, led them to forge a path toward freedom. Moses didn’t want the job — he felt unqualified, incapable… uncertain and hopeless, but he chose to say yes.

It was a terrible journey — both the journey of enslavement, the journey of release, and then the period of cleansing in the desert. At Passover we do not celebrate a defeat of Pharaoh and his people, instead we express our sorrow at the suffering and our gratitude that so many before us have accepted the struggle for freedom.

Freedom does not mean getting to do whatever you want. Patty and I were talking about what our kids would say — they seem to think freedom would be growing up so no one would tell you what to do. And we might imagine freedom as being eight and getting to come home from school and play ’till dinner. But neither is true or possible.

Freedom means taking responsibility to walk in the path of what is right. It a process of ongoing effort and care. It is a terrible burden, but also a joyful one. It is terrible because when you accept freedom, you can no longer take the easy path of blame. You can not ride along and then be mad when someone takes you to a destination that isn’t what you wanted!

There are so many ways to give up freedom. Being on “autopilot” and blindly following patterns. Being a victim. Being a dictator. Deluding yourself. Breaking your own integrity. Letting yourself be seduced by superficial wants — or maybe confusing “wants” and “needs.” Compromising your values, or devaluing yourself to seek approval, status, affirmation, or power from the outside.

But at the same time there are so many gifts. Not just gifts of freedom itself, but gifts from the struggle to be free. Perhaps without the struggle there is no real freedom — or at least none of the heady bliss of finding it. In the struggle we have the opportunity to confront ourselves and one another. To question what truly matters. To challenge assumptions and the status quo, not changing for change’s sake, but changing for the sake of liberating our highest and best selves.

In the struggles there are an abundance of difficult feelings. My dad (stepfather) is struggling w cancer and it’s brutal. On one hand I am feeling so sad and afraid and hopeless — and on the other hand these terrible emotions feel good. They feel “right-but-hard” and are reminding me of our love and the gifts he’s given me and our whole family. So the pain is really love in disguise.

Recently Max was in struggle because he left his “best Pokemon cards” in his pocket then put his jeans in the laundry — they did not fare well. On the one hand he was helpless, a victim of bad fortune. On the other it was an opportunity to receive loving support from us, and to take action, to take ownership of the future. To be free.

While I was in the midst of struggle post-emergency-knee-surgery I was feeling pretty low. I felt helpless, powerless, dependent, stuck. But at the same time I was able to receive so much love and care. I thought a lot then about what it meant to be free. Did it mean being able to put socks on myself? (that felt like great liberation!) Or did it mean being able to choose to be grateful for the care? Even grateful for the pain? (because it was a sign of the process of recovery)

I’m struck that freedom is so much about feeling. About feeling despair versus hope. About feeling unworthy of and unable to love versus abundant in it. So many people are afraid to love and to be loved. They are so hurt that the hurt itself becomes a kind of shelter. They make walls of rage to barricade their fear, they keep their hurt close at hand in a desperate attempt to prevent it from overwhelming them. Maybe this is the ultimate slavery, the self-imposed slavery of denying that we are worthy and capable of love.

This is a prison whose wall grow thicker each day. The more we see ourselves as unworthy of and unable to love, the more depleted we become. We become more and more closed to love from all around, and less and less able to love others. Paradoxically the door opens by giving; it swings open outward from self acceptance.

The good news is that no matter how thick we make these walls, freedom can come in the blink of an eye. So impossible, then so simple. It can feel like betrayal of a promise, though, because we do not stay free.

We must choose again. Each time it feels impossibly hard, then suddenly, miraculously, easy. Then we find another challenge; this is the journey of freedom. Without the opposition we go back to autopilot, back to coasting. So the walk toward freedom is embedded in struggle — we find jewels among life’s travails. While there will be struggle, there is also choice — a balance that is a process.

Freedom, then, is decision made over an over; a string of choices. Not choices of circumstance and power, but choices of heart and will. Love and effort. Made over and over, strung together on a necklace, each bead buffed to luster by the challenge inherent in the decision to be free.

Does this perpetual struggle sound grim and dark? I don’t see life that way. I see it as beautiful, part of the abundance and wonder of our world. Each time we choose freedom we become stronger, deeper, and brighter — contributing, as have so many before us, to the vast pool of liberation.

With love,
- Josh

It feels like summertime here - glorious, peaceful, and relaxed. The scent of jasmine is pouring in through my office windows along with the gently cooling evening air.

Yesterday I was talking with a client/friend about where he needs to put energy in his business. Hands down: “relationships.” Reaching out and connecting, mostly externally and also internally. He admitted he wasn’t doing it the way he wanted, and part of me wanted to say, “but that’s so easy!”

Then I realized that his reason for not doing this is much the same as my reason for not exercising (something he’s great at, by the way): In two completely different challenges, we each feel inadequate - incompetent - and without real hope that our efforts will work.

And we each find it incredibly difficult to persevere… and all too easy to slide that task to the bottom of the pile. I am sure there is value and insight in this feeling, some clarity to be found, but even in this quite jasmine gentleness of evening, the wisdom is beyond me.

A survey in 2000 found that the most frequently expressed emotion at work was anger and the least frequently expressed emotion was joy.  When I mentioned this to a group of b-school students a few days ago most were not surprised. Anger, they report, is common in their work experience. Expressing joy is associated with being a ‘lightweight’. It is not professional. Anger is associated with power, joy with weakness. This is obviously a problem for all of us. While anger has a place and can be an intelligent emotion, joy and other positive emotions are critical to idea generation and enhancing cooperation.  The question is, how do we express joy, or happiness, or as Josh has noted, appreciation and gratitude, in a way that is accepted and heard by people?  And how can we convince leaders of the importance - and ‘professionalism’ - of the expression of joy?

A few months ago I blogged about Randy Pausch’s “Last Lecture” about Achieving Your Childhood Dreams. He didn’t use these words, but he talked all about what we call emotional intelligence. Here’s a reprise he gave on Oprah:

Plus here are a ton of other videos about Randy.