Joe argues that to triple your intelligence you have to stop treating intelligence as purely intellectual. There’s the brilliant person who alienates everyone, and the genius stuck on the couch playing video games — limited not by intellect but by emotional and nervous-system capacity. In AOA’s framing, intelligence lives in three places: head, heart, and gut.
“If you start thinking about intelligence not just as intellectual intelligence, but you also think about it as emotional intelligence and nervous system intelligence, then you’re going to have a whole bunch of new levers to pull.”
The three intelligences interact, so working on one improves the others. Most people in our society operate almost entirely from the head, which means simply gaining access to the heart and gut roughly triples what’s available to them.
“Just having access to your emotional intelligence and your nervous system intelligence immediately triples your intelligence.”
There’s even a somatic shortcut: we have neural nets in the head, heart, and gut, and simply placing your attention in one of them lets you speak from a different intelligence. Ask the same question while resting attention in the head versus the heart and the answer changes.
Related Concepts
- Intellect, emotion, and nervous system are three interacting systems
- Cultivating all intelligences creates clarity
- Intelligence is gated by the emotions you won’t feel
- Intelligence and self-awareness must go together
- For most people, crack the intellectual trap first
- The body lies just as much as the mind
- Intuition sees what the logical mind cannot