Ever been baffled by other people’s reactions because you can’t understand where they’re coming from? Even though you saw the exact same event as they did? That’s because no two people see the exact same thing. We see life through filters based on our life experience, and there are philosophical differences we use to judge life on an unconscious level.
We see each other through lenses of perception. It’s not immediately known to us that we do it, but we do. Look from someone else’s eyes and you might see things you’re not tuned into.
Raising your emotional and spiritual intelligence means waking up to things you’ve become numb to. Here are three simple ideas that will transform how you see everyone you know.
- Fight or flight.
There is a large scale within our fight or flight mode, the most extreme being enraged or petrified, or on a lesser scale, it’s being stressed out and anxious. The other end of the spectrum is being peaceful, in harmony with yourself and everything around you. You can tell where a person is on this scale by how they respond under pressure, and how they deal with it.
Think about this as a scale and judging where a person sits on this scale. It can be very revealing.
- Space to fail.
When setting a goal, some people give themselves the latitude to take risks, manage those risks, and allow themselves the space to fail. Sometimes this may bring reward, but it always offers lessons and sometimes – real grief and pain. So how much space do you give yourself to take the risk?
This is another scale you can instantly use to understand a person. Do they allow themselves space to fail? Or are they blaming outside sources due to their lack of result.
- Owning your purpose.
This really relates to the first two points, but is a very important point all on it’s own.
First you’ve got to discover what your purpose / passion is, and then learn to prioritize it. This then links back to a person’s ability to allow themselves to fail, because if you’re playing it safe you may be missing your purpose entirely.
Do you know someone who is super smart, talented and organized, and yet they’re working at a job where they’re under appreciated and frustrated? This comes down to the ability to own your own personal purpose.
These three lenses show you a lot about a person. Once you’re fluent in identifying these areas in other people, you can predict where they are currently sitting within these scales, and where they’re going in their life.
To raise your emotional and spiritual IQ, you have to understand how the mind works and that the person is really above the mind. So when you see people doing things that don’t make a lot of sense and cause grief and harm, yes it’s the person, but it’s really the person’s mind. And you can relate this back to indentifying what degree they’re in the fight or flight mode. This plays a big role in how they deal with people around them as they’re dealing with adversity.
When someone is in the fight or flight zone, it shuts down blood flow in your brain and we lose the ability to discern, it destroys our ability to make good decisions.
So how do we get out of this downward spiral?
Feed the mind with positivity, plug into some podcasts, read some personal development books, engage in some exercise. Distance yourself from the negatives and give yourself the space to break you out of what’s going on in your life. It’s going to be hard to do because you’ll have to disengage with whatever you’re stressing over, and focus on something different. But that’s exactly what you have to do.
Practice purposefully disengaging on a daily basis – whatever it is you have to do. By doing this you’re expanding in a certain way through it, you literally change the role that you’re playing. You switch from being in an offence/defense position, and step into a creative role. And as you shift gears, it actually re-patterns the blood flow in your mind.
These three things will change how you see people. Once fluent in these areas, understanding a person is no longer is a mystery. You can see how someone is going, why they’re making those decisions and how they’re going to make their shifts. They’ve got to get on-purpose and start serving the bigger picture. It’s more important and more urgent than what’s right in front of you. The most urgent thing to do right now today, is to do what keeps you on purpose, build your own life to help you win and serve your passion.