There are what we might call adolescent or destructive emotions and what we may call more mature or constructive emotions. We don't yet have an equivalent test for EQ to that for IQ, but we can roughly chart and evaluate our emotional age. The process of emotional growth has a timetable that is allied to the development of our cognitive faculties and our brain and biological formation. We expect occasional tantrums from a young child but wouldn't anticipate them from a 45-year-old executive-or would we? The individual's identity may learn to control, cover up, or even suppress the expression of such emotions while not necessarily developing or maturing them. Why would the identity want to?

Classically, therapy has focused on two methods of managing our emotions: cognitive and appraisal.

The cognitive method requires us to think about the emotion we want to work on and by doing so, to try to temper our reactions to the stimulus that causes the emotions to express themselves in action. The sequence that has been identified runs from stimulus to appraisal to action tendency to feeling. What is crucial in making any cognitive intervention is the length of time for which we can prolong the appraisal process. The longer we can extend this period, the less likely we are to act and then feel instant regret. This is a fascinating study, but not the focus of this article.

The second method is to evoke the feelings of the emotion and appraise them. This involves training that allows us to manage the emotion (very much the focus of psychotherapy) and establish control over it by our cognitive faculties working on the stimulus.

The classical options for managing our emotional life are either to work from our IQ or to work by evoking our EQ and exercise our cognitive faculties on the process. I would suggest there is a third way that is more rigorous and more demanding but infinitely more enhancing. To explore why we have the emotions we have, seek to separate out the identity that uses adolescent emotions to continue its role as hostage keeper, and choose our emotional responses brings emotional maturity and growth beyond anything that the two other methods can achieve.

Take an emotional pattern common in all infants, the search for instant gratification of needs. In early life when we are hungry we cry, when we want attention we may make any number of noises. As children mature we notice that the time between the need arising and the demand for its gratification can be prolonged. Studies have shown conclusively that where children are able to delay their demand for instant gratification, they later have much greater success in the workplace at higher executive levels. So far, this is very reasonable. After all, many strategies for working with people require us to hold our tongue, to wait for the right moment to confront an issue, and so forth.

However, this pattern of delaying gratification can be developed to a new level with our SQ intelligence. Ask yourself why you get angry, have demands, expect others to comply, and so on. Such an exploration will quickly reveal that it is again our identity that makes these demands. The more we have these needs, the less developed is the core of our self. The demands of our identity extend to the need to be recognized, to be thought to be intelligent, smart, successful, beautiful, and clever. However, when we make even a cursory analysis of these needs, it becomes obvious that they serve mostly to sustain and even grow the identity and help us little to engage with any higher realms of intelligence. Given the choice, who would really want to be thought of as clever, successful, and smart at the expense of actually feeling useful, whole, happy, and enhanced?

The SQ process does not calculate what we give and what we can then expect back in return based on our short-term or long-term emotional and mental investments. Emotions become enhanced inner feelings when guided by the SQ process, which elevates our life to new levels of satisfaction, interest, and curiosity-in the now. Meaning is life's own reward.

Evolutionary psychologists would make the case that by deferring today's pleasures for tomorrow's rewards, we enable a new range of opportunities and skills. We can plan ahead, store food, and make journeys further and further afield to explore more distant territories, thus increasing our capability and freedom. But spiritual intelligence doesn't try to extend this pattern of independence by delaying gratification; it tries to over- come the need to be gratified altogether. SQ individuals are thankful for the opportunity of living and see their response as the meaningful development of their SQ inner core. They are always 'at home' in themselves.

Self-sabotage

Neuroscientist Joseph Le Doux writes:

Take the power of emotions to disrupt thinking itself. Neuroscientists use the term 'working memory' for the capacity of attention that holds in mind the facts essential for completing a given task or problem, whether it be the ideal features one seeks in a house while touring several prospects or the elements of a reasoning problem on a test. The prefrontal cortex is the brain region responsible for working memory. But circuits from the limbic brain to the prefrontal lobes mean that the signals of strong emotion-anxiety, anger and the like-can create neural static, sabotaging the ability of the prefrontal lobe to manage working memory. That is why when we are emotionally upset, we say we just 'can't think straight' and why continued emotional distress can create deficits in a child's intellectual abilities.

The stress of fitting the bigger truth into a small space has devastating consequences. I would suggest that what Le Doux describes as a kind of 'sabotaging' by the emotions can be fundamentally overcome by developing an SQ level of self. SQ is meaning first. It sets the contexts of living.

In his book Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman calls this sabotaging process 'emotional hijacking.' We are triggered into anger or rage quite against the reasoning we would normally apply to a situation. While Goleman chronicles some extreme cases, crimes of passion, rage, and violent behavior, in my view this process is happening all the time. By expecting gratification, whether it be respect from employees, love from one's spouse, or adoration from one's children, we are loading the conditions in which this emotional hijacking is more liable to happen. We are empowering our identity to sabotage our deeper intelligence's motive to grow.

Creating a continual inner dialog that projects how wonderful, important, or even perfect our life is, accompanying it with happy smiles and contrived behavior, sets up an inevitable context for emotional hijacking. Ensuring that others speak their lines on cue to the inner script we create is a notoriously tricky business.