Mindfulness and Emotional Intelligence

I have just returned from a three week trip to India, a country famous for its diversity of religions.  One fact that did surprise me was that although Buddism started in India, and Ashoka, India’s first unifying emperor, heavily promoted the religion, it is now practised by only 1% of the population.  We visited Sarnath, about 9km from Varanasi, where Budda preached his first sermon.  The site was filled with Sri Lankan, Thai, Japanese and Korean Buddhist pilgrims but the saris were non-existant.

In contrast to India, Buddhism or should I say Buddhist principles, are increasingly gaining popularity particularly in California  See for example this New Yorker article about Andy Puddicome, an Englishman and a former Buddhist monk, who via an App, HeadSpace, teaches short form meditation based on Buddhist techniques.  The Headspace App launched in January 2012 has been downloaded 3 million times.  Headspace does have critics.  One of my favourite quotes from the article:  “It would be as if somebody went to the Catholic Church and said, ‘I don’t buy all this stuff about Jesus and God, but I really dig this Communion ritual. Would you just teach me how to do that bit? Oh, and I want to start a company marketing wafers.’ ”

One of the big supporters of Andy Puddicome has been The Huffington Post.  Imagine my surprise when The Huffington Post recently published an article by Ron Purser and Edward Ng questioning the practice of mindfulness:  Cutting Through the Corporate Mindfulness Hype.  The article questions the scientific validity of Emotional Intelligence icons such as Daniel Goleman’s book and Google’s “Search Inside Yourself“ flagship corporate mindfulness training program.  Admittedly the article has a Marcusian flavour but the questions asked about scientific validity and reliability need to be answered. (It was a Purser tweet that supplied the photo.)

I think it is the Greeks who had the answer.  Inscribed on the walls of the Great Temple at Delphi were the two great commands of Greek life: "Know thyself" and "Everything in moderation."  These two commands are the emotionally intelligence way to developing mindfulness.  Rather that trying to control your transient emotions via mediation you would much better off understanding your core emotional drives.  Your core emotions are driven by your temperament – what you are genetically born with.  Based on a study of 11,000 identical twins nature is around twice as important as nurture.  I have found the Humm-Wadsworth model of seven core emotions the most practical tool for people to use and once understood (takes a day) dramatically lifts their emotional intelligence.  If you want to learn about the Humm download a free white paper on using Emotional Intelligence in either selling or management .  http://www.emotionalintelligencecourse.com/eq-free-white-papers/

Book Review A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness by Nassir Ghaemi

In this book Ghaemi puts forward an hypothesis that he calls The Inverse Law of Sanity.  According to him most of our leaders are exceedingly sane men such as Neville Chamberlain who in times of normality perform well.  However in times of crisis display such people demonstrate lacklustre leadership.  Instead in such times the best leaders are those with mood disorders.  Ghaemi argues his case using such leaders as Abraham Lincoln, Gen. William T. Sherman, Winston Churchill, Mohandas Gandhi, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ted Turner among others.  In particular Ghaemi contends these leaders owe much of their success because they were suffering some form of Bipolar Personality Disorder, either the full blown disorder itself or some milder variant such as hyperthymia (mild mania), dysthymia (mild depression), or cyclothymia (alternating between lows and highs in mood and energy.

The core of mania is impulsivity with heightened energy. Increased levels of mania usually mean creativity and sociability but if it is too pronounced it can lead to irritability, promiscuous sexuality, and lavish spending (eg Kennedy and Roosevelt).  On the other hand according to Ghaemi depressed people are not depressed because they distort reality; they are depressed because they see reality more clearly than other people do.  Depressed people also have more empathy, resilience and creativity.  I can agree with empathy but with regard to resilience I beg to differ.  It is people with low levels of the Depressive component in their personality who have high resilence.  Also it is mania that leads to creativity (the flight of ideas) not depression.

As someone who promotes the Humm-Wadsworth model of temperament this was a compelling book to read.  Temperament is how your genetic make-up defines how you react emotionally.  The Humm-Wadsworth says that your reactions are determined on where you fall in the spectrum of the seven most common mental illnesses.  It is here that I have difficulty with the book.  Ghaemi appears to see everything through the lens of Manic-Depression.  

Kretschmer was the first person to define the Cyclothymic (ie Manic-Depressive) mental disorder but he also defined another disorder, the Schizothymic (or Autistic-Paranoid).  Surely the one characteristic of all leaders is high levels of paranoia.  Andy Grove said it best in his eponymous book: Only the Paranoid Survive.  I find it difficult to accept Ghaemi’s thesis that Nixon was a homoclite or a person or with normal behaviour.  Like all successful politicians Nixon was well to right of the Paranoid spectrum with an overpowering desire to compete and win.  His downfall could be attributed to a severe paranoia for chasing demons that maybe did not exist and resorting to tactics that were not necessary.

On the other hand I found many of the biographies very interesting and discovered much.  Non USA citizens in particular will learn a lot about the USA reading this book.  Ghaemi himself was born in Iran and moved to the USA when he was five years old.  Dr. Ghaemi is a world-class psychiatrist; and is one of the world’s experts on issues of mood disorder so his emphasis on Manic-Depression is understandable.  No matter how hard we try, avoiding confirmation bias is almost impossible.