These are simple exercises that can work to increase your emotional and physical intelligence.
Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence is having the ability to respond in a way that is emotionally appropriate. We all have a comfort range which contains our most common and habitual responses. Emotional intelligence includes the ability to be emotionally flexible so we don’t always have to think, feel and act the way we always think, feel and act. When our old patterns are no longer effective, it’s time to make a change.
In order to be flexible and make that change, we need to expand our emotional palette. In the way an artist selects from the full color spectrum while painting, emotional intelligence allows us to respond to all situations life may throw at us by selecting from a full emotional spectrum.
Physical Intelligence
There are several kinds of physical intelligence. Seeing the iMax movie of Michael Jordon is seeing poetry in motion. Highly trained athletes like him have a particular and high degree of physical intelligence including coordination, quick response time, supreme eye-hand coordination, endurance, etc.
My definition of physical intelligence is rather different and is based on the ability to listen to your body. It could be as basic as knowing when you’re hungry or when you’re full. It’s recognizing the gut reaction in response to a decision-making moment. It’s a way to know how you feel emotionally and anticipating an emotional response before responding inappropriately. It’s knowing how to “turn up the volume” on the language of the body to make it easier to hear its voice.
More interesting than that, physical intelligence engages the body to train neural pathways to help you change an inappropriate and ineffective emotional response to an effective response that best serves the moment and your best self.
Integrative Change
Our personality styles determine a default setting for our emotional comfort zone. When we respond according to our personality style, we may react in ways that are not as effective
as we might hope. To increase the comfort zone and respond more effectively involves change. But change is difficult. Why?
There are many answers, including:
we don’t want to
we’re not ready to
we don’t know what else to do
we know what else to do, but
we don’t know how to do it
we keep not changing
and the pattern perpetuates. When change is difficult, a step is missing.
The Missing Step
Learn exercises that translate the emotional range of the different personality styles into simple movement. Brain science explains the neuron pathways that manifest and express our inner states. Recognize your personality type and its pathways that have been over-developed through over-use. Learn how to tame them, and train and strengthen new neural pathways that capture alternative responses that can help us break out of our box. This work facilitates change, helps you find your voice and engage your will because it integrates you — makes you whole, connects you — with your head, your heart, your body and your spirit.
Description of the NeuroPrograms
These programs use an experiential approach to explore the relationship between personality and the body. Personality — including inner thoughts, feelings, and motivations — are translated into simple movement concepts of space, time, and energy.
Neural pathways are the channels through which information travels between the brain and the muscles, nerves and tendons of the body. The thinking and feeling patterns that we engage most often have the most well-developed pathways. If you are a patient person, you have a well-developed neural pathway to tolerate quite a bit before you get upset. If you tend to get angry easily, you have a well-developed neural pathway for anger. If there are qualities you lack, such as confidence or patience, then chances are you lack a well-developed neural pathway for its expression.
When emotional change is difficult, it’s often because there’s not a neural pathway for the desired change.
Developing and training new neural pathways broadens our options, and allows us to find new choices for handling difficult situations and emotions. This process is designed to increase emotional range, enhance mental and emotional flexibility, allow for growth and change, and increase emotional intelligence.
If you are able to walk, sit, and stand, you’ll be able to do this work. This program is often attended by mental health professionals as well as those interested in their own personal development.
Objectives include being able to:
- Acknowledge the relationship between thoughts, feelings, and the body
- Explore ways to translate inner thinking and feeling states into movement
- Experience different personality styles through movement
- Identify physical triggers and develop neuron pathways to aid in the expression of different virtues
- Develop and train physical antidotes (and their neural pathways) to recurrent negative emotional states
- Explore strategies for increasing emotional intelligence
- Find easier ways to access wholeness, balance and joy.
