Emotional Intelligence

by Daniel Goleman

WHAT ARE EMOTIONS FOR?

  • “Anyone can become angry —that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way —this is not easy.” – ARISTOTLE, The Nicomachean Ethics
  • Emotional intelligence includes self-control, zeal and persistence, and the ability to motivate oneself.
  • Our emotions guide us in facing predicaments and tasks too important to leave to intellect alone—danger, painful loss, persisting toward a goal despite frustrations, bonding with a mate, building a family.
  • We have two minds, one that thinks and one that feels. The more intense the feeling, the more dominant the emotional mind becomes—and the more ineffectual the rational.

EMOTIONAL HIJACKING 

  • “Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel.” – HORACE WALPOLE
  • Our emotions have a mind of their own, one which can hold views quite independently of our rational mind. The emotional brain is as involved in reasoning as is the thinking brain.
  • The brain has two memory systems, one for ordinary facts and one for emotionally charged ones.

WHEN SMART IS DUMB

  • Academic intelligence has little to do with emotional life.
  • People with high IQs can be stunningly poor pilots of their private lives.
  • At best, IQ contributes about 20 percent to the factors that determine life success, which leaves 80 percent to other forces.
  • Emotional intelligence implies abilities such as being able to motivate oneself and persist in the face of frustrations; to control impulse and delay gratification; to regulate one’s moods and keep distress from swamping the ability to think; to empathize and to hope.
  • IQ offers little to explain the different destinies of people with roughly equal promises, schooling, and opportunity.
  • Childhood abilities such as being able to handle frustrations, control emotions, and get on with other people made the greater difference to achieve success.
  • Academic intelligence offers virtually no preparation for the turmoil—or opportunity—life’s vicissitudes bring.
  • Even though a high IQ is no guarantee of prosperity, prestige, or happiness in life, our schools and our culture fixate on academic abilities, ignoring emotional intelligence.
  • People with well-developed emotional skills are more likely to be content and effective in their lives.
  • The single most important contribution education can make to a child’s development is to help him toward a field where his talents best suit him, where he will be satisfied and competent.
  • We should spend less time ranking children and more time helping them to identify their natural competencies and gifts, and cultivate those.
  • Our humanity is most evident in our feelings.

SELF-AWARENESS

  • Self-awareness means being “aware of both our mood and our thoughts about that mood.”
  • Self-awareness is a neutral mode even amidst turbulent emotions. It has self-reflexive thoughts like “This is anger I’m feeling” even as you are enraged. 
  • Being aware of feelings and acting to change them usually go hand-in-hand: to recognize a foul mood is to want to get out of it.
  • Women, in general, feel both positive and negative emotions more strongly than do men.
  • Emotional life is richer for those who notice more.
  • Emotional self-awareness is the building block of emotional intelligence: being able to shake off a bad mood.
  • Just as there is a steady murmur of background thoughts in the mind, there is a constant emotional hum; beep someone at six A.M. or seven P.M. and he will always be in some mood or other.
  • Managing our emotions is something of a full-time job: much of what we do—especially in our free time—is an attempt to manage mood. Everything from reading a novel or watching television to the activities and companions we choose can be a way to make ourselves feel better.

ANGER

  • Benjamin Franklin put it well: “Anger is never without a reason, but seldom a good one.”
  • Anger is the mood people are worst at controlling. 
  • Reframing a situation more positively is one of the most potent ways to put anger to rest. 
  • A universal trigger for anger is the sense of being endangered. Endangerment does not only mean physical threat but also a symbolic threat to self-esteem or dignity: being treated unjustly or rudely, being insulted or demeaned, being frustrated in pursuing an important goal.
  • People are so much more prone to anger if they have already been provoked or slightly irritated by something else. 
  • Distraction is a highly powerful mood-altering device, for a simple reason: It’s hard to stay angry when we’re having a pleasant time. 
  • Active exercise also helps with anger. So do relaxation methods such as deep breathing and muscle relaxation.
  • But a cooling-down period will not work if that time is used to pursue the train of anger-inducing thought, since each such thought is in itself a minor trigger for more cascades of anger.
  • Distractions by and large help calm anger: TV, movies, reading, and the like all interfere with the angry thoughts that stoke rage. But indulging in treats such as shopping for oneself and eating do not have much effect; it is all too easy to continue with an indignant train of thought while cruising a shopping mall or devouring a piece of chocolate cake.
  • Ventilating anger is one of the worst ways to cool down: outbursts of rage typically pump up the emotional brain’s arousal, leaving people feeling more angry, not less.
  • One effective strategy to help a person overcome anger is to distract him, empathize with his feelings and perspective, and then draw him into an alternative focus, one that attunes him with a more positive range of feelings.

