Intentional intelligence
Emotional intelligence is an important dimension of intelligence. It means knowing how to acknowledge and respect each other’s emotions as they are. Considered in its simplest form, our universal emotional keyboard is composed of eight notes: like, dislike, fear, attraction, apathy, greed, happy, and sad.
When we’re young, we use our emotions as the basis for our actions. When we are happy, we act happy, and so on. As our life’s situations become more complex, subtle, and dynamic, none of our basic emotions are effective in guiding intelligent responses and initiatives. In fact, to the degree that we rely on our feelings as the guides to our behavior, we significantly restrict the range of behaviors possible, given the enourmous complexity of situations we encounter in our lives.
We expand our behavioral choices by practicing intentional intelligence rather than simply “emotional intelligence.” We can then create very subtle and situationally intelligent responses to a wide variety of situations. We can engage actions, for example, based on an intention like: Wanting you to know I support your idea with reservations that I am willing to talk about and come to consensus on as long as we both feel served by the outcomes.
None of the 8 core emotions could possibly guide our behavior with this kind of complexity and subtlety. Becoming more conscious means getting beyond emotional intelligence and move toward intentional intelligence.
