by MAUD NORDWALD POLLOCK

In business "Emotional Intelligence" can matter more than IQ, says Daniel Goleman author of the best-selling book by the same name. A corporate household of negative feelings lead to loss in business. The success quotient of a firm is based on the level of emotional intelligence of management and coworkers. Feeling bound individuals make poorer decisions, create conflict and tension, are unable to cooperate.

Like animals in a jungle, feelings can be uncontrollable and dangerous. They can unexpectedly jump out of the underbrush of our unconscious attacking mercilessly. Although a company cannot always be compared to a jungle, nevertheless the emotional outbreaks of some superiors could be likened to the attack of a wild animal. Emotional scapegoats are indispensable when emotions run amok. Someone, who keeps others in fear, is actually someone who is in fear. Fear can make a "yes" person out of an otherwise intelligent individual. Although we think that we leave our personal feelings at home when we go to work, we bring them with us, disguised, always ready and waiting to confront us in our work related interactions. Feelings have a tendency to be swept under a rug at higher levels of management, the reason is that most people have never studied their feeling per se. For eight years I have been teaching the high art of managing ones own feelings.

Feelings need to be taken seriously, because the working atmosphere a company reflects, starts at the top. If trust and goodness is prevalent and there is respect and honesty these attributes will filter down and proliferate. Trusting that someone knows, is trusting that we know enough to trust. As a Human Potentials Consultant I have learned over the years that it does not matter how rich, successful or intelligent people are, they are still governed by their feelings. My experience in working with feelings has shown me that the themes that were established in childhood, unless broken, are perused life long, whether someone is seeking recognition, money or power. Positive reinforcement or power struggles and manipulative games played at the executive levels are mostly duplicates of the reinforcements or power struggles confronted and programmed, in our childhood, through interaction with parents or persons of authority.

The work place is the second most important place, after the home, to learn and grow through human interaction. Conflicts we experience at the work place reflects the unresolved conflict within us. We create our own lessons. We advance when we stop seeing ourselves as victims. Faulting others or regarding a co-worker as stupid, indicates that we haven't understood, that opportunity for self growth requires that we attract exactly the person we need, to make that growth possible. We need to confront a mirror to look at our stuff. The other, plays the role of mirror, facing us with our unresolved feelings of disempowerment, fear, guilt or anger, or our courage, compassion and humility. The most irritating person is our best friend when it comes to helping us grow.

Feelings are not something spongy and diffuse, they can be recognized. The foremost thing, however, is to be able to acknowledge our feelings and allow ourselves to feel them. Not by suffering through them, but by looking at them. This is not always easy, perhaps these have been numbed for a long time. Feelings that get suppressed become stress, when we run away from them we try to cover them up with dependencies like Alcohol, medications, workaholism, etc.

To help orient someone in the feeling jungle I created a topography of Feelings. These are categorized according to intensity as follows: Helplessness, Pain/Sorrow, Fear, Guilt, Obsessive Wanting, Anger and finally Arrogance. An accumulation of these feelings, in time, creates the problems mentioned before. These feelings are not floating free in space, they amass and if they prevail long enough they may even lock themselves in the physical body, causing disease. We use language metaphorically to express unresolved and collected feelings: Pain in the neck, kick in the gut, raised my blood pressure, gave me a heart attack, broke my heart and so on.

Before Feelings get locked in the body as sick-making entities, they are found in the subtler energy system, the aura of a person. Discussing auras in Manager courses may seem daring. Today's exposure by the media and some general open mindedness makes premises that were thought strictly esoteric, acceptable. Researched and integration into mainstream health care of "hands on" healing methods like Therapeutic Touch or Reiki makes their phenomenal aspects become everyday events. Research work of scientists like Dr. Valery Hunt formerly with University of California and others, have validated the subtler energy bodies that surround the physical body measuring these with special instruments. The skin is not the boundary of a person's body, we have subtler energy fields that extend far beyond it. My knowledge of this realty is based on 23 years of experience.

