by Dr. Guy Higashi

“Get hold of your emotions!” I think I am a pretty relational guy. In other words, I think I’m pretty good when it comes to meeting people for the first time or holding a conversation. When in a business setting, I take the time to discover what people like or need. Yet, as a Japanese American who spent most of his adolescent years in Hawaii (I’m 62), I’m caricatured as being “Japanese,” meaning keep emotions in check. 

I grew up hearing my parents chide, “Don’t bring shame on your family” or to “speak only when spoken to” or “don’t rock the boat” and finally, “the tallest nail gets hammered down.” Some might say that this is yellow theology. By yellow theology, I mean that our attitudes and behaviors are shaped by our beliefs. 

In his article “Christ for Asia: Yellow Theology for the East” professor of Christian Studies at Seinan Gakuin University in Fukuoka, Japan, Dickson Kazuo Yagi, notes:

Theology is the meeting point of people problems and gospel answers. The gospel of Jesus Christ does not change from culture to culture. But theology does. Theology gives different answers to different cultures not because the gospel is unstable, but because cultures ask different questions or ask the questions in different contexts...Asian peoples grounded in a world so alien to the whites and blacks of the West require a yellow theology true to biblical faith that offers authentic gospel answers to their distinctive people problems...In cultures like Japan, which have sometimes been described as "shame cultures," public exposure and exclusion are still important sanctions for regulating social behavior. 

A snapshot of a Japanese person is someone that “bows low,” a portrait of a humble person who wears a “white belt” around his or her Judo gi (rather than parading around with a black belt), who giggles rather than laughs out loud, and is extremely polite. David Livermore, in Cultural Intelligence: Improving Your CQ to Engage Our Multicultural World, would call these “cultural artifacts, values and assumptions” (82) which reside below the surface. Picture an iceberg. 

The visible tip of the iceberg is “culture” (art, clothing, food, money, customs, gestures, etc.) However, there is a lot of ice below the waterline. What is below the water are “cultural values and assumptions (unconscious, take for granted beliefs, perceptions, feelings or sayings), things that shape yellow theology and affect our emotions. In this setting, emotional and cultural background “controlling your emotions” is “getting hold of your emotions.”

In an antithetical way, “getting hold of your emotions” is gaining an understanding of your emotions and considering how your emotions (or the emotions of others) affect your personal, public, and work-related relationships. Daniel Goldman in Working with Emotional Intelligence (5) posits that, 

“The rules at work are changing…these rules have little to do with what we were told was important in school: academic abilities are irrelevant…(nor) technical know-how to do our jobs…it focuses instead on our personal qualities, such as initiative and empathy, adaptability and persuasiveness.” 

It is not about being “nice” or “letting it all hang out” (emotionally). It is more about enabling people to work together towards a common good. It is about the “emotional” part of our brain that neuroscience tells us “learns” differently than our “thinking” part of our brain.

Enter Emotional Intelligence or EI. EI is the capacity to be aware of, control, and express one's emotions. Much of the focus is on the ability to handle interpersonal relationships fairly and empathetically. This is becoming one of the working world's greatest assets.

Why is Emotional Intelligence Important? 

People are desperately longing for connection, empathy, and communication. Today major corporations are trying to promote emotional intelligence (EI) for their employees through staff development, performance evaluations, and hiring practices. EI also helps us with the development of social skills like empathy, communication, influence, leadership, collaboration, leveraging diversity, and team orientation.

EI in the Digital World

We live in a world filled with technological advancements and digital communication- our mobile devices are powerful, personal computers, digital cameras, email, phones, word processors, music player devices and many more. More and more of our attention and personal interaction are on our cellphones and focused on a small screen. People no longer have eye contact or face-to-face conversations. 

Many churches today redeem technology and utilize social media, technology, and digital platforms to reach their community. It is not surprising to visit a church and watch the “big screen” even though the pastor is right there in front of you. The digital age is a screen-oriented society. This is a large part of how the world communicates with one another today. I recently saw a three-year-old infant scrolling through the screen on her parent’s cellphone. She is a “digital native,” this is the only world she knows.

So is all of this bad? No, of course not! There are opportunities, to communicate with people, but it will take some heavy lifting. This what Craig Detweiler and Barry Taylor write in A Matrix of Meaning: Finding God in Pop Culture,

“We’re living in a post-national, post-rational, post-literal, post-scientific, post-technological, post-sexual, post-racial, post-human, post-traumatic, post-therapeutic, post-ethical, post-institutional, and post-Christian era.” What does this mean?  In the post-literal arena, Oscar Wilde wrote, “I can believe anything, provided that it is incredible” (37). 

Our image and screen-driven pop culture is becoming post-literal people. So when Detweiler and Taylor talk about the post-human world, movies, television, video games, etc re-imagine a world with robotics, cyber pets, and more so human activities and interactions are holographic and synthesized. This means having people get face to face and in touch with their emotions is a real challenge.

Enter EI

Emotional Intelligence is essential to many basic functions of society, so why isn't it something taught in our school system? In the meta-analysis of current education, the students with EI programs integrated the anti-social behavior went down by 10%, Pro-social behavior went up by 10% and academic achievement scores were up 11%.

Regardless of industry, location, or even language, emotional intelligence is vital to our experience with others. As Christians, we’re all called to be in ministry, regardless of whether that’s full-time or not. To communicate the Gospel and the love of Christ, we need to be emotionally intelligent. Our abilities for our own self-awareness, self-management, empathy, and relationship create how people experience us, and if we are people that aren’t getting to the final step of building relationships, we’ll fail to share the Gospel. After all, Goleman says that the relationship aspect of emotional intelligence is “putting that all together in skilled relationship.”

Resources

We’ve created a free downloadable PDF to explore the article deeper. It contains discussion questions about the topic in general terms that will give you a jumping-off point for beginning a conversation.

The second page contains a way to see the topic from a biblical perspective.

And finally, to go deeper into the subject, we have chosen a few curated resources to explore from other authors’ and thinkers’ research or perspectives.

Read. Engage. Enjoy!

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Depending on how a gem is held, light refracts differently. At B+PC we engage in Pop Culture topics to see ideas from a new angle, to bring us to a deeper understanding. And like Pastor Shane Willard notes, we want “…Jesus to get bigger, the cross to get clearer, the Resurrection to be central…” Instead of approaching a topic from “I don’t want to be wrong,“ we strive for the alternative “I want to expand my perspective.” 

So, we invite you to engage with us here. What piqued your curiosity to dig deeper? What line inspired you to action? What idea made you ask, “Hmmm?” Let’s join with our community to wrestle with our thoughts in love in the Comment Section! See you there!