Lessons from Ghosts: The Benefits of Emotional Self-Awareness and Contemplation

? Steve Whiteford 2021

Consider Scrooge. We all have an internal Scrooge. Some aspect of our values, beliefs, or behavior that is driven by a lack of self-awareness, possibly repressed responses to unresolved events in our lives.

Working with emotional intelligence requires an openness to incremental self-awareness. To acknowledge the visitations of feeling throughout the day. Not dwelling on or obsessing about the cues of sensation or thought, but noticing, experiencing, naming, and deciding to use or convert the feeling because these subtle ghosts bring us the gift of information.

Consider garrulous old Scrooge, who comes home on Christmas Eve cursing and sputtering, annoyed with people wanting charity, more coal, and the brief respite of a holiday to shake off the dredge of productivity.

But something haunts him, distracts him from his habitually bitter and all-pervasive mood. His hallucination of a face on the door knocker reminds him that his former business partner had died this night. He goes up to his bed-chamber, heats some porridge over his fire, and feeling comes knocking, and clanging in the image of his dead partner dragging the chains “he forged in life.” He dismisses it as “humbug,” possibly “an undigested piece of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato.” (Which neuroscience tells us could be correct.) But the feeling persists. Scrooge entertains a conversation with Marley, who warns him he will be visited by three other ghosts throughout the night, the past, the present, and the future. An instructive outline for considering the power of this phantom mood.

It’s likely you know the story. Through the past, he acknowledges events and decisions that have shaped his present and chained him with unexamined and habitual feelings, thoughts, and moods. In the present, he considers the needs, values, and circumstances of others. By imagining the future if he doesn’t change, he experiences the pain of isolation and emptiness, the bitterness of blocks and limitations, the shame of a life shortened by ignorance and want, and his life and death dismissed as insignificant.

These “visitations” wake him up, and although the depth of his realization feels as if it has taken years, he recognizes it happened quickly in a single night. He makes good use of the information. Through self-examination, he is transformed into a kind and loving man.

In our daily experience, the same exploration of emotional self-awareness can take less than a minute:

Getting the kids out the door to school, and navigating the horrors of morning traffic, presents still to buy and wrap, have got you in a foul mood. Cursing other drivers has piqued your righteous anger, and the anxiety of arriving a little late has heightened your energy. You’re sitting at your desk working on a project haunted by pressure and an elusive sense of inadequacy. Although you have good ideas it’s just not coming together. You have a meeting with your manager in a few hours. You’re typing furiously and your shoulders are up to your ears.

Start the clock.

You notice. Noticing creates a gap. One second.

You experience your bodily sensation; shoulders up and tense, shallow breathing, tight jaw, furrowed brow, and the zing of anxiety. Five seconds.

You take note of your self-talk and visualization of the past. “I’m not getting this. It’s not coming together. I’ve never been good at this.” A Technicolor, Widescreen, Blue-ray vision pops into your head of that professor in college who always embarrassed you in class and gave you an unfair C- for the year. Four seconds.

You determine “I’m creating too much pressure about this!” Four Seconds.

You have another Blue-ray flash of walking in this morning, ignoring some associates, being terse with another, and sharply sharing your displeasure about the morning traffic with one more. You spontaneously remember the concept of Emotional Contagion and regret the impact you may have had. You imagine this may be evidence for that mediocre empathy score you got on your Emotional Intelligence 360° Assessment. Your heart breaks just a little.

You quickly realize that if you don’t change your emotional state, you won’t have anything to show by your meeting with your manager. 12 seconds.

You make use of this information. You decide to take a few deep breaths, do some shoulder and neck rolls at your desk, and then walk to the breakroom to get some tea. You resolve to do a drive-by or two on the way back to check in with your teammates; smile a little, and have some fun chat. 20 seconds.

Contemplation Total: 46 seconds.

During your walk to the breakroom, you recognize that self-criticism and a feeling of pressure are often a part of your process. You also recall several successes you have had with your projects at work. This lightens you for the teammate visits.

Total time it took to recognize your feeling, self-prescribe, and take action: five minutes, 46 seconds.

Merry Christmas!

You beat Scrooge’s time record and shifted both your mood and that of your teammates.

*Timing is approximate.