Daniel Goleman's 1995 book was a gamechanger in times when people were hung up only on IQ and Expertise as indicators of success. His tag line for the book 'Why EI can matter more than IQ' pretty much broke the mould. The book answers the question - why do high IQ people flounder and modest IQ people do well? A study of 95 Harvard students from the 1940s that went on into their mid-lives and careers found that the ones with the highest test scores weren't doing the best - salary, relationships, happiness, career, status. Goleman had a point.
To begin with, Goleman deconstructs the brain - the two brains - the rational and emotional brains. The emotional brain, or the primitive and limbic brain, processes emotions like love, happiness, anger, fear, disgust and surprise. While the rational mind, or the head, is about comprehension, thought, conscious stuff while the emotional brain is about knowing, impulse, powerful. It's the heart stuff and what drives action. The emotional mind is much about survival so when it gets hijacked by a trigger, it can capture and suspend the rational mind. (Now its good in a situation where our survival is threatened but in normal situations, if we do not know how to manage emotions, we could miss out of making rational decisions and affect our lives.) Emotional learning is important to harmonise emotion and thought.
Understanding Emotional Intelligence
When deconstructed, emotional intelligence was divided into five parts - 1) Knowing One's Emotions 2) Managing Emotions 3) Motivation 4) Recognising Others emotions and 5) Handling relationships.
1) Knowing One's Emotions - comprises of self-awareness and recognising emotions as they happen. This is the keystone of Emotional Intelligence. Self-awareness is the key to psychological insight. Be aware that physiological sensations occur before conscious awareness of feeling. Be aware, identify and recognise the emotions as they arise.
Managing Emotions - It is the capacity to soothe emotions as they appear, the ability to shake them off and bounce back at the earliest. If we let them be, they fester for a long period of time and become your temperament. You must know how to use appropriate emotion, know how to recover quickly from a low. Taking time off to cool oneself, reasoning with oneself, cognitively reframing the process are some techniques used here. Feeling the feeling instead of suppressing it, helps manage it better. Understand that all emotions and feelings are required for your emotional well being and accept them. Don't fight with them.
Motivating Oneself - It is the ability to marshall emotions in the service of a goal. It involves stifling impulsiveness and delaying gratification to be more productive and effective. Hope and optimism, the strong expectation that things will turn out well in the end, play a potent role in our success. A positive outlook helps in so many ways including health. Goleman refers to the concept of 'Flow' where one is so focused that one loses the concept of time and space, as the ideal state to achieve optimum performance. To enter a state of flow - one has to bring sharp focus, attention and concentration to a task that demands greater than normal concentration and fully immerses oneself to the extent that one is devoid of emotional static. One is immersed in the joy of doing work.
Recognising Emotions in Others - This is the quality of empathy, of understanding people's emotions, said or unsaid. People's emotions are rarely put into words so the ability to understand what it mostly communicated through cues, helps an empathic person connect better to people. Where rational minds can only understand words, which play a limited part in communication, emotional minds are good at catching non-verbal communication and thereby making the others feel understood. Empathic people tune into the 'how' of what's being said and not merely the 'what'.
Handling relationships - This is about the social arts, about how to manage emotions in others. It is the social competence aspect. Goleman gives the example of how in the midst of fierce fighting in Vietnam, a group of monks walk serenely across oblivious to the danger of bullets flying about. The firing stops as the calmness of the monks seeps into the soldiers and they stop fighting for a day. Goleman says that this is the skill that helps in organising groups, negotiating solutions, bring a personal connect and improve social analysis. These are the abilities that undergird popularity, leadership and interpersonal effectiveness.
These five areas are what constitute emotional intelligence. One can evaluate oneself on these through any of the many tests online and work on areas to develop emotional intelligence.
Applying Emotional Intelligence
Goleman highlights applications of emotional intelligence in intimate relationships such as marriage, by use of detoxifying self-talk and non-defensive listening and speaking.
At work, one can learn the art of giving feedback instead of merely criticising and learn to deal with diversity. (The example he gives of how a pilot of an aeroplane who had poor emotional quotient and who was difficult to approach actually crashed his plane because he ran out of fuel but his co-pilots were scared to tell him about it.) By bringing emotional intelligence to work the group's internal harmony increases and allows them to take advantage of their full talents and networks.
EI affects health as toxic emotions lead to anger, stress, anxiety, depression. Benefits of positive feelings like optimism, hope are well know. In fact, they say that people who have no one to share their feelings double the chances of sickness or death. more significant the relationship in your life, the more it matters for your health. Jame Pennebaker talks about writing for 1-20 minutes for 5-6 days about the most traumatic experiences of your entire life or pressing worries of the moment to improve your emotional health. The effect of this confessional - enhanced immune function, drop in health visits, fewer days missed at work, improved liver enzyme function. in fact, a study proved that women with metastatic cancer who attended weekly meetings with support groups lived twice as long as others who didn't.
Emotional Literacy
Goleman stresses that the effect of emotional intelligence begins early and at home. Parents do not know how to deal with the emotions of their children - most times because they are unaware of how o deal with emotions themselves. Most parents either ignore, allow without control or show complete contempt for children's emotions. The downside of not growing up with some idea of the subject or some level of emotional intelligence can lead to an effect on the children as they grow up into adults. Goleman however says that our temperament is not our destiny (we all fall into four main temperaments - timid, bold, upbeat and melancholy). emotional literacy can reduce rising rates of depression, eating disorders, addictions which are used as self-medication.
Several institutes have taught emotional intelligence with good results. The curriculum normally includes self-awareness, identification and Depression of emotions, managing feelings, impulse control, delaying gratification, handling stress and anxiety.
Impulse Control
The key to impulse control is by first identifying the difference between feelings and actions, controlling impulse, identifying alternatives and consequences and acting on the best alternative. They use methods such as Stoplight method, PATHS (Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies) and SOCS (Situations, Options, Consequences and Solutions).
The key is to know that emotions first show in the body and we can, by being self-aware, notice the physical sensation. When we are aware and then identify what emotions we are feeling and appropriately name them, we can create a gap between the emotion and our impulse. (most people cannot name emotions beyond 'good' and 'bad' or the basic 'happy', 'sad', 'fear', 'anger', when actually there are some hundreds of emotions in the sub-families of the basic emotions. An interesting finding was that people who had eating disorders found it difficult to distinguish between feelings of anger, frustration and hunger, and would end up eating.)
Our power lies in our response to the impulse. In that gap we can identify options, think of consequences and act on the best option. This would help in dealing with our emotions better. Emotional literacy can make a huge change to our lives.
It is a fascinating book and I really enjoyed reading it. Thanks Vinod bhai for gifting it to me.
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