Emotional Intelligence; another version

If you’ve blessed me with a subscription to Talking Story, and you didn’t just end up here by Googling something related to aloha, values, management, leadership or business, you know about the Ho’ohana Community.

If you did search, please consider sticking around and picking up a feed, for I’m about to give you one more reason that people get so excited about the relationships which can result from participating in online communities.

For those of you who do subscribe, I know it’s been pretty quiet here lately, so I’ve got to say mahalo nui loa (thank you very much) for your patience and for the breathing room. There’s been a lot going on for me, where spending time offline with my family has been the very best choice I could make in how I should use whatever free time I could drum up. Then there was the usual stuff of my business to keep up with, and keeping on schedule with the every-Saturday commitment I’ve made to blogging for the Learn to Lead with Your Strengths project on Joyful Jubilant Learning. As a result, Talking Story has continuously given up its place in line for my attentions due to a myriad of compounded reasons.

Perhaps you’ve enjoyed the break too?

Since you haven’t had to keep up with me, I sincerely hope you’ve taken the opportunity to do the blog crawl down my left column under the heading that’s called Ho’ohana Community Voices. If you ever want for positive, uplifting reading, that’s a great place to start.

I know it’s a pretty long list, and so another way to be sure that the ones you choose are currently active (and not on a life-is-calling break like I’ve been) is to click on the names that have been recent commenters here, like Pete Aldin, Dave Rothacker, Terry Starbucker, and David Zinger. You might even meet someone new, like Dave Richards.

When you decide that you’ll get to know the people who are in our Ho’ohana Community, you’re deciding to add much more emotional intelligence to your life.

Amazingly, they can be the ones who are there for you when you’re not sure who you need to be there. They can be the ones who are always there for you even though you’ve never met them in person. Their voices, and their good intention has always been enough.

More than good enough, their voices have been just about perfect.

This is what will eventually happen, just like it did for me today…

Stuff will happen in life that can make you look at things in your world very emotionally. You can feel off balance, even though deep down you know that trusting in the intelligence of your emotions can usually be a very good thing. Emotional intelligence is the all-good stuff that your intuition and gut-level trust is made of; your emotions give you a unique kind of capacity. The word we have in Hawaiian for the wisdom of intuition is na’au’ao … literally, na’au is gut, and attaching ‘ao to it is adding self-learning or trusted experience.

Still, even knowing that, you can get off balance with your emotions. They can go in overdrive, and when they do, they can interfere with rational decision-making.

Sometimes your emotions are actually right on the mark, and perfectly, solidly sound. But because they’re so emotional, you question them even more, and doubt they could possibly be as right as they are. What to believe? It’s not a female thing, a male thing, a young thing, or an old thing; it’s a very human being kind of thing.

When that happens, one of the smartest things you can do is to talk things out. But with who? Who will understand? Who will take the time to let you be okay with how you emotionally feel about something, respectfully honoring how valid those emotions are, while helping you get back on track? Who will ground you again, and bring you back into balance, understanding completely?

In my case, I decided to call two different people today, trusting that they were my Who(s). I was right; each time, they were the perfect choice of Who and Who to call. When we ended our Skype calls, I felt perfectly centered and emotionally right, with great decisions in mind. Both were members of the Ho’ohana Community, and both gave me a generous, healthy shot of emotional intelligence today. Within their care, I felt total, unconditional aloha, and I met them both here, within the pages of Talking Story. (Mahalo nui Greg and Phil).

I’ve now lost count of how many times over the last three years (the amount of time I’ve been online with Talking Story) that I’ve made calls like these I made today. If not for blogging, and if not for virtual community, I would never have met some of the most thoughtful, generous, and intuitively communicative people I know.

Family comes in so many varieties. I am blessed to have emotionally intuitive people in my life both online and offline. Sometimes, being together to talk things out in person is as good as it gets, but sometimes, online works in amazing ways, and with that respectful, intelligently emotional distance is as good as it gets too.

Isn’t it time you trusted in your own emotional intelligence, and talked story with us too? Trust me, you’ll be so glad you did.