Many cultures, particularly Western ones, place a lot of emphasis on intelligence as a barometer of success. We’ve even developed tests to measure our intelligence, resulting in a score known as our intelligence quotient, or IQ. But data suggests that IQ accounts for only about 20% of success in life, with the remaining 80% being made up by other factors, emotional intelligence included. And much more research has been done on IQ than on emotions and emotional intelligence, despite the fact that emotions are hard-wired in the human brain and make us the species we are.
IQ is fixed: what we’re born with is what remains throughout our lives. But emotional intelligence can be taught and learned -- we have the ability to improve upon our emotional intelligence throughout our lives. In this one-page summary, we cover a broad overview of what emotions are, what emotional intelligence is, and how we can use it in a couple different areas of life. The full summary goes into much more detail about each of these categories.
Emotions are strong impulses that urge us to take immediate action. They’re based on fundamental needs (usually survival) and neurologically designed to propel us into action without overthinking: “Run from the tiger before considering options gets us killed!”
There’s nothing wrong with feeling emotions -- the problems arise when the emotions are out of tune with the situation and when we don’t express our emotions productively or safely.
The human brain was built from the bottom up:
We essentially have two minds: a thinking one and a feeling one. Our feeling mind is associative, categorical, absolutist, and individual -- and it reacts to information before our thinking mind even gets all the information and has an opportunity to weigh out the best action.
Our feeling mind is more fully-formed at birth, while our neocortex can learn, change, and adjust throughout our lives. This means our emotional reactions to things are formed before we have high-level thoughts to make sense of them. We can’t change our emotional reactions to things, but we can learn how to respond to our emotions differently.
Emotional hijackings occur when our limbic system receives the information first and responds with an emergency alert. This sends our body into panic mode and makes it more difficult for our neocortex to control the actions we take based on our emotional impulses.
Emotional intelligence encompasses the following skills:
Self-awareness is the ability to recognize a feeling as it’s happening to you. Being able to monitor our feelings as they’re occurring helps us understand ourselves and our psychology. The more certain we are about our feelings, the easier it is to make personal decisions.
People who know their emotions are aware of their moods as they happen but can be mindful about how they deal with them. They’re more sure of their boundaries since they know how they’ll feel. They tend towards a positive outlook on life since they know they can manage whatever moods are thrown at them. They don’t dwell on bad moods and can get out of ruts faster. They can be mindful of their emotions and manage them successfully.
The goal is to be self-aware in relation to our emotions, but most people deal with their emotions in one of two unhealthy ways:
Once we’re aware of our emotional responses as we’re having them, we can start to regulate how they influence our actions.
There are three emotions that most people find hard to regulate: anger, anxiety, and sadness.
We also need to be able to delay gratification and overcome our impulses to be more productive and effective -- this is where motivation, the ability to push ourselves to do something, comes in. Being able to manage our emotions is the first step to motivating ourselves to finish tasks and achieve goals.
Motivation mostly has to do with what you believe about your own abilities. People who are good self-motivators:
Empathy is the fundamental people skill, allowing us to interpret what others want or need. Empathy changes the way you look at the world: When other people are in pain, you work to understand their pain and help them through it. You also work not to cause people pain: This is where morals and morality begin. Empathy makes you a better person.
Our most basic emotional life lessons are laid down in small, repeated life exchanges between us and our parents. How our parents responded to our emotions is how we respond to others’, and it shapes our capacity for empathy and the emotional expectations we bring into our adult relationships. Treating children with empathy creates more empathetic adults in the future.
When we recognize our own emotions, manage them, motivate ourselves to do better, and can empathize with others -- a culmination of the previous skills -- our personal relationships are bound to improve.
The ability to manage relationships breaks down into four distinct and separate abilities:
Relationship strife usually has to do with partners having differing expectations about how emotions will be handled. Agreeing how to disagree or confront each other is the key to a successful relationship.
Here are some things couples can do to improve their emotional intelligence in arguments:
Parents who are emotionally intelligent set better examples for their children. If you want a better life for your kid, work on improving yours first.
Three common difficult situations parents have to deal with are: angry kids, depressed kids, and kids with eating disorders.
Parents who address emotions healthily:
Issues at work usually arise from prejudice in the workplace or friction among employees who have to work together.
Prejudices are any preconceived opinions that are not based on experience or fact, but we see this most commonly in discrimation against other races, genders, sexualities, or classes. Prejudices are passed down from our parents and taught to us emotionally before we understand the logic behind them. It’s nearly impossible to change your own prejudices or anyone else’s on a neurological level -- but it is possible for a workplace to suppress the expression of prejudice for the sake of a healthier and better-functioning workplace.
Friction among employees usually stems from low group IQ, or low emotional intelligence. People with high emotional intelligence are better at working together.
To combat both of these situations, managers must be good at both giving feedback and receiving it. Here’s how:
When receiving feedback, remember that feedback is a tool to help you improve, and an opportunity for you to work with your manager to do your job better.
Family life doesn’t necessarily offer the same connections and instruction it once did, so schools have become the one place communities can depend on to educate their children and correct their behaviors.
High anxiety and emotional distress take a devastating toll on student performance. Emotionally distressed students have a harder time focusing, following through, controlling their behavior, and making friends.
Schools and teachers can do a few things to help combat the low emotional literacy of students:
Emotions are deeply connected to sickness and health. For the most emotionally healthy population, emotional interventions should be routine practice in any hospital or doctor’s office.
Three emotions have extremely detrimental effects on health: anger, anxiety, and depression.
Medical offices that would like to increase emotional intelligence should:
Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman is a tricky book to summarize: it clocks in at 384 pages and is packed full of interesting ideas and information, practical advice, and anecdotes.
Goleman’s career as a psychologist and New York Times reporter on the human brain and behavioral sciences gives him a lot of research to pull from, and the book is chock full of data from academic research studies. We’ve chosen to cut most of those examples due to 2 reasons:
Readers who revel in research should consider reading the original book to make use of Goleman’s extensive examples.
We’ve also done some reorganization for this summary: though the rough structure of our summary follows the rough structure of the book, the individual chapters in the original book sometimes meandered or jumped around in ways that could cause a reader to get lost. Much of the useful content in Emotional Intelligence is either scientific information or practical advice, and we’ve generally used that distinction to organize this summary.
IQ might reflect how smart we are, but it has nothing to do with how we handle our emotional lives. Passions and impulses can derail even those with the highest IQs.
IQ determines how well we can handle cognitive demands -- that’s why it’s good for predicting what job you might be suited for. But, for example, if a company employs a handful of experts within any given field, IQ will not help determine which of those experts will be the most successful. Data suggests that IQ only accounts for about 20% of success in life, with the remaining 80% being made up by other factors, emotional intelligence included.
Emotional intelligence has one major benefit over IQ: IQ is fixed -- what we’re born with is what remains throughout our lives. But emotional intelligence can be taught and learned -- we have the ability to improve upon our emotional intelligence throughout our lives. This is the major factor that makes emotional intelligence potentially more important for success than IQ: it’s within our control.
Corporations report that emotional intelligence determines which employees will be better leadership material. Emotional intelligence programs in schools also show definite positive results:
But research on emotions is sparse, so most people don’t have a good understanding of what’s going on when they have an emotional reaction, or how they can work to control their response to that emotional reaction.
In this summary, we’ll first explore emotions, what they are, and where they come from. Then we’ll delve into emotional intelligence and its benefits. Finally, we’ll look at using emotional intelligence in specific categories.
Emotions are strong impulses that urge us to take immediate action. The root of the word emotion is motere, the Latin verb meaning “to move.” Watch children or animals: they act almost immediately upon getting a feeling, before they know what they’re doing.
It’s a widely-held belief that emotions aren’t rational. But passionate emotional responses are designed to overwhelm reason. The more intense the emotion, the more it takes over.
