TOMATO WISDOM

For reasons I’m not going into, I did an emotional intelligence test the other day. It just involved reading facial expressions and selecting which emotion they were displaying.

I scored 16/20, which is apparently, above average. I missed compassion, interest, shame, and disgust though, interpreting those faces as I did as happiness, surprise, fear, and pain, respectively.

Let’s not overanalyse. It was only a very simple test, and not in-depth in any way. I’m just fascinated by the idea of social situations where we can use our emotional intelligence, just as we use our other intelligences to solve problems every day.

What it didn’t cover of course, was what to do. How to spot anger is one thing, especially when objects aren’t flying at your head and a person is shouting in your direction. My guess is that analysing their eyes, their downward head tilt, and their tense-lipped grimace like a computer, and then explaining to them that they’re angry... won’t help a great deal.

What would be great would be a test where your reactions to emotions are measured! An Emotional Wisdom Test if you will, rather than an intelligence quiz. My friend Graham says that ‘knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is not putting one in a fruit salad.’ Indeed.

But it’s hard to test that stuff isn’t it, because every one of the trillion, billion permutations of people and situations is different! We’re all tomatoes, and we’re all struggling along in our own bowls of fruit, all the time.

I want to be better at this. When someone is upset, my brain picks it up (well, 16/20 times anyway) but I’m not always clever enough to know how to react. So it must look like I haven’t detected it at all! When someone is joyously happy, it’s a bit easier, but even then, I’m so rarely like that myself, I have to remind myself how to be a child almost, or I run the risk of being a deflator, a squisher, a joy-killer.

Compassion, I missed. But for me it comes through words and time, hugs and cups of tea, not pictures. Interest I think I miss from disbelief sometimes, as, even now I find it tough to believe that a person would be interested in me. Shame and disgust are so similar, it’s no wonder I didn’t identify those two. If you’re interested, disgust comes with a nose-wrinkle; shame is all about the eyes.

So, how do we bolster our empathy, our EQ, and our e-wisdom? How do we get better at knowing what to do with tomatoes and fruit bowls? Practice and kindness, I guess. And for me, at least for me, the lack of worry about whether or not I’m overanalysing everything.

I suppose maybe we need to be honest as well as letting the silence do some work. I don’t often hear myself say things like: ‘When you said that, it really hurt my feelings’ or ‘That was really lovely’ or ‘Next time would you mind doing it this way?’ - these are tricky for British people, these vulnerabilities. But I’m not entirely sure I’m going to learn without some candour. In fact I’m more likely to write about it and then furiously delete the blog post.

And I know for a fact, I can be a better tomato than that.