- Okay, so how I learned emotional intelligence.
To start it off, I wanna address a question
that a lot of people have, which is,
is it even possible for an autistic person
to learn about emotions and emotional intelligence?
And the answer to that question,
is unambiguously, yes, of course, we can.
So, with that in mind, the first message
that I wanna tell you today is that
there is hope, essentially.
So, if you're on the spectrum and you find
dealing with emotions really really difficult,
my message to you is there is hope,
don't give up, you can improve.
I know what it's like to be in that place
of putting in a ridiculous amount of effort everyday
and feeling like you're making virtually no progress.
I've been there, I was in that place for over 10 years.
So today, I'm gonna share two key turning points
for my journey from bashing my head against the brick wall
everyday, making virtually no progress,
to wow, I finally get this, this makes sense.
Why did nobody tell me it was so easy?
So, as you can probably tell, I'm a little bit excited.
A little bit, I like to understate things.
I'm obviously quite excited about this topic.
It's almost as if I need to go around
making confession people to saying,
like an alcoholic in an meeting or something.
Hi, my name is Paul, my special interest
is emotional intelligence.
I think about it all day everyday.
Think about it, talk about it, read about it,
blog about it, evidently.
I've recently started an online business teaching it.
So, it's a problem and I need help. (laughs)
And maybe you can relate to that level of obsession
in your own special interest.
And the reason I mention that now is because
that level of interest can often get in the way.
So I don't wanna give you the impression
that I've always been good in this area
and at the same time, I don't wanna give you the impression
that I've somehow magically got this all figured out
and I don't have anything left to learn.
Last year, I ran a four-week emotional intelligence course
and I learned so much just by delivering the course.
I mean, I've wrote the course, it was all here already.
But just by interacting with the people in the course
and delivering it, I learned so much from that.
So, it's definitely been a journey
just by the fact that it has been my most special interest
for as long as I can remember.
So, before we go into too much more detail,
I thought I'd give you a quick overview
of three stages that I've identified
with the turning points that I mentioned earlier.
So, yes, I'm an engineer,
yes, I like cracking stuff, let's move one.
So I've broken my journey up into three stages.
So the first one was where I wasn't really making
much progress, that was because I was being a typical
little SP anthropologist trying to study
the little humans around me, just by watching
and figuring out what was going on.
So that wasn't very helpful.
The second stage was where I went from being
an observer to being a participant.
And I learned significantly more in that stage.
And then the third stage was
where I learned how I learn.
And I also learned the reason why it had been
difficult for me in the first place.
So that intellectual knowledge allowed me to focus
on more helpful things.
And that again, correctly accelerated the learning.
So to give you some insight into this first stage,
which I called the observation stage,
I have a memory of when I was about
three years old, in kindergarten.
And what we were doing is, the teacher was
teaching us a song with like actions and things.
And all the kids were doing it, very cute.
So, I was watching the other kids all do the same thing.
And I was thinking, how do they know what to do?
And my attention was focused strongly on
watching them and observing their behavior
and trying to figure out what was going on.
That I missed the fact that they were all
watching the teacher and the teacher was doing
all these actions and they would just copy.
So, that's an example of how I was trying to figure out
behavior by observation, but I was just going down
completely the wrong track.
And everyone else was learning these social skills
and learning how to make friends,
learning how to talk to people and all that kind of stuff.
And I just wasn't getting it.
And I would be asking people, how do you do this?
I would see the people who are really good at it
and I would try and get them to explain it to me,
to teach it to me.
But what I found is that they just didn't know,
at an intellectual level, what they were doing.
It turns out, they were just following their instinct.
And it turns out that's how all the other kids
knew what to do in a social situation
because they would just follow their instincts
and I would follow my instincts and I would end up over here
and they would end up over here.
And somehow, I'd be the odd one out
and I thought there was this information that I've missed
whereas, actually, it was just, everyone followed
their instinct and my instinct happened to be different.
And it seemed like no matter how much I analyze
the situation and tried to figure out what was going on,
and figure out what I was supposed to be doing,
it just didn't actually translate into an increase
of my skill of being able to actually go out and do it.
So that was the observation stage,
where I was trying to figure out what was going on
by looking from the outside.
The next stage is where I manage
to get myself on the inside
and get some first-hang experience.
Now, this happened quite by accident.
Some of you may have seen my other videos
on my Dreadlock story.
This photo on the left is me at the age of 16.
At that time, I didn't have a single friend
outside of school.
The photo on the right was taken at my 17th birthday,
just a couple of months later.
So you can see that there was pretty radical change
to my outward appearance, which my getting dreadlocks.