Emotions have developed over centuries of evolutionary history. They’re based on fundamental needs, and designed to prevent our brain from thinking about tasks that are too important to leave to intellect alone. Our most powerful emotions want us to:
These situations repeated over and over again throughout the history of humankind, and if the reactions kept us alive, then they got embedded more deeply into our systems and became automatic responses. Most of them involve life or death, surviving or perishing. This was useful for our ancient ancestors, but nowadays most people rarely face life or death scenarios -- yet our emotions still perceive things this way.
As we became more civilized, society had to develop and implement rules to rein in our emotional reactions, or create consequences for when we could not control our emotions. Humans can’t be expected to control their emotional responses unless there are negative results they understand. And there’s nothing wrong with feeling emotions--the problems arise when the emotions are out of tune with the situation and when we don’t express our emotions productively or safely.
The development of the human brain -- both evolutionarily and in our biological development from conception to old age -- reflects the hierarchy between our emotional mind and our rational mind.
The human brain essentially grew from the bottom up. We share the primitive part of our brain -- the brainstem -- with all species who have more than a simple nervous system, and this part of the brain controls our basic and necessary functions: breathing, the metabolism of our organs, preprogrammed reactions and movements such as shrinking from pain.
From the brainstem emerged the emotional center, our limbic system, which refined two important skills: the ability to learn and the ability to remember. This development allowed us to make conscious decisions in relation to our environment and smarter choices for survival.
From the emotional center emerged the rational mind, our neocortex. This part of the human brain is three times as large as the neocortex of our evolutionary next of kin, nonhuman primates. The neocortex also contributes to a more complex emotional life: it’s the reason we can have feelings about our feelings.
This development explains why emotions can supercede our rationality -- they’re more or less second in command in our brains. The emotional brain is quick to respond but sloppy. First we have feelings; second, thoughts.
We essentially have two minds: a thinking one and a feeling one.
Our thinking mind is our rational mind, and for us modern humans this is the one we’re usually more aware of: we can observe our thoughts, reflect on our choices, and we can be aware of our thinking.
Our emotional mind, however, starts off more powerful than our rational brain. It’s impulsive and strong, and sometimes irrational. It’s also been neglected by research and exploration up until the recent past, so we know far less about it.
The emotional brain is:
Have you ever looked back on an emotional response you had and thought, “I don’t know what came over me!” This is what Goleman would refer to as a limbic or emotional hijacking, where the emotional center of your brain takes over without notice. We usually associate it with negative emotions, but it can be positive, too -- if you’ve ever laughed uncontrollably and felt like you couldn’t stop, that’s a hijacking.
Research shows that we unconsciously understand what something is and make a value judgement as to whether it’s a good or bad thing in the first few milliseconds of perceiving it.
This has to do with how the brain is set up, and the balance between the epicenters of our two minds: the amygdala (the center of emotions) and the neocortex (the center of reason).
There are two amygdalas on either side of the brainstem, at the base of the limbic system. The amygdala is the command center of our emotions, responsible for interpreting emotional signals and for storing our emotional memory. The human amygdala is much larger than the amygdala in our closest relatives, nonhuman primates. Animals and humans who’ve suffered damage to or the severing of their amygdalas completely lose the ability to feel emotion or understand emotion in others.
The amygdala is constantly on the lookout for danger or dislike -- for negative emotional content. If it perceives a threat to our emotional health or physical safety, it reacts instantaneously and sends a crisis message out to the entire brain.
The brain is set up so that sensory information from the eye or ear goes first to the amygdala and then to the neocortex, meaning the amygdala can respond while the neocortex is putting the information through several levels of consideration. And since the amygdala is also the center of emotional memory, this is why traumatic emotional responses can stick with us even when we aren’t aware we have them. The more intense the signals sent to the amygdala, the stronger the amygdala imprints the memory. (Shortform note: We discuss trauma more in-depth in the next section.)
Once the amygdala has an emotional memory of a certain situation, any new situation that resembles the old one will trigger the amygdala’s stress response, whether the situations are ultimately similar or not. For instance, this is why many adults who got bit by a dog when they were kids still fear dogs: though it’s not the same dog and though the person might not be in any danger of getting bit, the amygdala triggers the same emotional response to the sight of any remotely similar dog.
The amygdala is already close to being fully formed at birth, while our neocortex is not. This means our rational mind has more time to change and develop, but our emotional mind is solidified at a very young age: many of our strongest emotional memories occur in the first few years of our lives when we have not developed language or logic to understand them or process them.
So our childhood experiences deeply influence our emotional wellbeing as adults. Though many people believe that infants or children won’t remember what happened, this is not true: though they might not be able to recall exactly what happened, they will always carry with them how their experiences made them feel. Our childhood emotional experiences and how our parents respond to them lay the blueprint for how we respond to emotional experiences as adults -- and the more traumatic the experience, such as physical abuse or emotional neglect, the more they affect our ability to be emotionally healthy adults.
There’s a moderator for the amygdala at the other end of the neocortex, in the prefrontal lobe just behind the forehead. This area regulates emotional responses, quells feelings in order to think more rationally about the situation at hand, and recalls the appropriate response if the amygdala analyzes the situation wrong.
The prefrontal cortex also contains our working memory -- the facts we need to complete a certain task or solve a certain problem. However, due to the connection between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex, if our amygdala is sending out signals of strong emotion, it creates something similar to static in our prefrontal cortex, and it interferes with our working memory and ability to complete tasks.
The connection between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex also explains why prolonged emotional distress has devastating effects on a child’s ability to learn (emotional overload severely hinders their working memory needed to learn and perform well in school).
There are lots of cliché sayings about the head versus the heart, but using the two in tandem actually results in the most success. Feelings actually help us make rational decisions by pointing us in the right general direction first, so we can then use logic to make the best decision in that direction.
Shortform example: You have a secure job but it’s not in a field that interests you. Is it more logical to keep the secure job that you don’t have any passion for, or switch to a new job that’s riskier but keeps you engaged?
Logic can’t actually answer this question for you. Using only logic to make this decision will send you round and round without an answer. It might seem more logical to keep the secure job, except logic would also tell us that if it doesn’t interest you, you probably won’t do it well, and you risk losing the secure job due to performance. And logic probably balks at the idea of giving up security for a riskier job that keeps your attention -- except logic would also confirm that a job that keeps you engaged will improve your performance, thus increasing your potential for high earnings and better job satisfaction.
Emotions can help you determine which is a better choice for you: maybe you have children, and the thought of them having to forego Christmas presents because you quit your job makes you feel too sad to consider quitting; or maybe you feel a strong emotional drive to teach them that they should do the things that make them happy, and want to lead by example. These are emotional influences that point you in the right direction.
Emotional reactions can feel very different to us, based on how long they last, how intense they are, and how they affect our bodies.
Goleman describes 4 different phases of emotional response: impulses, moods, temperaments, and on the extreme end, chronic disorders. We can distinguish between these phases primarily based on how long they last.
Emotional impulses are strong and immediate, but only last a few seconds. These are the knee-jerk reactions that happen before our conscious mind understands what’s going on. (Shortform note: Think of “crimes of passion”--most of them were probably committed in these few, brief seconds where the emotional mind is in complete control.)
Moods are muted forms of emotions and last for much longer than the immediate emotional impulse. You’ve probably never been in a full, terrifying rage for a whole day -- but you might have been grumpy all day, where normal things make you angry that much faster. That’s a mood.
Then, there’s temperaments. Goleman suggests that temperaments are a product of nature, a predisposition from birth based on brain activity patterns, and that people generally fall into one of four temperaments: timid, bold, upbeat, and melancholy.
Finally, chronic disorders occur when someone is trapped in a negative temperament or mood and most likely needs medication or therapy to help balance their emotions.
Different emotions cause different reactions in the body, usually in preparation for whatever the emotion might make us do:
PTSD occurs when the brain has lowered its setpoint for alarm due to traumatic experiences, making emergencies out of anything remotely resembling either a single, impactful traumatic event or prolonged periods of suffering cruelties.
PTSD also generally stems from traumatic events in which the victim felt helpless. The helplessness is part of what makes the initial traumatic event so overwhelming to the limbic system -- it increases the strength of the emotion because the brain feels like there’s no action to take.
