Review of Emotalerting: The Art of Managing the Moment

My latest project is trying to clear the backlog of books on my Kindle. I was trying to work out why this book was on my kindle when I realised that you can see what orders you have made and the price you paid for it. I purchased (?) this book for nothing in January 2015. Obviously it was a promotion.

The author describes himself as Spiritual Formation Pastor and Emotional Intelligence Coach. He received a Doctor of Ministry by writing a thesis on how EQ can aid spiritual formation and (while this is a guess) one would think the thesis finally produced in 2013 is the basis of the book. I confess this is the first time I had heard of this degree.

The book is not long (151 pages) and contains 10 chapters. The first four chapters are a standard introduction to the topic of emotional intelligence covering definitions, the limbic brain, neurophysiology, Goleman’s self and social mastery, etc. He does introduce the reader to Emotalerts which are emotional triggers that get alerted by stimuli happening around us. If the emotion overwhelms our behaviour it is a hijack; if we manage to control the emotion it is an emotalert.

In Chapter five Carlyle Naylor tells his life story. Dostoyevsky would have loved it. Multiple stepfathers, estrangement with his mother, murder of one ex-stepfather by another, thrown out of his home before leaving high school because he was too much a do-gooder. Writing his story down must have been a cathartic experience for the author.

The next five chapters are then Naylor’s attempt to improve the Emotional Intelligence model. He introduces various concepts such as Heart intelligence (which is a form of Spiritual Intelligence) and the Impulsive, Reflective and Ethical Human Wills. This tripartite division reminded me of Freud’s id, ego and super-ego. He then lists off 9 emotalerts that are within all of us. Among them for example are impulsively jumping to conclusions on limited evidence and automatically believing the best in people. I must confess that I am an Occam's razor sort of guy and hold to the principle that "Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily." I don’t like the theories of multiple intelligences.

Also a number of the emotalerts really appeared to me what you would derive from a combination of education, experience and common sense. But then I am now 70, have fortunate to been educated at Cambridge and the London Business School and 25 years of venture capital have given me unbelievable insights into human behaviour. On the other hand Naylor does wear his heart on his sleeve, his writing is honest and a young person reading this book would pick up some useful tips about life.