And what happened was that because
my outside appearance changed,
the way people perceived me radically changed.
All of a sudden, I was no longer seen
as boring and shy and awkward.
And my social life exploded.
Virtually overnight.
I won't go into it too much here
but you can check out some of my other videos
from when I first started this blog
if you wanna hear more about how I was using
that hairstyle as coping strategy.
But the important part for this discussion is that
it brought me from being an observer on the outside
to being thrown in the deep end
and all of the sudden, people were talking to me
and I had to respond.
So I couldn't run away, I had to practice in real life
even if I didn't know the answer,
I didn't have time to sit and think
what would be a good thing to say
theoretically in this situation.
I just had to respond.
So that was an incredibly formative period,
especially for a couple of years.
All of a sudden, I had my very very first
real friendship group outside of school,
I had friends that I would chat to on the phone,
couple of times a week, I had my first girlfriend.
And all of those things meant that I was learning
all these skills first hand that I probably
would've missed out on if I was still
in that observation stage.
So the practice stage is characterized by
not knowing what to do, not knowing the answer,
not thinking about too much, and just trying anyway.
And then using that trial and error to learn for next time.
So that was very helpful, but the next big thing
that really accelerated my learning in this area
was discovering a theoretical framework
so that I could look at behavior and look at
what's happening and actually put it
somewhere useful for me.
Maybe that doesn't make sense, I'll try to explain.
So, I'm a pattern thinker, which means
that I have to put everything that I learn,
has to be learned as part of a pattern.
And I want to describe my brain as like giant filing cabinet
where if I know where something goes
and I put it there, works great.
But if I don't know where this information goes,
then, it just doesn't stick and I can't
really learn anything from that.
So, a lot of people on the autism spectrum
really need to know the why behind what's going on
in order for something to make sense.
And I'm definitely, definitely, one of those people.
So, when people were telling me things like,
you need to make eye contact with people.
Okay, but why?
Why do I need to do that?
You need to say hello to people.
Why do I need to do that?
You need to do this, you can't do that.
All these things, like, why do I have to follow
what everyone else is doing?
Why can't I do it my way?
There are actually really really good answers
to all of those questions.
But I couldn't find any of those answers
until I have the theoretical framework
with which to use to go about
trying to answer those questions.
So this framework that I'm talking about,
it answers questions like, what is an emotion?
Biologically, what is an emotion?
Neurologically, what is an emotion?
How does it work?
How can we measure it?
All of those kind of things that allow me to take
bits and pieces of information and create this theory
of now, I really understand what's going on.
I can see behind the behavior of people
to what is underlying that behavior.
So to give you a sense of what I'm talking about
when I say theoretical framework,
I made a flow chart of emotional feedback
where there's sensory input and automatic reactions
and a conscious control loop that sort of has indirect
control trying to manage the whole thing.
I won't go into exactly how that works now,
hopefully, I'll make some more resources on that later.
It's actually, I devote two lessons
of the four-week emotional intelligence course to that.
So there's quite a lot in there.
Okay, so that's a little bit about my journey.
I'm gonna leave you with two pieces of advise
for how you can improve your own
emotional intelligence skills.
And they're linked to the two turning points
that I was telling you about earlier.
So the first one is practice.
You don't need to know what you're doing
to learn a lot from practice.
The very very first aspect is poker meeting I went to.
I met a man who was telling me
that he used to be a taxi driver.
And he learned how to have small talk
and how to do small talk from hundreds and hundreds
of conversations with his customers as a taxi driver.
You just practice and practice and practice
and eventually, you'll find well this worked,
and this didn't work and by trial and error,
you can significantly improve your skills that way.
The second way which also helped me immensely,
was learning that theoretical framework
and answering those questions of why.
So hopefully, I can help you out with that
as I make more free resources on this video blog
and also my written blog on emotional intelligence
and how emotions work.
Focusing both on the theory behind what's actually going on
and also, how to actually practice it in your life.
I also created a dedicated website
called emotionsexplained.com.au.
You could think of AU for Australia or AU for autism.
And on that, I will be running ones off webinars online,
so anywhere I can dial in from anywhere in the world
to go deeper into some of these topics.
'Cause this is kind of hard to teach these
with a one-way form, you really need to be interactive.
There's also the four-week online emotional intelligence
course which is quite comprehensive.
It's 12 lessons to live at over four weeks via email,
with interactive webinars in between.
So, for everything related to that,
check out emotionsexplained.com.au.
Otherwise, thanks for listening,
thanks for letting me share my passion
for emotional intelligence and yeah,
it'll be fun, good luck on your journey
and I'll see you another time, bye.
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Okay, I love you, bu-bye!