Here’s how PTSD affects the brain:
But we can learn to handle our emotions better, as we already know, and PTSD victims can, with treatment, relearn a different, more normal response to their specific triggers. The amygdala will always retain its response to that initial emergency alert, but victims can work on developing an ability to suppress the emergency alert through their rational mind.
Trauma sticks on an unconscious level, so a great way to work through trauma is through art, which also deals with the unconscious. (Shortform note: Goleman does not go into detail as to how art can be used in therapy for this purpose, but there are plenty of good books out there on art and drama as therapeutic techniques.)
Children have an easier time relearning responses to traumatic events. Because their brains are still forming, they can use a wider variety of tools to relearn responses -- tools like games, dreams, fantasy, and play.
There are 3 stages of recovering from trauma:
Once we’ve learned an emotional response to something, the emotion hardly ever changes or goes away -- but we can learn to control that emotion and how we let it affect our actions.
This is why people have patterns that show up regardless of the situation -- for instance, if we feel emotionally neglected by our parents and learn to hide our emotions to avoid the feeling of rejection, then as adults we will respond to any perceived neglect by hiding our emotions, whether the person neglecting our feelings is our boss, our spouse, or our children.
If PTSD patients can relearn their responses to traumatic events, than people with less intense but still impactful negative memories can also relearn how to respond. Psychotherapy can help in both instances.
It’s useful to know what your default temperament is so that you can appreciate it or work against it when necessary. Use this exercise to explore your default mood and how it affects your life.
Reviewing the four basic temperaments (timid, bold, upbeat, melancholy), which one would you say you fall into?
As we know, no emotion is wrong--so all 4 moods have benefits. What’s one benefit you receive from this default temperament? For example, melancholy might seem like a negative temperament--but being attuned to sad things in life might mean you process them more readily than others.
And all 4 moods come with tendencies you might like to change. What’s one aspect of this temperament you could afford to improve on? For example, if you’re a bold person, you might seek out new things--but perhaps sometimes you ignore valid warning signs in pursuit of something exciting.
Now that we know what emotions are, we’ll discuss emotional intelligence, break it down into 5 key skills, and then review those skills in greater detail. For clarity, each of the chapters will be numbered as 5-1, 5-2, and so on, to denote their relation to the major subject of emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence encompasses the 5 following skills:
Someone with high emotional intelligence can regulate her moods, control her impulses, motivate herself, empathize with others, and hope, within reason, that things will turn out all right. Emotional intelligence is really a meta-ability, an ability that determines how well we can put all our other abilities to use, including IQ.
Knowing your emotions is really a form of self-awareness. Self-awareness is the ability to recognize a feeling as it’s happening to you. Being able to monitor our feelings as they’re occurring helps us understand ourselves and our psychology. Failure to understand our emotional responses leaves us at their mercy. The more certain we are about our feelings, the easier it is to make personal decisions.
Even mild shifts in mood can change the way we make decisions. Making decisions in a good mood creates a perceptual bias that makes us more positive in our thinking -- in other words, making decisions when you’re happy leads to happier decisions. And the opposite is true, too: making decisions when we’re in a bad mood leads to more negative thinking -- you’ll make worse, more negative decisions when you’re in a worse mood.
Being aware of our feelings essentially means we can mentally take a step back from what we’re feeling and observe it, instead of act on it right away. Though being aware of our feelings doesn’t guarantee we can change what we’re feeling, the two usually go together. Recognizing you’re in a bad mood usually means you’d like to get out of it.
Don’t equate self-awareness with a “Stop that!” mentality. Balance is the goal for emotions, not suppression. All feelings have importance and value. We just want to make sure our emotions match the situation at hand, and that we can control them when they get in the way of what we want to achieve.
There are 3 general styles for dealing with emotions:
The goal is to be self-aware. But how can you tell if you fall into one of the other categories?
The book gives an example to help you figure it out. Imagine you’re on a flight. The pilot makes an announcement on the intercom that there’s turbulence ahead and everyone needs to return to their seats and fasten their seatbelts. The plane hits this turbulence and it’s the roughest you’ve ever experienced -- the plane is getting tossed around like a beach ball on the waves. What do you do?
If you fall into the first category, you deal with emotions by accepting them. If you fall into the second category, you get engulfed by your emotions.
As you become more self-aware of your emotions, you’ll discover that what once felt like anger might actually be a different, subtler feeling. Part of knowing your emotions is increasing your emotional vocabulary--words you use to specifically identify what you’re feeling. Goleman provides some useful words to increase your emotional vocabulary:
There are obviously more emotions than listed here, but this is a good starting place to start to expand your emotional vocabulary.
Once we are aware of our emotional responses as we’re having them, we can start to regulate them, working past emotions when they’re not appropriate to the situation, soothing ourselves when we’re experiencing negative emotions, and bouncing back quickly from setbacks. People who cannot manage their emotions expend a lot of energy fighting their emotional reactions.
There are 3 main emotions that are difficult to manage: anger, anxiety, and sadness.
Here are general rules for managing any negative emotion:
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We get angry when we feel attacked. It could be someone actively threatening our physical safety, dangerously cutting us off on the road, insulting us with words, or it could be something frustrating us in our pursuit of a goal. All these are perceived forms of attack, and anger is our brain preparing us to fight.
We’re also more prone to get angry when we’re more stressed. It’s much easier to shrug things off when your day is going well; if your day is going poorly, little things that might not even get to you on a good day can easily set off your temper.
The quickest way to continue feeling angry is to dwell on what’s making you angry. The longer we think about our anger, the more our brain comes up with self-justifications and good reasons that we should feel angry. Anger builds on anger.
Say someone dangerously cuts you off while driving and you get angry. “What was that person thinking? They could have killed me. What would happen to my kids if I died? That person could have ruined my life and the lives of the people I care about! And for what? Probably for nothing. Where they’re going isn’t important enough to kill people for it. Jeez, no one pays attention to anyone but themselves anymore…”
Every subsequent angry thought after the initial one fans the flames, keeping you angry and sometimes even increasing how angry you are.
The quickest way to undermine anger is to undermine the assumptions that are making you angry in the first place, usually by reframing the situation in a more positive light.
Another way to manage anger is to physically cool off. This is particularly useful in arguments: if you find yourself getting too angry with someone, get away from them to let your brain calm itself down before you do or say something you’ll regret. Removing yourself from the source of anger lets your body and brain wait out the surge of adrenaline that hits us when we get angry without having the target of the anger there in front of you.
You could also try writing down cynical, hostile, or angry thoughts as they arise. This will help increase your self-awareness and give you an opportunity to challenge those thoughts, thus decreasing the anger. Once you’ve written them down, you’re forced to look at them and assess them, and you have a better chance of reappraising the situation -- but only if it’s in the earlier stages of anger. If you’re in a fit of rage, an exercise like this will probably fan the flames.
Someone at the peak of their rage is the most difficult person to manage. Data suggests a strategy to deal with someone in a fit of rage:
Example: On a train one night, a drunk man started yelling at everyone, threatening them, and trying to destroy parts of the train car. Nothing seemed to work to stop him until an old man distracted him by greeting him as a friend and asking what he had to drink. The man had sake, and the old man talked about how much he and his wife love sake and how they drink it every night in their garden. Then the drunk man broke down: his wife had died recently, and he’d lost his job and his home because of his grief. Goleman calls this an act of emotional brilliance on the part of the old man.
Anxiety is a form of worrying, a kind of rehearsal of what could go wrong and potential ways we might deal with it.
The goal of worrying is to come up with solutions by anticipating danger before it occurs. Too often it turns into a chronic, repetitive thought process, one that goes on and on but never actually gets to a positive solution because it keeps picking up new worries.
Chronic anxiety is an emotional hijacking beyond our control: worries seem to come from nowhere or be inspired by nothing, they’re impervious to reason, and cause the worrier to fixate on one or many anxiety-inducing topics.
There are generally two forms of anxiety:
For example, insomniacs usually suffer from cognitive anxiety and not somatic anxiety, whereas those who have panic attacks usually suffer from somatic anxiety.
