The one skill the guarantees a more successful life

“You could cut the air in here with knife”

It’s a strange saying which points to something we all know.

We have a six sense in our ability to feel the tone of other people’s nervous systems.

The word given to this by neuroscience is

“Shared body budget”.

We all know about it but we often underestimate its power or even fail to identity it as a skill.

Perhaps that is because from birth it’s just what is.

We see what’s happening around us.

We hear what’s happening around us.

We smell the smells

We touch the things

We tastes the tastes

And we feel other people and detect our level of safety as a result both in relation to them and the environment.

We learn on autopilot and carry this learning around for life even if what we learn is no longer useful.

Through this process we learn who we are, what the world is, what other people are like and our relationship to all of it.

Like a firehose of information that we didn’t choose shoved in our faces. Gulped down before we even had the capability of discernment.

Today we all find ourselves somewhere on a skill spectrum.

•We might have learned to take in others emotions and make them our own.

Rather than notice but not make them our own.

•We might have learned to make other people’s emotions our responsibility.

Rather than take full responsibility for our emotions and explore how we created them.

•We might have learned to make our emotions other people’s responsibility.

Rather than be very careful not to.

•We might have learned to hold to our emotions and not let them go.

Rather than learn to let them go as quickly as they come.

•We might have learned to react to our emotions.

Rather than sit will them, process them and let them go.

•We might have learned to chase our emotions with thoughts keeping them alive and making them stronger and strong.

Rather than learn to use them to understand how we will more skilful approach life.

•We have learned to create undesired emotions with less and less input.

Rather than create more clarity around our world and the world making them increasingly less likely and less disruptive when they do appear.

•We might have learned to experience a pay off for our emotions such as worry.

Rather than use it skilfully once to create a plan then let it pass.

•We might have learned to be unconscious to our emotions.

Rather than being conscious to our experience of life and other peoples and experiences a richer life as a result.

This all makes up what we call, Emotional Intelligence.

It is one of the greatest predictors of success.

Particularly from a relationship perspective. That means, self leadership, home life and leadership.

And the level of it you/we currently have is very much something that happened to us.

The good news is that due to neuroplasticity it can actually be upgraded rapidly with 3 simple steps.

Define: using the most granular language possible to describe what we are saying so that the meaning is clear and unambiguous.

Refine: add nuance detail and clarity especially in terms of what’s not meant.

Align: a clear understanding of what we are doing actually looks like in terms of action.

Each feeling you take through this process of define, refine, align will increase your EI

The culture of your family, your company, how you treat yourself and how you experience of life is a product of your body budget and those you share it with.

Where ever it is right now, there is literally only up side to developing. My clients obviously get the added bonus of doing it with me.