DEPRESSION 

  • Simply staying alone, which is often appealing when people are feeling down actually only adds a sense of loneliness and isolation to the sadness.
  • Worrying about what’s depressing us makes the depression all the more intense and prolonged.
  • In depression, worry takes several forms, all focusing on some aspect of the depression itself—how tired we feel, how little energy or motivation we have, for instance, or how little work we’re getting done.
  • Rumination can also make the depression stronger by creating conditions that are, well, more depressing.
  • The idea of a “good cry” is misleading: crying that reinforces rumination only prolongs the misery.
  • Alcohol is a central nervous system depressant, and so only adds to the effects of depression itself.
  • A more constructive approach to mood-lifting is engineering a small triumph or easy success: tackling some long-delayed chore around the house or getting to some other long overdue duty. Similarly, lifts to self-image also were cheering, even if only in the form of getting dressed up or putting on makeup.
  • Seeing the loss differently, in a more positive light—is an antidote to sadness.
  • Another effective depression-lifter is helping others in need. Throwing oneself into volunteer work was one of the most powerful mood-changers.
  • Praying, if you’re very religious, works for all moods, especially depression.

KNOW YOURSELF

Self-aware people:

– They are aware of their moods as they are having them.

– They tend to have a positive outlook on life.

– Their mindfulness helps them manage their emotions.

Engulfed people:

– They often feel swamped by their emotions and helpless to escape them.

– They do little to try to escape bad moods, feeling that they have no control over their emotional life.

Accepting people:

– They tend to be accepting of their moods (whether good or bad) and so don’t try to change them.

WHEN EMOTIONS ATTACK

The design of the brain is such that we very often have little or no control over when we are swept by emotion, nor over what emotion it will be. But we can have some say in how long an emotion will last.

COMPARISON

  • When in a difficult situation, it helps to compare yourself to people in a worse situation than you. 
  • Cancer patients, no matter how serious their condition, were in better moods if they were able to bring to mind another patient who was in even worse shape (“I’m not so bad off—at least I can walk”); those who compared themselves to healthy people were the most depressed. Such downward comparisons are surprisingly cheering: suddenly what had seemed quite dispiriting doesn’t look all that bad.

IMPULSE CONTROL

  • All emotions, by their very nature, lead to one or another impulse to act.
  • The capacity to impose a delay on impulse helps in a plethora of efforts, from staying on a diet to pursuing a medical degree.
  • The ability to delay gratification contributes powerfully to intellectual potential.
  • Emotional intelligence as a meta-ability, determines how well or how poorly people are able to use their other mental capacities.

ANXIETY 

Anxiety undermines the intellect. Anxiety sabotages academic performance of all kinds.

LAUGHING

Laughing, like elation, seems to help people think more broadly and associate with others more freely.

HOPE

  • Hope has healing power.
  • People with high levels of hope are able to motivate themselves, feel resourceful enough to find ways to accomplish their objectives, reassure themselves when in a tight spot that things will get better, are flexible enough to find different ways to get to their goals or to switch goals if one becomes impossible, and have the sense to break down a formidable task into smaller, manageable pieces.
  • Hopeful people evidence less depression than others as they maneuver through life in pursuit of their goals, are less anxious in general, and have fewer emotional distresses.

OPTIMISTIC PEOPLE

People who are optimistic see a failure as due to something that can be changed so that they can succeed the next time around.

FLOW

  • Flow is a state of self-forgetfulness, the opposite of rumination and worry: instead of being lost in nervous preoccupation, people in flow are so absorbed in the task at hand that they lose all self-consciousness, dropping the small preoccupations—health, bills, even doing well—of daily life. 
  • Being able to enter flow is emotional intelligence at its best; flow represents perhaps the ultimate in harnessing the emotions in the service of performance and learning. In flow the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand. 
  • Although people perform at their peak while in flow, they are unconcerned with how they are doing, with thoughts of success or failure—the sheer pleasure of the act itself is what motivates them.

RELATIONSHIPS

  • Being able to manage emotions in someone else is the core of the art of handling relationships.
  • Handling emotions in someone else requires the ripeness of two other emotional skills, self-management and empathy.