There are three different types of chronic anxiety:
Worry, when allowed to continue, almost always blows itself out of proportion. In one study, participants were asked to intentionally worry for one minute out loud. Within just a few seconds, the worries had spiralled out into epic statements like “I’ll never be happy.”
Worry could easily be controlled by shifting your attention away from the worries. However, the rational brain actually gets in the way here, and makes it harder to stop worrying: we could get a payoff from worrying by coming up with potential solutions to problems, and that would be a good thing. But anxiety actually doesn’t usually come up with positive solutions.
Because worrying is negative, it doesn’t function like a creative breakthrough, viewing the problem from different angles, thinking laterally to come up with new solutions, or feeling energized at the prospect of solving the problem. Instead, it’s a form of rigid thought that deals in generalities and follows a fixed, linear path -- this is why anxiety rarely leads to a useful solution and usually turns into a rut.
Relaxation methods work to physically calm the body and take the mind off the worrisome thoughts -- but it’s best to practice relaxation methods daily, during totally normal moments, so at the time of crisis you can actually use the relaxation methods.
But relaxation isn’t usually enough -- anxiety needs to be actively challenged. Here’s a list of questions you can ask to actively challenge anxious thoughts:
We experience sadness when we feel lonely or when we’ve lost something or someone that’s important to us. For example, even if you feel sad when you see a happy couple because you’ve never been in a relationship, you’re still mourning the perceived loss or lack of something you feel is important: companionship.
People are most inventive when trying to change feelings of sadness, and it’s generally the mood people put the most energy into changing. But, of course, a lot of our coping methods don’t actually positively deal with the sadness, they negatively reinforce it.
Isolating ourselves when we feel sad actually usually doesn’t make us feel better. It adds to our feelings of loneliness and distance.
A lot of us fixate on the sadness to try to figure out what’s wrong or to understand ourselves better. But this is rumination, which, as we already know, actually increases and prolongs the feelings we’re ruminating on. It’s useful to analyze your sadness if it actually leads to concrete actions or insights that will result in positive change -- but if you find yourself passively ruminating on why you’re so sad, you’re probably just reinforcing how sad you are.
Here are 2 methods of combating sadness or rumination on sadness:
1) Intentionally schedule pleasant distractions.
Sad thoughts are automatic and often enter our minds unbidden. So scheduling pleasant distractions actively breaks up these automatic thoughts and prevents them from intruding.
It’s important that the distractions actually be pleasant. In one study, depressed people were given a list of distractions and asked to choose one, and they ended up choosing the more depressing distractions.
Here are some good distractions, as long as they’re pleasant:
There are some commonly used distractions that have pitfalls, and might be worse for you in the long run. Exercise these with caution.
2) Engineer a small, easy success or triumph. This will boost your mood and give you something positive to focus on.
Repressors are people who repress their emotions routinely and automatically erase emotional disturbances from their minds and their awareness.
This can be positive or negative. When it’s positive, it might be more appropriate to call these people unflappables. They’re actually deft experts at handling their own emotions, capable of pushing emotional responses out of their brains without much struggle and going on about their business. They’ve gotten so good at it, in fact, that they aren’t even aware of their negative feelings. They’ve silenced them completely.
Of course, on the negative side, this can also mean the person is completely out of touch with their emotions, still experiencing primarily physiological symptoms of emotions but being totally oblivious to the emotional cause of these symptoms.
Neurologically, people who are genuine repressors are not feigning this obliviousness to emotional strife: their brains are essentially keeping this emotional information from them. People who exhibit repeated emotional repression have been found to have more brain activity in their left prefrontal lobe than their right -- the left prefrontal lobe is the center of good feelings, while the right is the center for negative feelings.
Being able to identify and manage our emotions makes it easier to motivate ourselves to finish tasks and achieve goals. We also need to be able to delay gratification and overcome our impulses to be more productive and effective.
Goleman says this is the most fundamental psychological skill. Because emotions are impulses, being in control of your emotions is resisting the urge to fulfill impulses that are harmful or counterproductive.
The ability to delay gratification in pursuit of a goal is necessary to achieve almost anything. Very little of what we do on a moment-to-moment basis is gratifying -- most of us have obligations we have to meet, big-picture goals we’re working towards, or personal improvements we’re looking to make. All of these require us to delay immediate gratification in favor of doing something that will be beneficial down the line.
There was a famous experiment done in the 1960s with children. They were left in a room with one marshmallow. They were told that if they didn’t eat the marshmallow before the researcher came back, they could have 2 marshmallows. Or they could choose to eat the single marshmallow right away.
The study followed the children into their adolescence, and the kids who had delayed gratification and resisted their impulses to eat the first marshmallow were:
On the other side, kids who ate the first marshmallow were:
Hope, in this context, is the belief that you have the will and the means to accomplish a goal, regardless of what it is. More hopeful people were found to have a variety of traits that made them more successful:
More hopeful people generally deal with less emotional distress throughout their lives, don’t give in to overwhelming anxiety, and suffer less from depression.
Optimistic people see failure as something that can be changed so they can succeed next time they try. Pessimists believe failure is something they’re doomed to experience because of who they are or what they’re (not) capable of -- the failure usually feels outside their control.
Hope is sometimes a better indicator of academic success than IQ. One study found that a student’s hopefulness was a better predictor of how good their grades would be in the first semester of college than SAT scores were.
As a caveat, we’re talking about realistic optimism here. Naive optimism can actually undermine success. It implies a lack of self-awareness or awareness of the circumstances that are necessary for success.
People are naturally born leaning more towards an optimistic or a pessimistic view of life, but temperament can be cultivated with experience and nurturing. Hope and optimism can be taught and learned.
The most successful people in their fields -- masters of a certain subject or ability -- often describe their ideal working mentality as a “flow” state. Flow state is a product of motivation, discipline, and practice. They describe this state as one where you lose your sense of self -- you might as well not exist, or you go into full autopilot -- and your ability to do something seems to come from outside your mind or body. One composer described it as his hand working without him -- that the music just came pouring out by itself.
This state represents the pinnacle of emotional control in the service of doing something--people who get into a flow state are not just controlling and directing their emotions, but their emotions become positive sources of energy that align with the goal they’re trying to achieve.
In this state, our awareness merges with our actions--there’s little to no gap between what we’re conscious of and what we’re doing. Even reflecting on what we’re doing can take us out of a flow state -- it halts the relationship between thinking and doing for a moment of outside reflection like “This is going well!”
It’s the opposite of anxiety. Anxiety is the tendency to step out of the current moment and look down on it from above with worry. Flow state is the ability to be totally in a moment and an action, without any removed opinions, good or bad.
First, it requires long-term discipline. To get into a flow state, you have to have mastered the basics of what you’re trying to do.
Next, it requires high levels of calm and focus. Flow is, in essence, a highly concentrated state, relaxed yet intensely focused.
Lastly, once the first two steps have been achieved, a flow state usually requires the task at hand to be just outside your abilities. In other words, once you’ve mastered something, if you only perform it at that level, you’ll get bored. Flow occurs when you don’t have to think about the basics, but the task at hand is a challenge for you, so you are constantly engaged in performing the skills you’ve mastered to achieve a new level of success.
When people get into this state, they usually describe the emotions they’re feeling as spontaneous rapture. There’s actually little emotional content other than a feeling of ecstasy that serves as motivation. They lose track of time or their surroundings.
Watching someone in a state of flow makes the difficult thing look easy: the performer looks like an effortless natural, despite the task being something of a challenge for them.
And, in one sense, it is easy: the reason why people feel like the flow comes from outside themselves is that their brains are expending minimal mental energy. This is why mastering the techniques involved is crucial, as well as a sense of calm: well-practiced skills require less effort than freshly learned ones, and agitation or anxiety tire the brain out and decrease your ability to be concise in your efforts.
There’s a case for education embracing the idea of flow: people are more likely to master something that they enjoy doing, and since people enjoy doing different things, a one-size-fits-all model of education might not bring out the best in students. When kids get bored in class or overwhelmed by anxiety if the pressure is too high, it becomes harder for them to learn. Motivating kids from the inside out -- letting them find the things that they care about and enjoy engaging in, and then helping them master their abilities to do those things -- might result in a better educated student body, even if their education has a more narrow focus.
