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#158 Beyond Smart - Three Types of Intelligence We All Need


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Intelligence isn’t just something we measure with IQ tests or celebrate in school—it goes beyond intellect into the wisdom we gain from our emotions and our bodies.


Our society tends to focus on intellectual intelligence without recognizing the importance of emotional and somatic intelligence. That’s why so many intellectually brilliant people can solve complex problems, but struggle to recognize when they’re overwhelmed or when their boundaries are being crossed.


In this episode, we explore these three types of intelligence, the differences you may see in your life if you gave them equal attention, and practical ways to start developing them. The goal isn't to be less intellectually capable, but to find balance and access all of the wisdom available to us. Because becoming your favorite you means becoming wise in every way a human can be.


Since you’re ready to become your favorite version of you, book a consult to learn more about working with me as your coach.


"Imagine teaching kids not just to be smart, but to be emotionally aware and somatically connected. Teaching them to notice when their body is telling them they need a break or when their emotions are giving them information about a situation.”

What you'll learn in this episode:

  • Why overvaluing intellectual intelligence can lead to burnout and disconnection

  • How paying attention to your emotions helps you make better decisions and respond with intention

  • How somatic intelligence allows you to access the powerful guidance your body offers

  • Practical ways to begin developing all three types of intelligence in your daily life


"That's what this work and life is all about. Not perfection, but a willingness. Willingness to pay attention to all the ways we can be smart. Willingness to value emotional and somatic wisdom alongside intellectual achievement. Willingness to allow yourself to be more human and to have access to all of the information available to us.”

Mentioned in this episode:


Be sure to sign up for a consult to see if coaching with me is the right fit for you. Join me on a powerful journey to become your favorite you.


Listen to the full episode:


Read the full episode transcript

Hey, this is Melissa Parsons, and you are listening to the Your Favorite You Podcast. I'm a certified life coach with an advanced certification in deep dive coaching. The purpose of this podcast is to help brilliant women like you with beautiful brains create the life you've been dreaming of with intentions. My goal is to help you find your favorite version of you by teaching you how to treat yourself as your own best friend.


If this sounds incredible to you and you want practical tips on changing up how you treat yourself, then you're in the right place. Just so you know, I'm a huge fan of using all of the words available to me in the English language, so please proceed with caution if young ears are around.


Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Your Favorite You.

I'm still Melissa Persons, and once again, I'm so grateful that you are here with me today listening to the podcast. I've been thinking a lot lately about intelligence. Not just the kind we measure with IQ tests or celebrate in school, but all the different ways we can be smart.

And I've realized something that's both humbling and exciting. I've spent 52 and a half years developing my intellectual intelligence. I've spent the past eight years deliberately working on my emotional intelligence.

And I'm just now at 52 and a half getting started on something called somatic intelligence. So my body's intelligence. Today, I want to talk about these three types of intelligence and what might happen if we gave them equal attention.

Because here's what I'm seeing. We are raising a generation and we are a generation of intellectually brilliant people who can solve complex problems, but we have difficulty recognizing when we're overwhelmed.

We're creating careers out of our intellectual gifts while ignoring what our bodies and our emotions are trying to tell us. And I would love it if we could change that. So let's start with the intelligence that we tend to worship.

It is the intellectual intelligence, the kind we're all familiar with. From the moment our kids can talk, we focus on developing their minds. We read to them, we teach them their numbers, we try to get them into the best schools, we celebrate their good grades, and we worry about their test scores.

Don't get me wrong, intellectual intelligence is important to me. It helped me become a doctor. It helped me build a coaching practice. It helps me help my clients solve their problems. It's probably helped you excel in your career and in your life too.

But somewhere along the way, we started acting like this was the only intelligence that mattered. Like if you could think your way through your problems, you were set for life. Here's what I see with my clients and what I experience myself for decades.

My clients come to me intellectually brilliant. They can analyze complex situations. They can solve problems at work. They can manage multiple projects, but they're letting their emotions run the show without much intentionality.

They know they should set boundaries, but they can't figure out why they keep saying yes to everything. They understand the concept of self-care, but they feel guilty every time they try to practice it.

They can give perfect advice to friends, but can't figure out why they're so hard on themselves. They have a lot of intellectual knowledge, but compared to their intellectual knowledge, very little emotional intelligence to implement it.

And I get it because I lived this for decades. I could diagnose complex medical conditions, but I couldn't recognize when I was burning out. I coached clients through many emotional breakthroughs, but I ignored my own stress signals.

Emotional intelligence is the one that we're learning to value. It's not just about being good with feelings. It's the ability to recognize, understand, and manage your own emotions and to recognize and respond appropriately to other people's emotions. It's knowing the difference between feeling disappointed and feeling devastated. It's recognizing when your anger is actually grief in disguise or fear in disguise. It's understanding that your anxiety about a work presentation could actually just be excitement.

