Meaningful Alignment: Mastering Emotionally Intelligent Interactions At Work and in Life

Success

INTRODUCTION

THE DIFFICULTY WE ALL FACE when effectively communicating with coworkers, customers, neighbors, and even family members, is a very real and painful social problem. Our lives have become so immersed in smart technology that contacting one another at any hour of the day or night has become the new normal. In fact, our ability to connect through multiple mediums has never been easier—or more powerful. Unfortunately, this omnipresent connectivity often fails to facilitate encounters that are meaningful and personally rewarding. In the same way that information does not equate to knowledge, and followers do not equate to friends, communication does not equate to meaningful understanding.

Rather than serving as a conduit for connection, our universal accessibility has created the exact opposite: disconnection. Take, for example, the workplace. We live amid a sweeping trend that confuses frequent communication efforts with effective collaboration, wherein the allocation of work is intelligently based on our priorities, capacities and personal growth. Throughout the workplace, we often mistake signal with noise and productivity with busyness. As a consequence, many people are routinely lulled into a state of overproduction, saying yes to every person, project and meeting request. The ego-driven desire many feel to be the standout superstar at work has backfired, generating an enormous cost to the teams they sincerely desire to serve.

A recently concluded eight-year study of twenty organizations revealed data findings that collaborative time demands have increased by 50% over the past decade, and individuals who work in knowledge-based or leadership roles are now spending more than 85% of their time managing the interpersonal communication demands of their job (Cross, Madden and Taylor 2018). Although it is easy for us to blame our ever-expanding work week and saturated inboxes on things beyond our immediate control, the real enemy we must confront is ourselves.

When we do engage in face-to-face communication, many of us lack the tools required to tackle the difficult subject and to engage the difficult person. Despite the glowing promise of the Information Age making us more productive, we’ve lost what matters the most in the process: the art of conversation.

Life in the Information Age may also be contributing to disengagement in our personal lives. According to a 2012 study by the Stanford Center on Longevity, baby boomers (age 55+) are more isolated and less socially engaged than their predecessors were just twenty years earlier. This includes having far fewer meaningful interactions with their spouses, weaker ties with family members and friends, fewer connections with neighbors and less involvement with their local communities (Carstensen 2016). The biggest concern associated with these findings, is the significant, long-term health risks that this behavior is creating—most notably, to our life expectancy. Although the explanation for this trend has many causal aspects to consider, one inescapable contributing factor is that our connection to technology overrides our connection to one another. We believe this growing sense of isolation is not limited to boomers (who were the focus of the Stanford research) but includes the generations following them.

In our executive coaching work, we have used the assessment of emotional intelligence to help increase self-regulation strategies and improve the quality of relationships that our clients have at work and at home. Over the past twenty-five years, there have been many books and articles written on emotional intelligence (or EI), many of them quite outstanding. These books cover a wide range of topics, such as why EI is important, the underpinning theories of EI, and whether it is a cognitive ability or a personality trait. Some books offer the reader a collection of constructive habits to adopt and valuable life tips to practice, aimed at helping readers improve their emotional intelligence. These are useful to some extent, but we came to a realization some time ago that none of the books we had read or were recommending to people over the years were helping them to significantly shift the social dimension of their lives in a meaningful and enduring way. As a result, we have focused our initial research for this book, and the dialogue model for Meaningful Alignment, on the impact that our emotional intensity and sensitivity have on behavior, above and beyond the scope of emotional intelligence.

Consider for a moment how emotional intelligence is measured on most assessments. Results reflect a person’s best intentions and highest and best sense of self. After all, when asked, most people will tell you that they prefer acts of empathy and cooperation to those of selfishness and distrust. Most people also recognize that being cool under pressure is a more desirable trait than a tendency to shut down or run away from social difficulty. But the inner world of our affect (our inner world of feeling and sensing) in real time paints a much different picture of our external behavior.

When we are faced with a high-stress, high-impact situation, initial sensory signals are sent to the thalamus, which functions as a signal receptor and relay switch of sorts to different areas of our brain. One important neural pathway travels directly from the thalamus to the amygdala in the limbic system, which is the epicenter of our fight-or-flight response. This pathway is far stronger and more sensitive in some people than it is for others. Furthermore, the conditioned patterns that trigger the fight-or-flight response will also vary greatly from person to person. This is not easily captured during the calm of taking an online assessment of our own emotional intelligence. Each person is born with a unique arousal baseline mixed with a lifelong history of trial and error experience. This has serious implications for how and why each of us decides to engage or avoid people at critical moments.

