How do you make decisions?
What do you access to allow you to make good decisions? Do you rely primarily on your thoughts, your feelings or your gut instincts? Understanding our three centres of intelligence is a great tool as we consider noticing, detaching and decision making.
What are the three centres of intelligence?
We all have three centres of intelligence that we can access to as we seek to grow in wisdom and decision making, and respond to life in a more balanced and holistic way.
Each of us naturally sits in one of these centres, but we can learn to recruit the other two. I was talking about this recently in a group session I did with a marvellous team. I am reminded about how useful this information is in understanding ourselves and how we can therefore make positive and healthy choices.
Let me explain.
Our head centre: IQ.
This is our thinking function and concerns rational, objective thought. Facts and weighing up the pros and cons are central. We ask questions like – Does this compute? Is there enough research? What do I know to be true? Am I sure? Where am I in this decision?
Our heart centre: EQ or emotional intelligence.
This centre regulates and is concerned primarily with feelings and emotions. Noticing and managing our own emotions, noticing the emotions of others and connecting with empathy operate from this centre. These types of questions are central – What am I feeling? Who am I with and how am I connecting? How aware am I of my own emotions and how well am I able to manage them? How are others perceiving me, and how aware am I of the emotions of those around us?
Our gut centre: GQ, or gut intelligence.
This refers to what we might consider our sixth sense, an instinctive understanding. Our instincts, a gut knowing, is important. We respond physically, express things physically and can also have a tendency to jump in with feet first.
What about you?
Think about yourself – what connects most with how you first and most naturally respond? It can help to consider what is most likely to be said about you by others when you are in the heat of the moment:
Get out of your head!”
You’re too emotional!”
Don’t be so reactive!”
What do we do with this information and why is it useful?
When we understand which centre of intelligence we naturally operate from, we are then in a position to notice where we can tend to get stuck. And that allows us to recruit the other two centres of intelligence so we can make a balanced and more holistic response.
If you are naturally someone who operates from their gut centre, like me, it can be easy to jump in with both feet. We risk not thinking first or paying attention to who else might be involved in the situation. This can lead to impulsive behaviour, or an over-reaction, a tendency to want to fix, sort, control. Instead, we can recruit our cool heads and ask what I know to be true here and to stop and notice the objective reality of the situation. And to notice my own feelings – my warm heart – and the feelings of others involved and how I am connecting with them.
What if we get stuck in our heads?
If we get stuck in our thinking centre, we can become stubborn, fixated on our way of doing this being the best way, very focused on the task without noticing how others are feeling or our connection with them. We need to know all the facts before we can take action, which can cause us to get stuck in analysis paralysis. (Do you cringe in recognition at that? Read this then!)
Recruiting the other two centres allows us instead to notice how we are connecting to other people and open up to them as we notice our own feelings. And our GQ helps us identify what our instincts are telling us, and what action we can take.
And for those dominated by their feelings?
If our tendency is to be dominated by our emotions, living primarily in the heart centre, we can lose perspective very quickly. There can be a lot of fear, especially of loss of connection, or of not being enough. We can get drawn into doing things for others that are not necessarily ours to do.
Instead, we learn to pay attention to our IQ – our calm, objective rational thoughts. We might ask for someone else’s perspective, or remind ourselves to look for what we know to be true here. And our gut instincts help us pay attention to what our body is telling us and what a healthy action is here..
So this week, the encouragement is to notice which of the three centres of intelligence you camp out in most. Pay attention, and see what the other two centres might be telling you.