It's learning to feel your feelings without being overwhelmed by them. For me, developing emotional intelligence really started about eight years ago when I began my own coaching work. I had to learn that emotions weren't actually problems to solve. They were simply information to pay attention to. I had to practice noticing what I was feeling instead of immediately jumping to what I was thinking about what I was feeling. I had to learn that emotions have wisdom and that they're not just an inconvenience.

My clients are, of course, at all different stages of this journey. Some are just learning to name their emotions beyond fine or stressed. Others are working on feeling their feelings without immediately trying to change or fix them.

Here's what's beautiful. Once they start developing emotional intelligence, everything changes. They make better decisions because they're not just thinking their way through choices. They're also feeling into what feels right.

They have better relationships because they can recognize and communicate their own emotional needs. They tend to be less reactive because they start to understand what's driving their responses. And this is where I start getting excited because I start to imagine what the world might look like if we gave emotional intelligence equal time with intellectual intelligence.

Imagining leaders who could recognize when they're making decisions from fear instead of from love. Imagining parents who could model emotional regulation instead of just demanding it from their kids. Imagining a generation that could feel their feelings without being overwhelmed by them.


And here's the third type of intelligence that I feel we've been ignoring and I know I've been ignoring, and that is somatic intelligence. This is your body's wisdom, your body's ability to sense, feel, and know things that your mind hasn't figured out yet. I'm just discovering this myself through reading a book called Somatic Internal Family Systems Therapy by Susan McConnell. And I'm realizing that I've actually been seeking this type of intelligence for years without really knowing it. All the yoga that I've been doing, the fascial release massage therapy, the way I've been learning to give my body what it needs through movement, whether that be walking, dancing, lifting weights.

This has all been me unconsciously, or I guess subconsciously, seeking somatic intelligence. For most of my life, I treated my body like it was a vehicle for my brain, something to carry my intelligence around.  And when it gave me signals, like fatigue or tension or that gut feeling about a decision, I either ignored the signals or I tried to think my way around them. I tried to intellectualize them. Your body is constantly giving you information. That tightness in your chest when someone crosses a boundary. That sense of expansion when you're doing something aligned with your values. That gut feeling that something's off even when you can't articulate why.

As I'm developing more awareness around somatic intelligence, I'm noticing how much my body has been trying to tell me over the past several decades while I've been trying to ignore it. All of those headaches, those years of headaches when I was overwhelmed, the way that my shoulders would creep up to my ears and I would wear them as earrings during stressful periods, the way certain people or situations would make my stomach clench, the way that traveling or doing something new affects my gut. My body knew things that my brain hadn't yet figured out, but I had been so focused on intellectual solutions that I completely missed the wisdom that was right there in my body, in my nervous system.

Most of my clients have been rewarded for ignoring their bodies for years in pursuit of intellectual achievement. They've learned to push through fatigue, ignore their hunger cues, override their need for rest, and dismiss physical comfort as irrelevant. That full bladder, that feeling that you need to find the bathroom, dismiss it, go see the next person, and it'll be there when you're done. When they start paying attention to their somatic intelligence, they discover this whole other source of information about what they need, about what feels right, and about what's actually sustainable for them.

So what might happen if we gave equal attention to each of these three types of intelligence? And I'm sure that there are more that are yet to be discovered. But what if we valued emotional and somatic wisdom as much as we valued intellectual achievements?

Imagine making decisions, not just with your mind, but also checking in with your emotions and your body. So questioning, what do I think about this opportunity? How do I feel about it? What does my body tell me when I imagine saying yes?

Imagine teaching kids not just to be smart, but to be emotionally aware and somatically connected. Teaching them to notice when their body is telling them they need a break or when their emotions are giving them information about a situation.

I just actually was talking to Owen about this yesterday, and he said he was supposed to go out after going to one of the OSU games with his buddies, and he just had a gut feeling about one of the kids that was with him and didn't really want to hang out with this dude. And then later come to find out that this kiddo got in trouble at one of the places where they were hanging out and started a fight. And I was just so proud of him for listening to his gut and for following that intuition. Because I told him, like I told him, so many people plow through that and just go with the flow and go out. And, you know, then they deal with the consequences later. I digress. So I don't think we need to choose between these intelligences.

The goal isn't to become less intellectually capable. It's to try to become a little bit more balanced, to have access to all of the wisdom available to us. So when I'm coaching now, I'm not just thinking about what might help my client. I'm also paying attention to what I'm feeling in response to their story and what my body is telling me about the energy. All three types of intelligence are working together to help me be more effective.

And I ask them to do that too. I asked them to think about it. I asked them to feel into it, feel their emotions about it. And then I asked them to check in. What does their body say? Is it a yes or is it a no?

Imagine what this could do for the next generation. Instead of raising kids who are brilliant but burnt out, emotionally disconnected and living in their heads, we could raise humans who are intellectually capable, emotionally intelligent, and somatically wise. It sounds amazing to me.


