When we’re in an emotional situation, we can be “flooded” and unable to think clearly. We get “hijacked.” How do you ask for a raise? You ask for a raise. And it can really get painful to be hung up that way.

“It grieves me so to see you in such pain,” she continues in song. “I wish there was something I could do to make you smile again.”

He says he appreciates that, “and would you please explain about 50 ways?”

Slip out back, Jack Make a new plan, Stan You don’t need to be coy, Roy Just listen to me.

Hop on bus, Gus You don’t need to discuss much Just drop off key, Lee And get yourself free.

And then she has a good idea. “Why don’t we just sleep on it tonight,” she says, and then she kisses him, and he “realized she probably was right … there must be 50 ways to leave your lover.”

Smart girl! She didn’t have a PROBLEM figuring out how to get what she wanted. Emotions motivate us. We will sit on fence until pain gets too bad in one direction, or expected pleasure too great in other direction.

And when we get feelings that motivate us, we discover there must be 50 ways to …

As poet said, “Kisses are a better fate than wisdom.” Emotions are our guides. That’s what Emotional Intelligence is all about.

Let’s just say here it’s another good reason to get rid of prejudice, but then we didn’t need another good reason to get rid of prejudice, did we?

Thinking and acting are, of course, two different things, but, as usual, we do not fool our bodies. Look at that physical reaction. An editorial in Nature Neuroscience quickly adds that while “the study links certain brain activity with implicit bias, it says nothing about what causes that bias or how bias affects behavior towards people of other races.”

However, it’s very clear how it affects person with feelings. Those with low bias, did not have a drop in cognitive functioning.

Lead researcher Jennifer Richeson, Dartmouth, concluded that in today’s modern multicultural world, “being biased has negative consequences for us.”

A broader application is to note what it does to us when we are generating negative feelings. If you are reacting this way, it’s going to lower your cognitive functioning. Which is sort of what “work” is all about. You have to be able to think. We return to tenets of coaching – find your passion. Find work you love, you’ll do better at it. Make choices. If you dislike something you have two alternatives: remove yourself from situation, or learn to manage your emotions in regards to it. Prejudice, for instance, is learned. What’s learned, can be unlearned.

And corollary to this is that when we dwell in rancor, hatred and prejudice, it may or may not damage other, but it definitely damages us. Bias slows us down, and anger kills us … whether suppressed or expressed. If we could all just learn to get along, within ourselves, and between one another … and that’s what Emotional Intelligence is all about.

It seems fitting to end with these words from Doc Childre and Howard Martin, The HeartMath Solution: “The emotional frontier is truly next frontier to conquer in human understanding. The opportunity we face now, even before that frontier is fully explored and settled, is to develop our emotional potential and accelerate rather dramatically into a new state of being.”