But teachers can use internal motivation and the idea of flow state to improve student performance in any subject: schools that embrace this model of education identify a student’s individual profile of natural competencies, then pass those profiles on to teachers, who can use them to shift how a certain topic is presented.
The ultimate goal is to introduce every child to the flow state--once they know what this feels like, it will hopefully motivate and encourage them to take on challenges in other areas, with the hope of achieving the same results in a different subject. Studies reinforce this idea.
Empathy is the fundamental people skill, allowing us to interpret what others want or need. This skill is especially important in what Goleman refers to as the “caring professions,” such as sales, management, or teaching.
In the early stages of our development, we cannot tell ourselves apart from anyone else around us -- we interpret everything outside ourselves as part of ourselves. This is why babies mirror our facial expressions. Up until about one year of age, infants perceive any distress around them as if it were their own distress.
At around 2.5 years, toddlers can recognize that someone else’s pain is not their own -- now, toddlers can begin to develop the skill of comforting someone else. This is generally the point where babies begin to diverge from one another: some babies become very sensitive toddlers, while others become less sensitive.
Something that seems to have a big impact on which direction toddlers go in is how they get disciplined by their parents.
Another influencing factor is how their parents and other people react to emotional distress.
More than the dramatic events we experience as children, our most basic emotional life lessons are influenced by small, repeated life exchanges between us and our parents. Parents can either be attuned to or misattuned to their infants’ emotional states.
Attunement is a state where our emotions are responded to by our parents with empathy, acceptance, and reciprocation. It’s more than just imitation. Imitating a baby’s emotions only shows that you see what she did, not that you understand how she felt. To give a baby the sense that their feelings have been understood, you have to play back their feelings to them in a different way.
Misattunement, where our emotions are not responded to at all, or responded to with negativity and avoidance, is a deeply upsetting experience for an infant.
One study found that criminals who’d committed the worst and most violent crimes had an overwhelming commonality: in their early lives, they’d bounced from foster home to foster home or had been raised in orphanages -- essentially, they’d been deprived of any attunement or empathy in their early lives.
Conversely, children who suffer sustained and extreme emotional abuse develop a different kind of empathy that ultimately turns into something like PTSD: because they are constantly threatened by others’ emotions, the children develop an obsessive fixation with others’ emotional states, a state of hyper-alert vigilance that can result in intense mood swings that are sometimes diagnosed as borderline personality disorder.
Parents who show empathy to their children teach them to feel empathy and exercise it in their own lives.
(Shortform note: You might be wondering if parents who show too much empathy end up coddling their children -- overindulging their emotional states and becoming overprotective of them -- but this is a misunderstanding of empathy. Parents who coddle do not demonstrate empathy to their children. They demonstrate an obsessive need to neutralize all negative emotional states, and take the burden upon themselves to do so. Parents who demonstrate empathy allow their children to feel things, help them process what they’re feeling, and then teach them active ways to manage the emotional state on their own.)
How well you identify your own and others’ emotions ultimately makes you a better person. Empathy is the root of altruism -- people who can’t sense or understand another person’s needs or anguish ultimately don’t care what happens to that other person. Empathy changes the way you look at the world: when other people are in pain, you work to understand their pain and help them through it. You also work not to cause people pain: this is where morals and morality begin.
The lower someone’s capacity for empathy, the less likely they are to identify with suffering that they cannot understand, the more likely they do not view that suffering as a moral question.
An absence of empathy is incredibly telling: it’s a unifying factor among many troubled people in society, such as criminal psychopaths, rapists, and molestors.
The culmination of all the previous skills combined, when we recognize our own emotions, manage them, motivate ourselves to do better, and can empathize with others, our personal relationships are bound to improve. Managing someone else’s emotions is the key to successful relationships.
As children, we imitate others’ emotions, and this tendency never really leaves us -- we do it throughout our lives. Emotions are contagious. Whoever’s mood is stronger or whoever expresses their mood more forcefully will win out. This is called entrainment.
How in tune our emotions are with someone else’s can also speak to how close we are to that person--the stronger the emotional connection we feel with someone, the more tightly we will mirror their physical movements and emotional moods when we’re with them.
Social ineptitude is an inability to interact successfully with one’s peers. It usually begins in childhood, and without learning emotional intelligence habits, socially inept children will find themselves trapped in a cycle that can last into adulthood.
Interpersonal intelligence, or the ability to manage relationships, breaks down into 4 distinct and separate abilities:
People who possess these skills are usually natural leaders whom other people gravitate to and enjoy being around. But if these skills aren’t accompanied by a strong sense of self and self-awareness for one’s own feelings, the person will be a social chameleon, turning themselves into whatever the other person needs or wants but never having an identity of their own.
The best balance would be to be true to yourself and use your social skills with integrity. (Shortform note: We’ll go into more detail on familial and romantic relationships in the next chapter.)
Since emotional intelligence is a collection of abilities, most people aren’t totally devoid of any emotional intelligence skills. Use this exercise to analyze your own strengths and weaknesses when it comes to emotional intelligence.
Considering the five basic skills of emotional intelligence--knowing your emotions, managing emotions, motivating yourself, empathizing, relationships--which would say you’re currently strongest in? List 3 ways you use this skill in your everyday life.
Conversely, which would skill could you most improve on? List 1-2 small actions you could take immediately to start improving in this area based on what you’ve read.
Freud said, “To love and to work are the twin capacities that mark full maturity.” Goleman would most likely add “to learn” and “to take care of yourself and others” to that list, and emotional intelligence is the key to loving, working, learning, and taking care of yourself and others to the best of your abilities.
We’ll go through each of these categories -- love (romantic and familial), work, school, and health -- exploring their difficulties and some ways emotional intelligence can help overcome those difficulties. Similar to the last chapters, these chapters will be numbered 6-1, 6-2, and so on to denote their relationship to the major subject of using emotional intelligence.
Since social pressures are no longer the main catalyst for marriage, much more importance is placed on the emotional bond between two people. The current trend in divorce rates suggests we need a little more emotional intelligence in our marriages.
One primary factor in the dissolution of marriage is differing expectations, and it all starts with how we raise children to approach emotions based on their sex.
In couples experiencing marital distress, typically the woman wants to engage with her husband, and the man routinely withdraws from his wife. This stems from the two different emotional realities in a heterosexual couple, his and hers.
Emotional differences may be partially biological, but they are undeniably social. Boys and girls are taught different lessons about how to handle their emotions.
And there are differences in how girls and boys form relationships with others, even in childhood.
These lessons result in different expectations and abilities in adulthood:
One researcher found that in the dating phase men are much more likely to participate in the emotionally connected talking that women crave -- but as the relationship goes on, men spend less time talking this way and want to connect through activities.
Because men have less capability with registering and interpreting others’ emotional cues, husbands don’t notice their wives’ emotional states until they’re more intense -- a woman has to be that much sadder to get her husband to notice, let alone ask what’s making her sad. Women, as the emotional manager of a relationship, can get burnt out not only by trying to manage their male partner’s emotions, but by having to manage their own stronger and more neglect emotions by themselves.
Ironically, because men generally have a more shallow understanding of emotions, husbands also generally see their relationships in a rosier hue than their wives -- everything from sex to family relationships to finances seem on average better to men than to women. Women generally complain more vocally about their marriage than men, especially in less satisfied couples. This is precisely because they are trying to work out emotional issues and resolve grievances in their role as emotional manager.
Marital success isn’t determined by how often a couple sleeps together, or opinions on how to raise children, or how each person handles finances -- it’s determined by the skill with which a couple discusses disagreements in those categories. Agreeing on how to disagree is the key to a successful marriage.
John Gottman, one of the foremost American scholars on marriage, found that harsh criticism is an early warning sign of a marriage in danger. When either party complains in a destructive manner, such as personal attacks on their spouse’s character, it’s a telltale sign that all is not well.
