The truth is, I am an emotional person. Maybe some people may think otherwise, as I am often quiet or shy or...whatever, but actually I am quite emotional. The majority of times I feel very emotional and I tend to follow those feelings, even if it is not in my best interest. I feel sad or depressed, I dwell on it rather than just putting it aside and dealing with an critical assignment, I let it cloud my ability to be productive. I like someone, in a romantic relationship or a friend, I often feel such a feeling of love or friendship that I have a hard time looking at them critically. I see a girl in the library I have a crush on- I am too fearful to think of what to say to her or to even go and talk to her, even though logically that would be the right reaction.
A few years ago I read a book by a professor at Harvard School of Business called Emotional Intelligence. To quickly summarize the book discusses how in business (as in many areas of life) "success" is a great deal more dependant upon people's ability to control their emotional responses to certain situations, often crisis, than on their actual "intelligence" in the sense of degrees, titles, and other more mainstream conceptions of intelligence. The book explains through a series of examples that in dealing with other human beings our ability to control our own immediate emotional response and instead choose the emotional response for those around us or for the situation is what is critical to success. One example that the book has is a man, that for the sake of time, we'll call John. John is a chemist at a major pharmacuetical company, working on a team of 12 chemists. John is brilliant, went to the best ivy league schools, and has amazing credentials. Unfortunately, John is also very bad with dealing with other people. He has a very difficult time explaining how to do things to other people and often gives into his emotions and gets frustrated or angry when people do not quickly understand what he is trying to show/tell them. After several years of working at the firm, John's boss moves to another city and there is an opening for a team leader/manager of the 12 chemists. John obviously is the most qualified as he is an exemplary chemist- one of the best in the company- so he is chosen for the position. Once John is promoted he still has the same stengths and weaknesses as before, but his team still manages to be one of the best in the company. When another chemist is having trouble with something or is underperforming, instead of motivating him, firing him, explaining to him, John simply picks up the slack and does the work himself. John is a total micro-manager and constantly redoes or does work for everyone of the 12 chemists underneath him. The problem comes when John is promoted yet again. John is now managing not a team of chemists doing tests, but he is now managing 36 managers around the company and their chemists. John cannot pick up the slack for the 432 chemists beneath him anymore, he has to deal with their respective managers. The problem is that John cannot. He is too emotional and is intollerant of people's slower or different learning. He is incapable of motivating people. He is incapable of telling someone else how to solve a problem. He is incapable of inspiring. The end result is that John is demoted back to being a manager of the team of 12 chemists.
The book's example makes the point that often in life although we feel emotions very strongly, it is more important that we put them aside if we want to achieve something. John should have put aside his frustration and tried to explain to his fellow team how he did things and how they could do them rather than get frustrated if he really wanted to help the group as a whole do better work.
Exam time is a reflection of this paradigm, for me. It is easy for me to get emotional, to question why I am in school, to curse the environment I am in, to become concerned with emotions like temptation, loneliness- distractions. In exam time you need to focus simply on what you are doing and on its execution without letting your emotions get involved, and most importantly of all you must avoid the most dangerous exam time emotion of all: panic.
Dude, exams must have really gotten to you, you are writting about emotions now.
Posted by: Derek | December 14, 2004 at 02:46 PM