DISPLAYING EMOTIONS

  • How well one employs various strategies for displaying emotions, and knowing when to do so, is one factor in emotional intelligence.
  • We send emotional signals in every encounter, and those signals affect those we are with.
  • We unconsciously imitate the emotions we see displayed by someone else, through an out-of-awareness motor mimicry of their facial expression, gestures, tone of voice, and other nonverbal markers of emotion.
  • When two people interact, the direction of mood transfer is from the one who is more forceful in expressing feelings to the one who is more passive.
  • When it comes to personal encounters, the person who has the more forceful expressivity—or the most power—is typically the one whose emotions entrain the other. Dominant partners talk more, while the subordinate partner watches the other’s face more—a setup for the transmission of affect.

WORKPLACE EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

  • The destructive effects of miserable morale, intimidated workers, or arrogant bosses or any of the dozens of other permutations of emotional deficiencies in the workplace costs in the form of decreased productivity, increase in missed deadlines, mistakes and mishaps, and an exodus of employees to more congenial settings. There is, inevitably, a cost to the bottom line from low levels of emotional intelligence on the job. When it is rampant, companies can crash and burn.
  • Leadership is not domination, but the art of persuading people to work toward a common goal.
  • The effectiveness, satisfaction, and productivity of people at work depend on how they are told about nagging problems. Indeed, how criticisms are given and received goes a long way in determining how satisfied people are with their work, with those they work with, and with those to whom they are responsible.
  • Many managers are too willing to criticize, but frugal with praise, leaving their employees feeling that they only hear about how they’re doing when they make a mistake.
  • An artful critique focuses on what a person has done and can do rather than reading a mark of character into a job poorly done.
  • It demoralizes people just to hear that they are doing “something” wrong without knowing what the specifics are so they can change.
  • The critique should point to a way to fix the problem.
  • Critiques are most effective face to face and in private.
  • Managers who have little empathy are most prone to giving feedback in a hurtful fashion, such as the withering put-down.

MIND AND MEDICINE

  • We can be so emotionally fragile while we are ailing because our mental well-being is based in part on the illusion of invulnerability. Sickness—especially a severe illness—bursts that illusion.
  • Emotional intervention should be a standard part of medical care for the range of serious disease.
  • People who experienced chronic anxiety, long periods of sadness and pessimism, unremitting tension or incessant hostility, relentless cynicism or suspiciousness, were found to have double the risk of disease—including asthma, arthritis, headaches, peptic ulcers, and heart disease.
  • Anger is the one emotion that does most harm to the heart.
  • Stress weakens the immune system.
  • While chronic hostility and repeated episodes of anger seem to put men at greatest risk for heart disease, the more deadly emotion in women may be anxiety and fear.
  • Depression may not make people more vulnerable to becoming ill, it does seem to impede medical recovery.
  • Social isolation—the sense that you have nobody with whom you can share your private feelings or have close contact—doubles the chances of sickness or death. Having people to turn to and talk with, people who could offer solace, help, and suggestions, protects you from the deadly impact of life’s rigors and trauma.
  • Unburdening a troubled heart appears to be good medicine.

FAMILY

  • Family life is our first school for emotional learning.
  • The ways a couple handles the feelings between them—in addition to their direct dealings with a child—impart powerful lessons to their children, who are astute learners, attuned to the subtlest emotional exchanges in the family.

TRAUMA

Traumatic memories remain as fixtures in brain function because they interfere with subsequent learning—specifically, with relearning a more normal response to those traumatizing events.

TEMPERAMENT

  • Temperament is moods that typify our emotional life, such as habitual reactions of people who by nature are, say, highly volatile, painfully shy, etc.
  • Temperament is a given at birth, part of the genetic lottery.

TIMIDITY

  • Mothers who protect their high[ly] reactive infants from frustration and anxiety in the hope of effecting a benevolent outcome seem to exacerbate the infant’s uncertainty and produce the opposite effect.
  • The protective strategy backfires by depriving timid toddlers of the very opportunity to learn to calm themselves in the face of the unfamiliar, and so gain some small mastery of their fears.
  • Fearfulness—or any other temperament—may be part of the biological givens of our emotional lives, but we are not necessarily limited to a specific emotional menu by our inherited traits.

BRAIN PLASTICITY

  • Genes alone do not determine behavior; our environment, especially what we experience and learn as we grow, shapes how a temperamental predisposition expresses itself as life unfolds.
  • The brain remains plastic throughout life. All learning implies a change in the brain.

NOTE: The book has a section on child psychology which has not been covered in the excerpts. 

Disclaimer: The key points of the book presented here are not a substitute for reading the book. To get the entire holistic message the author has offered requires reading the book.

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