Repeated incidents of anger in a marriage often lead to contempt, which is one of the most detrimental feelings that can enter into a marriage.
Criticism and contempt reflect that one spouse has made a negative mental judgment about their partner. The contemptuous spouse attacks, which causes their partner to become defensive or counterattack.
One defining factor of the toxic thoughts that lead to repeated displays of contempt is that they are absolutes: when a mistake is made, it isn’t merely a mistake that can be corrected next time, it’s proof that the person is horrible and that things won’t change. These toxic thoughts are often reflections of the spouse’s deepest emotional attitudes, and they are self-confirming and non-negotiable. Someone functioning in this way reads negative intent into every action their partner takes.
The fight or flight response comes into play when partners attack each other: the attacked partner can choose to either fight the criticisms, usually leading to a shouting match, or they can choose to flee the emotional situation, retreat emotionally, and respond with a stony, silent withdrawal. This withdrawal is called stonewalling. On the other end of the spectrum is flooding, which is an emotional hijacking of the brain.
In Gottman’s research, stonewalling showed up in marriages that were headed towards failure. Where yelling might be an indicator that both parties care about something and are trying to work it out between them, stonewalling is a sign that there’s less chance of working out differences or disagreements, since one party refuses to participate emotionally at all. 85% of the time stonewalling showed up in a relationship, it was husbands and not wives who used stonewalling as a response to criticism.
Contempt, accusations, and toxic thoughts create a constant state of crisis in a relationship, routinely triggering emotional hijacks and making it more difficult to bounce back from these negative emotional states. Gottman uses the term flooding for this state of affairs.
Men react to spousal criticism with flooding more often than women, and enter into a flooded state at lower levels of negativity than women. Men also release more adrenaline into their bloodstream when flooded, meaning it takes them longer to recover from flooding. This is why men are more likely to stonewall their wives: to avoid flooding.
Perhaps because women are generally more comfortable with emotions, they also on average will get into a marital argument more readily than men will. One study found that women didn’t mind getting upset during a disagreement, where men were uniformly averse to it.
Broadly speaking, men and women need different advice to help improve their marriages.
For men:
For women:
Goleman offers some great general advice for couples looking to improve their relationship in the way they handle disagreements:
Stick to one topic. Sometimes, arguments about one thing turn into screaming matches about all the wrongs anyone has ever committed. Keep the discussion focused -- this will help avoid personal attacks and resolve concrete issues.
Use the XYZ formula. X is the action, Y is how it made you feel, Z is what you’d prefer they did next time. “When you forgot to put gas in my car, it made me feel like you didn’t care about me. Next time you could do it first thing when you take my car, or at least let me know before I get home that you forgot.”
Give each person a chance to explain their perspective at the forefront. This will help resolve any fundamental misunderstandings right away before the argument has a chance to take hold. At the very least, it will give each person a chance to understand the other person’s point of view, which will make it more productive to continue discussing the issue.
Show your partner you’re listening. Most people in the throes of any emotional distress just want to be heard and understood. Empathy is an excellent reducer of tension. You can repeat the other person’s feelings back to them in your own words to confirm you understand them correctly. If you’ve misunderstood their feelings, you can try again until you get it right.
Learn how to soothe yourself first. If you can learn how to handle your own emotional hijackings and recover from them quickly, you’ll be able to listen to and handle your partner’s emotional hijackings with more ease. Remember, the stronger our own emotions, the less we can hear, understand, or care about someone else’s. It’s crucial to be able to calm yourself down first.
Challenge toxic thoughts. When we’re upset, it’s easy to get swept away by those black and white absolutes that keep us angry--”he doesn’t care about anyone else but himself, he’s always so selfish”. If you find yourself thinking these thoughts, try challenging them directly -- for example, intentionally remind yourself of all the thoughtful things he’s done for you. This can help balance your emotional response and bring your focus back to the action that’s upset you, instead of being upset at the person.
Try not to get defensive. When we feel attacked, we go on the defensive. In arguments, this often looks like making excuses, refusing to take responsibility, or attacking with our own criticisms. If you find yourself getting defensive, remind yourself that what feels like an attack to you is really just your partner having strong feelings about this issue -- they want you to pay attention to it, though they may not be asking for that in the healthiest way.
Validate your partner. Articulate to your partner that you can see things from their point of view and that their perspective is valid -- even if you don’t agree with it yourself. You can even simply acknowledge their emotions if you don’t necessarily agree with their argument: “I see I hurt your feelings.”
Take responsibility or apologize if you’re in the wrong. If you have the self-awareness to admit that you did do something wrong, admit it to your partner. A simple and honest apology can go a long way to smoothing over the worst disputes.
Agree on a time-out. If nothing else, both partners should be able to call a time-out and cool off if they need to, but this needs to be discussed when emotions aren’t high so it can be used in times of need. Agree on a phrase or method of calling the time-out that both partners will recognize, and then actually use the cooling off time to cool off. Refer back to the previous chapter to find tips for cooling off.
Couples who can increase their shared emotional intelligence will have a more successful marriage. Again, specific issues may be the things that get our emotions going, but it’s how we approach solving those issues together that will make or break the relationship. It’s not easy to change destructive emotional habits or improve on the pillars of emotional intelligence -- it takes time and work. Our ability to make changes runs directly in proportion to our motivation to try. To improve these things, you and your partner need to practice them in moments when you aren’t fighting. Without practice, you won’t be able to call on these tools in the heat of the moment. Rehearse them with each other in small, day-to-day moments.
Our family is the first place we learn about emotions and how to handle them. Children learn not just through the things parents say, but the things they see parents do as well.
There are 3 common parenting styles that are harmful:
We’ll look at 3 common issues parents face with their children -- anger, depression, and eating disorders -- and the danger of letting these issues go unmitigated.
Angry kids usually become bullies who, incapable of handling their own emotional reactions, take their anger out on other children, leading to social isolation, disciplinary actions, and judgement from teachers.
Bullies are more likely to drop out of school and end up with criminal records, and they’re likely to pass their violence and aggression down to their kids -- not only through genes but through nurturing and the environment of the household -- which creates more bullies.
Bullies typically come from households where punishment is an emotion-based system. When parents are in a bad mood, the punishment for misbehaving is severe. When parents are in a good mood, the kids can do whatever they want without consequences. This volatility and lack of logic creates a kind of chaos that encourages letting emotions dictate one’s actions, violence and aggression as the primary ways of dealing with negative emotions, and a lack of boundaries.
Very often, bullies come from households of abuse or neglect. Abused children are more likely to abuse their own children, creating whole family lineages of abuse passed down through the generations. Abuse shatters trust in people and the world around them, and often makes the victims feel as though something about themselves caused the abuse, or that they deserve it for some reason. On the opposite end are households where parents emotionally neglect their children -- and neglect can be more detrimental than abuse, some studies find.
Anger doesn’t always result in bullying -- sometimes angry children are social outcasts, withdrawn and overreactive to perceived insults. This is the common tendency among angry kids, whether they’re bullies or not: angry children perceive threats or slights where they’re not intended--someone bumping into them accidentally in the hall, for example -- and then lash out at those perceived threats, furthering their isolation. Most of these kids see themselves as victims who are merely acting in self-defense.
International data reflects a modern epidemic of depression in today’s young people. Each generation since the beginning of the 21st century has a higher risk than their parents of suffering major depression.
Some people think kids grow out of depression, but the opposite is true: mild episodes of depression in childhood often lead to more severe episodes in adulthood.
Depressed children, like angry children, are more likely to be isolated and ostracized in school, making it harder for them to learn social skills and build relationships that could help pull them out of depression. Depression also affects concentration and memory, leading to worse grades and poorer academic performance.
Relationship problems of any kind are the most triggering factor for depression in young people.
Handling setbacks is another frequent trigger for depression. Interpreting their failures as personal shortcomings they can’t change, or things that don’t work no matter what they seem to do, drives them deeper into depression.
Eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia develop primarily due to an inability to tell the difference between negative emotions (sadness, anxiety, anger) and bodily impulses (hunger or lack of appetite). They’re essentially incorrect responses to impulses.
