The WHY Helps Us Take Action

Many of us intuitively recognize where we’re strong and where we have blind spots. Experience can serve as an amazing teacher IF we’re willing to analyze it and we’re willing to take action based on what we learn from analyzing it. The challenge someone who’s as impatient as I tend to be can run into when relying on experience alone for mastering a new skill is that it can take a really long time to have all the experiences we need to build a solid foundation for making great decisions. Even then, just knowing WHAT happened without having a clear understanding of WHY it happened can limit the effectiveness of those decisions.

I recently had a conversation with a client where they explained a situation with one of their employees who had made similar mistakes a few times in a row when completing the same task. While the mistakes weren’t exactly the same, the client felt like the second one should not have happened since they had pointed out the first mistake and told the employee what should have been done. The second time appeared to have been caused by a lack of attention to detail. It was caught before there was any impact on an outside customer but the owner was frustrated because they had already explained what was supposed to have been done to ensure accuracy. After hearing the story, I gently pushed back asking if they had taken the extra step of explaining WHY it mattered after they told their employee WHAT needed to be done. 

Without hashing out the rest of that conversation, I’ll just emphasize how easy it can be for any of us to miss, or even skip, critical steps in a process when we don’t have a clear understanding of WHY the step is necessary. When we think back to that first component of emotional intelligence that we looked at in the last post, Self-Awareness, it’s really similar! Having some level of knowledge that we’ll likely respond a certain way when something happens is important but it can be incredibly difficult to do anything to control or alter it if we don’t understand WHY we’re responding that way in the first place.

As William Marston conducted the countless hours of observation he used to compile The Emotions of Normal People, he noticed that their responses to various scenarios became very predictable within a specific framework. As he did even more research on human behavior, he also discovered that our systolic blood pressure changes in different emotional states. When combining those findings, he was able to develop a solid foundation that could be used to understand WHY we do certain things in certain situations as well as a framework for making adjustments to those somewhat natural responses.

This is where the second component of emotional intelligence comes into play; self-management. Using some tools that were created based on Marston’s work, Cindy and I have been able to help hundreds of individuals and dozens of teams make significant progress in developing an increased level of emotional intelligence. Next time, we’ll dig into the third component of emotional intelligence and we’ll start looking at the simple steps that can be taken to put all of this into action!