Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Just look at my daughter:



This picture was taken one morning after her mother had left to go to teach. Well, you can see what I had to cope with...
And, yes, I did what every good dad would do. I went outside and took pictures...

No, jokes aside.

Why is it that we don’t realize that we are emotional beings, and not only rational robots? We’re not robots, we’re not minds only. We have the miracle of emotion, the foundation of passion. In his books on Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Coleman teaches us that we need to get in contact with our emotions again. We need to identify and treasure them, rather than suppress them all the time. Here is the interesting thing. In a world where IQ is professed to be everything, the results of our IQ tests are kept secret...
So what does than mean?
It means that your IQ is directly equivalent to your self-esteem. If you think you did well on the test, you may feel more clever than you are, therefore act more clever than you are and then become more clever than you are...
Unfortunately, schools are ridden with dangerous weapons called “red pens”. They become the ultimate tool in colourful criticism! So in most instances, we are afraid that we might not have done so well in the tests, and therefore a reverse cycle takes place. We often feel as if we did not do well, therefore we do not do that well...
And in a strange way, an unknown test result, a big secret, determines how clever we think we are. Yet, if we look at the miracle of our lives, we will see that each of us have natural intelligences, not necessarily in all the fields they teach at school. Thank Heavens, Howard Gardner identified multiple intelligences, today we know that brilliance is not often being really clever in all subjects, it may be, and often is, more a question of making the most of your natural gifts.
But so often we find people are not in touch with these, we feel the threat of failure as it grabs our emotions...and maybe we need to find out how to handle that...
A possible clue lies in our fears and how we oftentimes do not face them in the right way.

So next time, I revisit a picture of my son...

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