All About Mentoring Spring 2011 - SUNY Empire State College

57
Reflections on a Journey of Learning
to Adjust My Blind Spot
Heidi Nightengale, Central New York Center
As a faculty mentor with the
Auburn Unit of the Central New
York Center, one of the studies
that I guide involves investigation into the
work of Daniel Goleman. Goleman made
his theoretical research about emotional
intelligence both groundbreaking within
the academy and accessible to those outside
the academy who grabbed his books off
the shelves of local bookstores and helped
him become a New York Times best-selling
author.
Goleman’s work caught my attention as an
administrator of not-for-profit organizations
in the 1990s, years before I came to
SUNY Empire State College in the mentor
role. Goleman speculated that emotional
intelligence (EQ) far out-predicted the
likelihood of life success at home, in school,
in the community and in the workplace
than its counterpart, the long validated
intelligence quotient (IQ) and its well
established testing methodologies used to
arrive at a static IQ.
At the heart of Goleman’s work was a
series of competencies. I studied them.
I pondered them. I wondered if I had
them. He postulated that personal and
social competencies such as empathy, selfawareness,
self-control, social skills and
motivation were far greater predictors
of happiness and success than the IQ. In
his ground breaking book, Emotional
Intelligence: Why it Can Matter More than
IQ (1995), Goleman details these personal
and social competencies and argues that the
common link between them and emotional
intelligence is the concepts of compassion
and humanity.
The hallmark of these competencies for
me was empathy. Even Goleman admits
that while this is a fluid, developing
and developable competence, he knows
little about how one comes to become
empathetic. Still, it is this competency and
my on-going reflection on it that led to the
work for which I was honored to receive
the Altes Prize for Exemplary Community
Service last year. That is, it was Goleman’s
thinking about empathy that led me to a
movement away from a personal blind spot
I had been hiding.
Early on, I found myself emotionally,
physically and spiritually impacted by
remarkable people, mostly young people,
who came into my life nearly always
through a serendipitous series of events.
Heidi Nightengale (left)
Phone calls from local school administrators
would indicate that a teen and senior at
the high school district was homeless. At
the very least, high school graduation was
at stake, as the adolescent had aged-out of
any intervention from the local department
of social services. Without shelters and
programs for theses girls, my home could
provide a refuge from the streets and could
offer routines and safety to help them
remain in school through high school
graduation and beyond. In an underground
railroad of sorts, the first call from a
frustrated school administrator (someone
who could not get law enforcement, social
services or not-for-profit human service
agencies to respond) prompted that first
sheltering experience. Several more young
girls followed to cross the Finger Lakes
Railroad tracks to my home.
But my blind spot was showing up
emotionally. Why did I want to do this
work Did I house these youths and try to
provide for their emotional, nutritional,
educational and other developmental needs
because of a narcissistic need to receive
accolades Did I simply want to feel good
about myself more than feel connected to
the whole village ideology that in other parts
of world society creates a quiet stepping up
to just take care
As my work continued, I found my answers
following the path of discovering and
exercising my emotional intelligence.
suny empire state college • all about mentoring • issue 39 • spring 2011