Therapy that addresses these emotional deficits can go a long way in helping rehabilitate people suffering from eating disorders. Learning how to identify and distinguish between feelings, how to self-soothe or manage relationships more productively will lead to improvements in their relationship to food.
Parents who want emotionally healthy kids first need to work on their own emotional health. Setting a good example for your children is the first step you can take to better their future.
Then, parents need to encourage and help their children develop good emotional habits. This will lead to better academic performance, more social skills and better relationships, better performance in the workplace, and better health.
Parents who address emotions healthily:
Here are the qualities a child needs to be the most efficient student and a successful person. Parents can help their children learn and practice these qualities:
Many jobs require people to work together, and good teams require harmony between the members and strong leadership.
It takes a lot of top-level teamwork to fly an airplane. When a crash occurs, 80% of the time it’s because of a mistake made by a pilot that could have been prevented if the team had worked together better. Because of this, pilots in training must learn certain social intelligence skills, like open communication, listening, cooperation, and speaking up.
Of course, in everyday jobs, someone making a mistake isn’t going to result in a plane falling out of the sky and potentially killing people -- but teams that are poorly managed experience low productivity, an increase in mistakes, missed deadlines, and the loss of team members to other, better workplaces.
Emotional intelligence is particularly important to the leaders in business -- CEOs, managers, and the like -- and yet these people are usually the biggest believers in cutting emotions out of business.
The same negative effects we discussed in the Chapter 1 still happen in workplaces: stress and emotional distress make it harder to remember things, learn new things, make decisions, and work together.
Leadership shouldn’t be about dominating people, it should be about persuading them to work together for a common goal. An ideal workplace is one where every member is attuned to each other’s feelings, the team can handle disagreements without allowing them to escalate, and each member can get into a flow state while performing their job. To accomplish all that, we need emotional intelligence.
One major thing that gets in the way of workplace harmony is prejudice.
Humans have prejudices: our brains, as we read in the first chapter, are designed to identify something and whether we like it or not in the first milliseconds of seeing it, and this means our responses to things are deeply ingrained in our psyche.
But the workplace is no place for prejudice, so even if managers are humans who will have biases, they need to make a conscious effort to make decisions as though they had none. Not only is this the more humane way to manage, but it’s a more practical way to manage too:
Many companies have “diversity workshops” that last the length of one video, one day, or one weekend. The data suggests that workshops this short do little to actually shift the prejudices of the employees who need the training most.
Worse, sometimes these short workshops can bring up extremely emotional issues of discrimination or entitlement and then run out of time to resolve these issues, effectively calling attention to the differences, increasing tension, and then shortchanging the employees on any of the difficult work it takes to improve upon these dynamics.
First, it helps to have an understanding of where prejudice comes from:
Though it is extremely hard to change a person’s innate and long-held biases, we can change what we do about them. Here are a couple ways you can begin to change prejudices in your workplace:
It’s not enough to just have people from different backgrounds working at the same place. When schools in the US were desegregated, white and Black students did not immediately get along just by nature of sharing space. However, when people have to work together directly to achieve a common goal, they begin to see each other as human, and stereotypes generally start to break down little by little.
How authority figures address prejudice sets the example for how everyone else will address it. For a better workplace with less prejudice, tackle it with the same rules as effective criticism. It’s most effective to suppress the expression of prejudice, instead of trying to rehabilitate the attitude itself. As a manager, you can’t necessarily change what a person believes, but you can change how they behave at work.
Assuming that prejudices have been handled, now employees can focus on working well together.
Many people today are “knowledge workers,” workers who specialize in adding value to knowledge -- computer programmers, data analysts, writers, and so on. The productivity of these workers depends on their coordination in an organized team--computer programmers program the software but don’t distribute it, writers write but don’t publish. In other words, they rely on other people to help make the work happen.
Instead of serving as an individual work unit, knowledge workers are part of a team, and the team becomes the work unit. Just as emotional intelligence is important for an individual to navigate work, for a group to do their best work together it’s important for a team to have a collective emotional intelligence (Shortform note: Goleman somewhat confusingly refers to this as group IQ, despite it being emotional intelligence).
A handful of things can bring down a group’s performance, all of them in the realm of emotional intelligence:
There are a variety of circumstances in any workplace where group emotional IQ comes into play: meetings, emails, conferences, work teams, and even informal individual networks. Managers or team members looking to improve their group’s IQ should organize some emotional intelligence training, both for themselves and the other members.
Even workplaces without organized team efforts still benefit from employees with emotional intelligence.
Individual “stars” at a workplace do something that sets them apart from other employees: they have an informal network of fellow workers they can call on when they need something specific, on account of developing and maintaining personal relationships with these workers.
The formal hierarchy and network at an organization is designed to deal with anticipated problems on the job -- but having an informal network of fellow workers becomes more important in the face of unanticipated problems. These informal networks are good in a crisis because they do not have to go through the typical channels, allowing workers to focus on specifically what needs to get done and bypass unnecessary functions.
There are three types of informal networks, based on the type of connection needed.
Workers with high emotional intelligence have networks in all three categories. They form these networks by making themselves available for all three: they talk to other employees, share their expertise, and are dependable, responsible, and tactful (which builds trust).
Criticism, or feedback, is one of the major workplace areas that we need emotional intelligence.
People need feedback to do their jobs better and keep their work on track. Like cogs in a clock, every part of a system needs to be running at its best to keep the whole system going; in a workplace, people are the cogs, and everyone needs feedback to improve their performance for the sake of the whole.
When people don’t get feedback, they’re in the dark: they don’t know how their boss or their peers feel about their work, they don’t know exactly what’s expected of them and whether they’re meeting those expectations, and if there are any issues with their performance, they’re left to get worse as time goes on.
Managers must be good at both giving feedback and receiving it. It makes a difference in how successful a workplace is. The better you are at giving feedback and receiving it yourself, the more satisfied and more productive your employees will be. Feedback should be used to motivate your employees to do better.
If you want to give good feedback, here are things to avoid:
Mishandling feedback can demoralize employees, causing them to refuse to cooperate or avoid managers altogether.
Some managers delay giving feedback for long periods of time. This is counterproductive: employees don’t suddenly develop problems in their performance, usually the problems develop over time. Managers have to use feedback proactively -- they can’t let criticism come only when things are at their breaking point. When feedback is given earlier, the employee has more time to fix the issue and can catch it before it gets worse.
Also, managers are human, too: when managers let criticisms build up in their minds, they usually end up giving criticism in the least helpful way, as a long list of personal attacks on the employee that have been festering over time.
Some managers only give criticism, and this, too, can be bad for morale. Praise and criticism should be balanced: letting employees know what they’re doing well reinforces good habits and keeps their spirits lifted. A healthy balance of praise and criticism lets the praise motivate employees to fix the criticisms.
Here’s how to give good feedback:
Here are some approaches for receiving criticism to the best results:
In 1990, the US experienced the highest rates it had ever seen of juvenile arrests for violent crimes, teen arrests for rape, teen murder rates, suicide rates, and murder victims under the agen of 14. Children at the time were also reported as doing worse in school, socialization, and mood. Wealth made no difference, and neither did ethnicity or race -- the problems were universal.
Internationally, families are plagued by financial worries and other stresses, meaning parents can’t spend as much time with their children to teach them emotional intelligence. The need to make money has also increased mobility -- people move to where jobs are -- so kids have less connection to their extended family, another source of learning.
Since family life doesn’t necessarily offer the same connections and instruction it once did, schools have become the one place communities can depend on to educate their children and correct their behaviors. It’s the one place most children go, and it presents a big opportunity to positively impact upcoming generations.
Emotional literacy is a bigger challenge facing today’s students than any low scores in math or reading, and yet most schools do nothing about this incredibly important subject. Not only that, but emotional distress has significant negative effects on performance -- so schools looking to get better academic performance from their students should think about introducing emotional intelligence education.
