Syllojism is a bi-weekly, culture, and philosophy challenge podcast on the edge of chaos.
CHALLENGE: Record your feelings and the surrounding context 3x/day for the next week.
This week’s Intrapersonal Intelligence challenge was to record our feelings 3x/day for a week. To help us assess our Intrapersonal intelligence, we brought in Collen Star Koch, founder of Rowan Coaching. Colleen is a friend of a friend who helped me start down the path of leaving the job I hated and doing things that don’t betray my sense of self for a false sense of accomplishment. She’s the tits, and she’s doing a free webinar tonight on The Number 1 Reason Plans Fail.
One thing I wanted to clarify inthe discussion about men and women experiencing emotions differently (12:30): The vast majority of information we have about emotion relies on self-reporting or correlates of emotion. This means that if men *perceive* themselves as not experiencing an emotion, they obviously wouldn’t report it. The fMRI studies which look at brain activity (glucose metabolism), definitely show differences between male and female brains during emotional processing tasks, but it’s difficult to separate cultural and “hard-wired”/genetic/biological differences at every turn. We don’t really know exactly what an emotion is, so we’re all just grasping at the concept here.
Regardless of the intrinsic/extrinsic causes for these differences, we all have to learn to work together, and to do that we need to accept things as they are currently, and work towards new outcomes. The sweeping generalization that men suck at recognizing emotions in themselves and others, and women overinfuse emotion into everthing, are just statistical data and do not reflect individuals or specific instances. What we do with that information is up to us. Just something to keep in mind.
Some more resources from the episode:
Here’s the graph of Arousal and Valence that I referenced at 16:47.
and also a funny set of data that I’ll explain in the bonus content tomorrow.
One more bit of goodness: The book I mentioned that Colleen gave to me on election night in 2016. I recommend this to all my friends who are reevaluating their lives.
SHOWNOTES:
3:55 What a life coach does
4:43 The difference between coaching and therapy
8:09 Gardner’s idea of Intrapersonal Intelligence
10:02 The external evidence of intrapersonal intelligence
12:30 Why men unconsciously spew toxicity into the environment
16:47 The Challenge -Natasha’s graphic representation of emotions
20:03 The brain-body machine shitty ass printer - are you out of ink?
23:19 Colleens tool for transitions
25:59 Brett’s handwritten confessional
29:37 Sharing shame and emotional vulnerability
31:37 Writing/storytelling to understand intrapersonal intelligence
35:01 Emotions are a signal
37:08 Integrating emotions with the “rational” mind
40:25 The working mind vs rational mind
45:32 System-independence
NEXT CHALLENGE:
To assess your Musical Intelligence, compose an original piece of music. You can keep up with challenges in the Discord.
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