The poet sage Valmiki has just completed his epic, Ramayana.<\/p>\n
Narad, divine messenger and communicator visits him: \u2018Do you know that Hanuman has also written a Ramayan?\u2019<\/p>\n
Valmiki is anxious- a competitor? He makes haste to the forest \u2013Hanuman\u2019s Ramayana is scripted on thousands of large banana leaves.<\/p>\n
When Valmiki reads Hanuman\u2019s text, he is touched, moved and inspired to tears. Every sentence\u00a0 is soaked with \u2018rasa\u2019 and \u2018bhaav\u2019 of love. He is also envious\u2014 will the world read his epic ? This seems far superior to his own.<\/p>\n
Then Hanuman reads Valmiki\u2019s masterpiece. It is full of scholarship and an objective description of Rama, his actions and his epoch, yet written in exquisite poetry .<\/p>\n
Lord Rama appears and, \u201cBoth the writings are excellent and incomparable. Hanuman\u2019s is a song drenched in emotions. \u00a0Valmiki\u2019s is a work of a poet, academic and historian. Both Bhakti yog and Gyan yog are equally important paths of enlightenment.\u201d<\/p>\n
Today\u2019s work place also needs us to pay attention to both\u2014 cold facts, data, logic and rationale AND the warmth of emotions.<\/p>\n
Sensing, recognizing, acknowledging and responding to emotions humanizes the workplace. It is the juice which connects people. Relying on only statistics, knowledge and reasoning in interactions makes us transactional and exhausted.<\/p>\n
Emotions play a big role in our lives.\u00a0 There are more than 600 words in English to describe them; and 43 facial muscles to express them physically. Although human beings speak more than 6,000 languages, about 90 percent of people across different cultures have no trouble figuring out if someone is registering happiness, surprise, or disgust just by looking at the person\u2019s face.<\/p>\n
We are supersensitive to the slightest shift in people\u2019s facial expressions, especially if they are registering fear or anger.<\/p>\n
And yet, business folk are ambivalent about emotion in the workplace. At best, it is awkward and better be over quickly. At worse, it is a pollutant clouding the cold, data-driven reasoning that business supposedly runs on.<\/p>\n
The focus remains on logic, cold data-driven reasoning: Giving instructions, Asking why\/ problem solving, Measuring gaps and outcomes.<\/p>\n
Salovey and Meyer defined Emotional Intelligence as: \u2018The ability to monitor one\u2019s own and others\u2019 feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one\u2019s thinking and actions.’<\/p>\n
Do you stop to ask: How am I feeling? What emotions can I read from the other\u2019s micro expressions? What is the predominant emotion in the room? \u00a0How can I use this information to guide my thinking and actions?<\/p>\n
(Today is full-moon and the birth anniversary of Maharishi Valmiki.)<\/p>\n
Art by MPM Nataraja<\/p>\n
To learn about our upcoming 5-week workshop on Developing Emotional Intelligence for Executive Presence<\/a>, click on the link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The poet sage Valmiki has just completed his epic, Ramayana. Narad, divine messenger and communicator visits him: \u2018Do you know that Hanuman has also written a Ramayan?\u2019 Valmiki is anxious- a competitor? He makes haste to the forest \u2013Hanuman\u2019s Ramayana is scripted on thousands of large banana leaves. When Valmiki reads Hanuman\u2019s text, he is … Continue reading “Valmiki, Hanuman and the Role of Emotions at the Workplace”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":173,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8,3,2,10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rashmidatt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rashmidatt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rashmidatt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rashmidatt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rashmidatt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/rashmidatt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":176,"href":"http:\/\/rashmidatt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172\/revisions\/176"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rashmidatt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rashmidatt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rashmidatt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rashmidatt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}