by Susan Dunn, MA, EQ and Life Coach
What makes another person difficult? When we don’t understand
where they’re coming from. They yell at us in an argument when
we want to quietly reason; or they disengage when we want to
talk it out. They say they want a vacation and then plan a full
agenda while you it was sitting on a beach veging that you
wanted. People don’t make sense. That makes them difficult.
The success of relationships depends how you deal with the other
person’s “difficultness.” You can learn some action-points (when
X does Y, do Z), in which case you’re basically book-bound, or
you can learn how to figure out what’s going on at a deeper
level, so that you can apply your knowledge to the myriad of
situations you’ll be confronted with in real life that will
never fit what you learned in the book or seminar, with the host
of people you encounter, all of whom are difficult unless you
have an identical twin.
I’ll admit I have an edge here. Not only because I study and
teach emotional intelligence, but because I have an identical
twin sister. Identical twins have the same genes. We tend to
think of genes in terms of physical things, and IQ, but they
relate to EQ as well.
We’re aware that genes determine that X can be a great
basketball player. He’s over 6’ tall and athletic. Genes also
allow Y to be a physicist. She’s got an IQ over 150, conceptual
ability and a knack for numbers.
However, in perhaps the more important aspects of life, your
personality and temperament, we’re talking about the emotional
workings of the brain, or the emotional brain. The neocortex is
where we think, analyze and reason, and our IQ is largely
determined at birth. The limbic brain is the seat of the
emotions, and if people’s IQs vary, so does their EQ – how they
work emotionally. But our EQs are not set at birth; we can
always develop our emotional intelligence.
Our understanding of the functioning of the brain has escalated
tremendously in the past few years with the new research tools.
We can’t peer into the brain and see cognitive intelligence, but
we can see what happens when emotion happens in the brain. For
instance, brain scans show that the emotional parts of a
neglected orphan’s brain work differently than a “normal”
baby’s, i.e., one that’s been well care for and had its
emotional needs met.
That having been said, you aren’t likely to find someone who
functions emotionally the same way you do. Close with an
identical twin, but even then there are fluctuating hormones and
individual past experiences (“nurture”) which influence our
emotional makeup. And it’s emotion that motivates all our
behavior.
So accepting that no one else works quite the way you do is the
beginning. The unhappiest people I know – and I’m a coach who
works with people around EQ – are those who think the world
should be a certain way, the way they think is right, and that
they can’t be happy until everyone does it that way, their way.
It’s almost easier to be with someone insensitive and not tuned
in, than the intense individual convinced they have a message
for you, and you’d better listen up, right?
So what’s the same about everyone, and what’s different? We all
want pleasure, and to avoid pain. The catch is, we all use
different means for getting pleasure and avoiding pain, and we
each define the concepts differently. That’s way to “relax,”
Alison plays two sets of tennis, and Sharon goes to the day spa.
If you want to figure someone else out, then, you need to move
to the meta level. We can understand “meta” better by examples
than definitions. It comes from the Greek “with, after, or
among.” You can see the problem already. It can also mean
“change or transformation,” as in “metamorphosis,” changing
shape, like the caterpillar that becomes a butterfly. It also
means “more comprehensive, or transcending,” and that’s what
we’re after. (And in physics it means something else.)
Now in emotional intelligence, we work on applications: Learning
the facts or theory, and the applying it to situations in your
life non of which will ever have been covered in the lesson in
class, if you know what I mean. For instance, let’s take “people
want pleasure and not pain”. Why, then, does Emily spend 14
hours a day at work and then pursue a graduate school program at
night and on the weekends? This would be your definition of
“pain”. Emily has a different definition of “pleasure.” The plot
thickens.
Here’s another example of getting it at the meta level.
Harry said when he retired he wanted to get away from it all. He
retired to Comfort, Texas (great name isn’t it, and a place
where many people retire), bought 12 acres of land and turned 11
of them into a natural habitat. He can see the stars at night,
and hear the birds during the daytime. He putters around the
house listening to music, reading, spending time on the
Internet. His social life consists of his wife and occasionally
his grown children. He rarely leaves his land.
Martha, too, wanted to get away from it all when she retired.
She bought a house in an active retirement community in
Alabama’s Gulf Coast, and bought a catamaran. She fills her days
with volunteer activities, entertaining on land and on sea,
daycaring her grandchildren after school, and taking commercial
cruises every several months, traveling all over the world on
group tours.
What’s up with that? Harry have been a primary care physician,
his days filled with people, demands and crises since his
medical school days. He wanted what he called “peace” – no
people, nothing he had to do.
Martha had lived with someone like Harry, rather isolated as a
full-time homemaker who did bookkeeping part-time from her home.
She rarely saw people, and they entertained infrequently because
of her husband’s demanding schedule and reclusive nature. In
retirement, when her husband died, Martha wanted lots of people
and activities, and getting out and going places.
They both said they wanted to get away from it all, yet one fled
to exactly what the other was avoiding. The meta level would
tell you they wanted to get away from – what they had been doing
before. Since each “before” was different, each “after” was
different. So while they were doing different particular things,
at the meta-level, they were doing the same thing.
It’s the common thread. They both wanted to get away from it
all, but they each had their own definition. Was it different
from your definition? Each person’s definition is uniquely
different; how different, you’d be surprised.
Men are from Mars and women are from Venus, but it’s more
complex than that. Each of us lives in our own little planet,
and it’s in our heads!
And by the way, if understanding what’s going on with other
people doesn’t interest you, that’s a given as well. I find all
the time in training EQ coaches, that some people are interested
in insight and meta-cognition, while others aren’t at all. Some
want only the WHAT, and not the WHY. Either route can take you
to home base. However, getting the WHY allows you to navigate by
the stars, while only knowing the WHAT keeps you map-bound.
It may be easier to accept that other people are different, that
to accept that YOU are different. We’re all after the same
thing, but our means of getting it, and the particulars of what
it looks like, could hardly be more different. If you’re the
kind of person who seeks to understand the “why” of other
people, look to the meta level. Find the common thread.
When you see something different, ask yourself how it’s the
same. And if you don’t understand at any given level, inquire. I
remember planning a vacation with a friend some years ago. “And
let’s not get a car,” she said. “I’m sick of all the hassle.”
At the time I had a job 20 minutes from my home where I sat at a
desk all day, ate lunch in the building cafeteria, and then went
home and stayed home, as my husband was on-call most of the
time. It wasn’t until years later, when I took a job in
marketing (which is what my friend did at the time of the
vacation) and was in my car all day and night that I understood
just what a hassle “a car” can be.
Now when someone asks me to take a “vacation” with them, I check
it out. If I’m after Broadway shows and fancy restaurants and
they want to climb mountains and wear Birkenstocks, we’re in
trouble. Using your EQ means understanding the emotions that are
our motivating factors and learning to work with them.