If negative feelings don't get dissolved, they accumulate becoming denser and sooner or later they force the body to signal their presence. A heart attack for example is potentially present long before the experience takes place. Most business people are champions in their ability to overlook the signals the body is giving. When nothing else works the organism finally takes action. It is impossible to deny a heart attack when someone lies helplessly in the hospital. Now at last they are forced to confront and experience all feelings they denied before, their fears, pain, anger, etc.

The purpose of my workshops is to teach how to master dissolving these energy loaded feelings to prevent accidents on the "Feeling-Highway" as Austrian journalist and future trainer Christoph Santner calls it. One of the major principals to learn is how to stop being victims of our feelings. By using a short exercise, we get surprising results. When pent up swallowed anger at the superior is dealt with, open discussions become possible. The stressful conflict laden corporate conferences become harmonious. Are we powerful? You bet! Much more than we thought. Did you know, that just by changing our attitude and knowing how to manage our energy, we can affect a whole group? We can.! We have experienced this many times, only in most cases it is represented by negative events. Riots or ganging up on someone like the lynching's of old, needed only a catalyst to get the group going. At the basis of this type of event is the manipulation of feelings of fear and anger. Knowing what to do, allows us to turn things around so they work positively.

For years in the course of many workshops, I have developed and refined a new tool, I call it  "Feeling Dissolve"©. How do we recognize a feeling? What does it do? It makes us think subjectively instead of being objective. Feelings of the seven categories I mentioned before consume our energy. It cost us energy to keep these feelings caged like wild animals, under control. Once we dissolve energy consuming feelings we experience a burst of energy. We become valiant, insightful and strong. We become detached in clarity, accepting and truly objective. Eventually a profound harmony flourishes inside us.

Most of the time we don't even know that feelings are the cause of our problem. Take the case of lawyer R, a participant in a workshop in Zurich, Switzerland. His complaint was that his assistant never could do anything right. After working through several feeling layers, he discovered that he could not allow his assistant to do anything right, because if he did, he might endanger R's position. R was afraid of not being good enough. Once lawyer R recognized this, he was able to enable his assistant to do his best and see this as a positive reflection of his own capabilities, instead of a threat. The profound nature of my work makes it essential that people participate from personal choice. A superior who orders a co-worker to the workshop is saying: "The way you are is not good enough. You need to change." Instead of motivating change this unspoken message only creates resistance, resentment and fear.

If we want to manage our feelings, this is what we do. First we identify them. Is it? : Hopelessness? Pain (emotional)? Fear? Guilt? Desire? Anger or arrogance? Now we locate it in our body, i.e., the stomach, the chest, the neck, etc. Then we use our creative imagination, a very important component. We give the feelings a form. The first image that comes to mind. A shape, which has size, may have a color, quality like thick, thin or denseness. It may be a container that has a content, like a bottle, a pot with a liquid in it, etc. Since by nature we avoid feeling feelings, giving a feeling a context is paying attention to it. Then it becomes tangible. Now something can be done about it. Using the exhaling breath or your hand to sweep the energy out of the place where the feeling is found. Breathing out as you sweep out, until the image that you have been observing right along, has completely disappeared. The now emptied space is filled with light, this can be like white light from a floodlight. If this cannot happen, then there is still part of that feeling unresolved. Or another feeling came up behind it, which also needs to be dissolved. Another sign that you have dissolved your feeling, is a sense of relief, a deep sigh, being able to breathe better, more deeply. As a last validation, check your attitude about the person or situation that triggered the feeling in the first place. Your attitude should be one of detachment, indifference, the situation seems to become unimportant. Try it and you will see. It works! Keep it up and it will work for you at work and with the family. With friends and foes alike. Using  "Feeling Dissolve"© should be like breathing, natural and automatic. To reach that state we need to practice. The result is that instead of life or work being a drag, they become interesting and joy filled.

Should you be interested in learning to "Feeling Dissolve"© in my MANAGING FEELINGS workshop. You can contact me by calling 631-728 4140

or send Email to MNP-LOVE-LIGHT-WISDOM@worldnet.att.net