For executive leaders, the development of skills and abilities associated with managing and controlling responses to stressful moments will ultimately determine whether or not their inherent emotional intelligence can be leveraged to maximum effect. More directly, it will likely determine the trajectory of their career. For this reason, the Meaningful Alignment program was developed to build skills that help people to self-regulate, to take full advantage of their emotional intelligence by recognizing and respecting the power of their underlying affect intensity, and to manage the unique set of dialogue styles that predict what their strongest response triggers will be. Finally, we focus on preparation and performance—that is, how to have conversations that lead to Meaningful Alignment! Self-discovery is the prerequisite for self-improvement.

Meaningful Alignment is challenging work, but it is also extremely rewarding and liberating. Success in this key area of life requires self-determination and tenacity. Ultimately, Meaningful Alignment requires us to build our resilience, expand our options for self-regulation and increase the competence necessary to rework our learned social responses and replace them with wiser, more effective techniques, including a focus on mindfulness, gratitude and emotional self-care. These practices create greater levels of trust, appreciation and collaborative efforts that lead to deep commitment and mutual understanding.

We believe that the social problems we are facing can be overcome one relationship at a time, beginning with the relationship we have with ourselves. It is only when we engage in the inner work of reflection and the outer work of skill development that we will be capable of effective collaboration at work and at home and able to realize lasting happiness with the most important people in our lives.

The story you are about to read illustrates some of the ageless truths that prevail throughout our lives. It is also our story—the story behind our research and, ultimately, why we developed the Meaningful Alignment program.

You may wonder why we decided to write a fictional story about Carl, the protagonist of our book, instead of simply presenting our research on Meaningful Alignment.

Storytelling is undeniably one of the most potent forms of human communication and significant connection. Throughout history, since people began speaking in the earliest form of language, we have been telling stories to one another to help us make sense of the world we live in. Why the tides ebb and flow, why the moon waxes and wanes, and the reason for changing seasons—as well as the interpretations of innumerable human experiences. Stories help us understand the human condition, and they are an essential part of our day-to-day communication. We are hardwired to receive information via storytelling; gaining information through a story dramatically increases our ability to understand and retain that knowledge. The stories we tell shape our identity as individuals and help us make sense of our world as a society. We are, all of us, an endlessly unfolding narrative, the heroes of our own unique story.

We are excited to share this journey of self-realization through the fictional tale of Carl and the people central to his life. We believe you may find some commonalities in the power of Carl’s journey, and we hope that it may lead you to explore ways to find meaningful connections and more gratifying communication in your own life.

CHAPTER ONE

IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL SPRING DAY. The air was fresh with new life. Carl was on an empty road, driving…just driving. Leaving the city behind. Soon, he found himself on a lonely back road with gently sloping farm fields and woodland on either side. He rolled down the window and took in a few deep breaths. The air was sweet and fragrant, and the smell of the earth awakening was all around him. The road was empty. He allowed himself to relax and release the strain of life. He felt alive and free.

As he drove with no destination in mind, something urged him ever forward. A hazy sadness overtook him, an undefined longing tugging at him, beckoning to him. He decided to simply let it go, to quiet his mind and be in the moment. He opened himself to the beauty of creation. He felt a sense of connection to everything, as though the rhythm of the universe flowed through him. He slowed to a stop on the dusty dirt road to take it all in. Pristine evergreens flanked the bends of the meandering route. He looked around at the tall pines. The peaceful breeze set them gently swaying, while birdsong punctuated the sound of the wind through the trees…

Wheee…Wheeee…Wheeeeee…

The alarm sounded like a siren wailing throughout the room, leaping out from the corners, echoing through his head. What a dream…! He could still feel the crisp coolness of the air and smell the earthy pines as he drove that winding road. And the sense of freedom—he wished it could go on forever.

Carl sat up in a sleepy stupor, dangling his feet over the edge of the bed.

I guess I shouldn’t have had that third beer last night. Or was it four? A few drinks always helped relieve the unremitting sense of apprehension that he felt day after day. Dread owned him, it seemed. And right in this moment, it was pushing against him like an invisible weight, attempting to shove him back to bed and back into that beautiful dream. He reached over and turned off the alarm.

Older and wiser. That was how his friends had teased him at his birthday get-together last week.

Not a chance…

At forty-seven, Carl felt lost at sea. He never awoke refreshed and ready to greet the day anymore. Everything ached, and his body felt like an anchor. No question, he had issues. His doctor had read him the riot act at his yearly physical. You’re at least twenty pounds overweight, Carl, and I don’t like the look of your blood work, he’d cautioned. "Your cholesterol is too high, as is your sugar, and you have high inflammatory biomarkers, which all point to imminent cardiovascular issues. These