Emotional Intelligence

The Big Ideas!

• IQ and emotional intelligence work separately.
• Emotional intelligence operates in five realms: awareness of one’s own emotions; being able to shake off negative emotions such as anxiety, gloom, and irritability; motivating oneself; feeling empathy; and interacting smoothly with others.
• We retain the emotional systems of our cave-dwelling ancestors, who regularly faced life-and-death situations
• We have two minds – a thinking mind and a feeling mind.
• When emotions operate below the level of awareness, they can control our actions and our moods. By becoming aware of our emotions, we can use our thinking brains to evaluate them.
• While we cannot control what we feel when we are swept away by emotion, we can control how long the emotion lasts.
• When emotions overwhelm our brains, our working memory is unable to operate properly, and we lose the ability to concentrate.
• Programs teaching emotional intelligence in schools have been remarkably successful.

Neutrino’s Nutshell

Conventional wisdom dictates that our ability to succeed in life depends largely on our IQ. Goleman proposes the idea that much of success in life depends on what he dubs “emotional intelligence,” which includes abilities such as self-control, persistence, and self-motivation. Unlike the type of inborn intelligence measured by IQ tests, emotional intelligence can be taught to children, thus the concept offers hope and the possibility of future change.

Emotions are impulses to act. Evolution has provided us with emotions so that we can act quickly in situations that are too important to be left to intellect alone. The emotional center of our brains evolved millions of years before the thinking part. In humans, there are many complex connections between the thinking and feeling brain areas. However, when the brain perceives an emergency, the emotional center can hijack the brain before the thinking area has a chance to react, therefore, impulsive feelings override rational thought. Emotional intelligence involves harmonizing both emotions and thought.

The consequences of emotional illiteracy: depression, eating disorders, high student dropout rates, and addiction are common. Teaching emotional skills to children can help prevent these problems, which are both personal and social. Programs that train students in key emotional-intelligence skills have reduced bullying, lowered children’s risk of depression, increased cooperation, and promoted assertiveness.

Quotables

“As a psychologist, and for the last decade as a journalist for The New York Times, I have been tracking the scientific understanding of the realm of the irrational. From that perch I have been struck by two opposing trends, one portraying a growing calamity in our shared emotional life, the other offering some hopeful remedies.”

IMEO (In My Eudaimonian Opinion)

Daniel Goleman’s book made a significant impact when it was first published in 1995. The once seemingly exotic concept of emotional intelligence has now become widely accepted, especially within business organizations, where it is often taught in workshops to employees.

Parents and teachers reading “Emotional Intelligence” for the first time will likely discover insights into the behavior of their children and themselves. The sections on the brain, in particular, provide a framework for thinking about why our emotions seemingly control us. While the book discusses emotional-intelligence programs that have been successfully used in schools, it focuses more on why emotional intelligence is important, rather than teaching specific ways readers can develop emotional skills in their own lives.

Take action, Humanoid!

An exercise that can be used for a group of children in a classroom setting: create a “feeling cube” which contains a different word describing an emotion on each side. The children take turns rolling the cube. Each child, after rolling the cube, reads the word that shows up, and then thinks of a time when he or she felt that emotion before describing that particular moment to the group.

A skill that both children and adults can practice: when reacting negatively to a comment, whether out of anger or sadness, pause for a moment, take three deep breaths, and allow yourself to think about the motive of that comment, rather than defensively jumping to conclusions. This is the only way to find out what is going on instead of letting your emotions cloud your rational process.

The Deets

Emotional Intelligence
Author: Daniel Goleman
Publication Date: 2010