So let me give you some practical ways to start developing all three types of intelligence. For intellectual intelligence, you probably can just keep doing what you're doing, keep reading, keep learning, keep growing, but maybe start getting curious about the other intelligences too.

For emotional intelligence, start by simply naming what you're feeling throughout the day. Not just good or bad or stressed, but the actual emotion. So are you disappointed? Are you excited, overwhelmed, curious, frustrated, hopeful?

There's a million emotions. You can Google a list of them. There's over 100. Practice feeling your feelings without immediately trying to fix them or figure out what to do about them, taking action. Just notice, oh, I'm kind of feeling anxious right now. How interesting. Pay attention to your emotional responses to decisions. How do you feel when you imagine saying yes to something versus no? Your emotion often knows things that your logic hasn't caught up to yet.

And for somatic intelligence, this is where I'm learning right alongside you. But here's what I'm experimenting with. Start checking in with your body throughout the day. Where might you be holding tension?

What does your posture tell you about how you're feeling? What happens in your body when you think about different choices? Pay attention to your gut feelings, literally. That tightness in your stomach, that sense of expansion in your chest, that feeling of your shoulders relaxing, your body is constantly giving you feedback.

And your body has answers for you that you will notice when you ask. Something that is a yes often feels warm, expansive, and spacious. And something that is a no to your body will feel cold and contracted in your body.

Movement can be a gateway to somatic intelligence, whether it's yoga, walking, dancing, lifting weights. Notice how different types of movement affect not just your body, but your emotional and mental state too.

Before making your next decision, whether it's big or small, check in with all three intelligences. What does your mind think? What are your emotions telling you? What does your body sense? You might be surprised by how much more information you have access to.

And if you have kids that you're wanting to learn about this, the way to shift this is the same way we try to shift anything with our kiddos. We go first. We lead by example. We become willing to make mistakes and not get it right the first time. And then we try again if we need to. Instead of just asking them about their grades or their test scores, start asking them about their feelings and their body wisdom too. So what did you notice in your body during that presentation? How did it feel when your friend said that to you? What did you notice in your body that told you that you shouldn't go out with these guys after the game?


But this isn't just about parenting. When you start developing these three types of intelligence, you model a different way of being human for everyone around you. So your colleagues, your friends, your family, they get to see what it looks like to be someone who values emotional and somatic wisdom right alongside intellectual wisdom.


And here's what I want you to know. You do not have to have this figured out to start. I'm 52 and a half and I'm just beginning to understand my somatic intelligence. There's really no timeline for this work, certainly no grade that you need to achieve.

It is a lifelong journey of becoming more and more aware and more and more connected to all the wisdom that you carry. I certainly do not have this figured out, not even close, but I'm proud of myself for coming to this realization and being willing to go first in developing this so that I can help my current and my future clients.

Because that's what this work and life is all about. Not perfection, but a willingness. Willingness to pay attention to all the ways we can be smart. Willingness to value emotional and somatic wisdom alongside intellectual achievement.

Willingness to allow yourself to be more human and to have access to all of the information available to us. So this week, I invite you to start paying attention to all these different types of intelligence.

Notice what your mind knows, what your emotions tell you, and what your body senses. You might discover some wisdom you didn't even know you had because becoming a favorite version of you isn't just about getting smarter.

It's about becoming wise in all the ways a human can be wise. Okay, my friends, thank you so much for listening. And of course, I'll be here next week to talk at you. Have a great week.


Hey, before you go, I want to tell you about something special I'm doing that I think you're going to love. On Tuesday, September 30th at 7 p.m. Eastern, I'm hosting a free workshop called Why Smart Women Stay Stuck and the one ship that's set you free. If you've been listening to this podcast, you know that I work with growing accomplished women who have achieved everything they thought they wanted, but still feel stuck in one way or another. This workshop is for you if you're tired of overthinking every decision, if you're exhausted from seeking everyone else's approval, or if you know you're capable of more but can't figure out what more even looks like.


I'm going to share the one shift that changes everything, how to move from external authority to internal authority, and I'll tell you exactly what that looks like and how to make it happen in your own life.  Here's what makes this even better. Just for signing up, you'll be getting a 25-question assessment called Am I Giving My Power Away? That helps you identify exactly where you've been handing your authority over to others.


And if you show up live and engage with me during the workshop, you'll be getting two additional bonuses. My permission slips for smart women, a collection of 10 beautifully written permission slips you can save to your phone for daily reminders that you don't need anyone else's permission to want what you want.


Plus, you'll get my five-minute internal authority check-in. It's an audio to help point you back to your own intuition. The women who come to these workshops tell me that they get massive clarity just from the hour we spend together.


Some say it really helps them make sense of why they're doing what they've been doing, and it's completely free. Go to melissaparsonscoaching.com/workshop to save your spot. That's melissaparsonscoaching.com/workshop.


Tuesday, September 30th at 7 p.m. Eastern. Stop trying to think your way out of being stuck and start trusting yourself instead. I'll see you there.


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