Emotional Intelligent 2.0

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THE JOURNEY

The warm California sun greeted Butch Connor as The stepped out of his he truck and onto the sands of Salmon Creck Beach. It was the first day of a long holiday weekend, and a perfect morning to grab his board and head out for a surf. Most of the other local surfers had the same idea that morning, and after 30 minutes or so, Butch decided to leave the crowd behind. He penetrated the water's surface with long, deep strokes that propelled him away from the pack and over to a stretch of beach where he could catch a few waves away from the crowd.

Once Butch had paddled a good 40 yards away from the other surfers, he sat up on his board and bobbed up and down in the rolling swells while he waited for a wave that caught his fancy. A beautiful teal wave began to crest as it approached the shoreline, and as Butch lay down on his board to catch the wave, a loud splash behind him stole his attention. Butch glanced over his right shoulder and froze in horror at the sight of a 14-inch, gray dorsal fin cutting through the water toward him. Butch's muscles locked up, and he lay there in a panic, gasping for air. He became hyper-focused on his surroundings; he could hear his heart pounding as he watched the sun glistening on the fin's moist surface.

The approaching wave stood tall to reveal Butch's worst nightmare in the shimmering, translucent surface-a mas-sive great white shark that stretched 14 feet from nose to tail. Paralyzed by the fear coursing through his veins, Butch let the wave roll past, and with it a speedy ride to the safety of the shoreline. It was just the shark and him now; it swam in a semi-circle and approached him head-on. The shark drifted in slowly along his left side, and he was too transfixed by the proximity of the massive fish to notice his left leg dangling perilously off his surfboard in the frigid saltwater. It's as big around as my Volkswagen, Butch thought as the dorsal fin approached. He felt the sudden urge to reach out and touch the shark. It's going to kill me anyway. Why shouldn't I touch it?

The shark didn't give him a chance. The shark, with a massive chomp of its jaws, thrust its head upward from underneath Butch's leg. Butch's leg stayed on top of the shark's rising, boulder-sized head and out of its cavernous mouth, and he fell off the opposite side of his surfboard into the murky water. Butch splashing into the water sent the shark into a spastic frenzy. The shark waved its head about maniacally while snapping its jaws open and shut. The great white struck nothing; it blasted water in all direc-tions as it thrashed about. The irony of floating alongside a 3,000-pound killing machine without so much as a scratch was not lost on Butch. Neither was the grave reality that this apex predator was unlikely to miss again. Thoughts of escape and survival flooded Butch's mind as quickly and completely as terror had in the moments prior.

The shark stopped snapping and swam around Butch in tight circles. Instead of climbing back on his surfboard, Butch floated on his belly with his arms draped over the board. He rotated the surfboard as the shark circled, using the surfboard as a makeshift barrier between himself and the man-eater. Butch's fear morphed into anger as he waited for the beast to strike. The shark came at him again, and Butch decided it was time to put up a fight. He aimed the sharp, pointed nose of his surfboard at the shark as it ap-proached. When it raised its head out of the water to bite, Butch jammed the nose of the board into the shark's slotted gills. This blow sent the shark into another bout of nervous thrashing. Butch climbed atop his board and yelled, "Shark!" at the pack of surfers down the beach. Butch's warning and the sight of the turbulent cauldron of white-water around him sent the surfers racing for dry land.

Butch also paddled toward safety, but the shark stopped him dead in his tracks after just a few strokes. It surfaced in his path to the shoreline, and then began circling him once more. Butch came to the dire conclusion that his evasive tactics were merely delaying the inevitable, and a paralyzing fear took hold of him yet again. Butch lay there trembling on his surfboard while the shark circled. He mustered the will to keep the tip of his board pointed in the shark's direc-tion, but he was too terror-stricken to get back in the water and use his board as a barrier.

Butch's thoughts raced between terror and sadness. He wondered what his three children were going to do without him and how long his girlfriend would take to move with her life. He wanted to live. He wanted to escape this monster, and he needed to calm down if that was ever going to happen. Butch convinced himself that the shark could sense his fear like a rabid dog; he decided that he must get hold of himself because it was his fear that was motivating the shark to strike. To Butch's surprise, his body listened. The trembling subsided, and the blood returned to his arms and legs. He felt strong. He was ready to paddle. And pad-dle Butch did-straight for the shoreline. A healthy rip current ensured that his journey to shore was a nerve-rattling five minutes of paddling like mad with the sense that the shark was somewhere behind him and could strike at any moment. When Butch made it to the beach, an awestruck group of surfers and other beachgoers were waiting for him.

The surfers thanked him profusely for the warning and patted him on the back. For Butch Connor, standing on dry land had never felt so good.

WHEN REASON AND FEELING COLLIDE

Butch and the great white weren't fighting the only battle in the water that morning. Deep inside Butch's brain, his reason struggled for control of his behavior against an on-slaught of intense emotions. The bulk of the time, his feelings won out, which was mostly to his detriment (paralyzing fear) but at times a benefit (the anger-fueled jab of his surfboard). With great effort, Butch was able to calm himself down, and realizing the shark wasn't going away-make the risky paddle for shore that saved his life. Though most of us will never have to tussle with a great white shark, our brains battle it out like Butch's every single day.

The daily challenge of dealing effectively with emotions is critical to the human condition because our brains are hard-wired to give emotions the upper hand. Here's how it works: everything you see, smell, hear, taste and touch trav-els through your body in the form of electric signals. These signals pass from cell to cell until they reach their ultimate destination, your brain. They enter your brain at the base near the spinal cord, but must travel to your frontal lobe (behind your forehead) before reaching the place where ra tional, logical thinking takes place. The trouble is, they pass through your limbic system along the way the place where emotions are produced. This journey ensures you experience things emotionally before your reason can kick into gear.

The rational area of your brain (the front of your brain) can't stop the emotion "felt" by your limbic system, but the two areas do influence each other and maintain constant The physical pathway for emotional intelligence starts in the brain, at the spinal cord. Your primary senses enter here and must travel to the front of your brain before you can think rationally about your experience. But first they travel through the limbic system, the place where emotions are expe-rienced. Emotional intelligence requires effective communication between the rational and emotional centers of the brain.

communication. The communication between your emo-tional and rational "brains" is the physical source of emo-tional intelligence.

When emotional intelligence was first discovered, it served as the missing link in a peculiar finding: people with the highest levels of intelligence (IQ) outperform those with average IQs just 20 percent of the time, while people with average IQs outperform those with high IQs 70