Kids are building differently fundamental skills at different ages, and at different ages, schools and teachers can help them improve critical life skills:
Children who are angry, depressed, anxious, timid or shy, or socially awkward in particular are at risk of dropping out of school: social rejects will find it more difficult to complete schooling at any level.
High anxiety is almost a guarantee that someone will perform poorly under pressure. Many difficult things children face -- poverty, abuse, social rejection, racism, sexism, ableism -- cause high levels of anxiety, though these factors may not be easily identifiable by teachers.
Even when someone has a higher IQ, if they also have higher levels of anxiety, they’ll be less likely to fail a test of any kind and perform worse in academic environments.
Anxiety generally circles around self-defeating thoughts that turn into absolutes--”I’ll never be able to do this, I’m not good at this kind of thing”--and this kind of thinking also turns into self-fulfilling prophecies, and ultimately undermines someone’s ability to make decisions with confidence.
Not all anxiety is bad -- it’s how we deal with anxiety that determines whether we succeed. Some students crumble under anxiety and perform poorly; some students let their anxiety motivate them to prepare for the challenge, try their hardest, and ultimately succeed.
There’s an ideal peak of useful anxiety in which the amount of nervousness propels the worrier towards excellence. Too little anxiety and someone will feel unmotivated or apathetic about the task at hand; too much anxiety and the person will feel overwhelmed by the pressure and the potential for failure.
Good moods and positive feelings enhance our ability to be creative, complex, and flexible, three necessary components for problem-solving.
It’s never too early to start introducing emotional intelligence into the learning environment.
In experiments, researchers put emotional intelligence programming into place in schools. Kids and classes who went through emotional intelligence training saw the following benefits:
Teachers are already burdened by state-sanctioned requirements, curriculum, and testing material, and it might seem overwhelming to have to introduce emotional intelligence components into totally separate courses.
The good news is that emotional intelligence lessons can be easily integrated into existing subjects, and can be taught alongside already present curriculum.
One major way teachers can begin to incorporate emotional intelligence into daily school life is by adjusting they way the discipline problem students. Again, most teachers are overwhelmed as it is, and there aren’t enough hours in the day to train every individual problem student to be more emotionally intelligent. But any disciplinary moment is an opportunity to begin to teach children impulse control, understanding and explaining their feelings, and conflict management.
And, if teachers feel up to it, they can incorporate a variety of lessons directly on emotional intelligence in to the day-to-day activities of their classroom.
Teachers become fundamental components in this new framework: they must go beyond their traditional duties and take on more responsibility. Just as parents serve as instructive teachers just based on their own behavior, so teachers also set examples for their students of how to handle emotional situations.
Though it may be more costly upfront -- in both time and money -- to introduce emotional intelligence into the classroom, it will ultimately boost academic performance, improve graduation rates, and would be worth the initial investment in the positive dividends it pays down the line.
Emotions are deeply connected to sickness and health, how vulnerable a patient is to disease, or how fast a patient recovers -- and yet medicine and medical care often lack any trace of emotional intelligence.
Emotional interventions should be routine practice in medical care.
There’s a subtle difference between disease and illness: disease is the thing a doctor can cure, but illness is the thing a patient suffers. Emotional wellness might not seem to have a correlation to how well a disease is cured -- but it has a great impact on how little or how much or just how a patient suffers through their illness.
This is not to say that emotional well-being can, on its own, cure a disease--there are a lot of current trends that suggest people can cure themselves by thinking positively, which is dangerous, not only because it disregards the necessity of medicine in curing illnesses but also because it can make people feel like they’re to blame if they get sick, that it must be in their minds or because they’re not strong enough to “will” themselves to be well.
Our immune system is the brain of our body, deciding what belongs in our body and what doesn’t, and rejecting the latter. When it recognizes cells, it leaves them alone; when it doesn’t recognize them, it attacks. When it works correctly, our body fights off bacteria, viruses, even cancer -- but if it judges incorrectly, it can end up attacking necessary cells and leading to autoimmune diseases like lupus or allergies.
The nervous system is innately connected to our immune system, and, like the brain, our immune system can learn.
The chemical messengers with the most extensive operation in the brain and the immune system are most densely found in the neural areas responsible for regulating emotion. So the nervous system not only communicates with the immune system, it is necessary for the immune system to function properly.
Stress can negatively affect immune resistance, though it is temporary -- presumably directing energy away from the immune system to deal with the stressor. Of course, if the stress itself is continuous and intense, the resulting suppression of the immune system also continues.
Studies have shown that toxic emotions (stress, negativity, etc.) diminish the effectiveness of some immune cells, though it is not conclusive whether the effect is great enough to make a difference. But it is an accepted practice among surgeons to cancel a surgery if a patient is too scared -- scared patients in surgery bleed more, get more infections or sustain more complications, and have a more difficult road to recovery.
There are three main negative emotions that impact health: anger, anxiety, and depression. We’ll now go into a little more detail on each.
Anger has a major impact on heart health: when we’re angry, the pumping efficiency of our heart drops, sometimes by a small amount, but in some cases by 7% or greater, a state which cardiologists classify as a sign of myocardial ischemia, when blood flow to the heart drops at a dangerous rate.
Higher levels are anger are also connected to dying younger. One study performed on physicians themselves found that physicians with the highest scores on a hostility test were 7 times more likely to die by the age of 50 than physicians with lower scores.
Of course, anger by itself does not cause heart problems -- but it is one extremely important factor that affects heart performance. And high levels of anger can be lethal to people who already have heart disease.
None of this is to say that suppressing your anger will lead to a healthier heart; on the contrary, suppressing anger can intensify the physical agitation and raise blood pressure even more. The determining quality that makes anger harmful to your health is whether it’s chronic or not. Everyone gets angry from time to time -- it’s when you find yourself constantly angry, jumping to anger immediately as a first emotional resort, or in prolonged periods of intense anger, that anger becomes chronic.
But anger and hostility, like all other emotional reactions, can be learned about and controlled. For helpful ways to deal with anger, refer back to previous sections, particularly Managing Emotions.
The most deadly emotion for men is anger, which puts them at greater risk of heart disease. The most deadly emotion for women is anxiety, which puts them at greater risk of developing infections and disease.
Chronic anxiety can:
The more stressed we are, the worse our immune system functions. This is why we get sick during stressful periods of time, or right after. Again, it is not clear if the range of impact is of clinical significance.
Unlike anger and anxiety which can lead to the onset of diseases, depression plays a part in worsening many other existing medical conditions.
Depression often gets overlooked when it accompanies more serious physical illnesses because the symptoms of depression overlap with those illnesses. For instance, loss of appetite, fatigue, or emotional outbursts in a cancer patient might not give a doctor pause -- but they could be signs of accompanying depression, which, untreated, might make the patient’s recovery longer, harder, and less successful.
Depression can negatively affect a patient’s recovery because it reduces their will to take care of themselves, their energy to do so, and numbs them to the possible consequences of doing so.
Though it might cost more money up front to treat depression alongside other medical conditions, arguably it would save more money in the long run to do so.
Society often looks at drug addicts or alcoholics as people who just can’t control their impulses, and this is true in the sense that impulses are generally emotional needs. One theory suggests that addicts have a chemical imbalance in their brain -- but instead of being treated with medication, they’ve found an addictive drug to treat themselves with.
Most addicts suffer from chronic depression, anxiety, or anger. When they find a substance that counteracts what they’re suffering from, they turn again and again to that drug to stabilize them. Many addicts reported finally feeling “normal” when they use their particular drug. What drug they eventually develop a long-term habit with depends on which of these they’re suffering from.
Emotional intelligence education could go a long way in aiding recovering addicts. While some rehabilitation centers and support groups such as AA attempt to do this, making emotional intelligence a routine part of any addict’s medical care would most likely increase positive results.
Hope can be beneficial, though not a cure-all, for patients facing illness or disease. Patients with greater hope are generally more positive, more willing to try things to recover, and generally take better care of themselves.
Strong relationships are another benefit of emotional intelligence that have positive medical benefits. Feeling like you have no close contact with anyone and no one to share your feelings with -- feeling socially isolated, in other words -- doubles your chance of sickness or death.
In fact, isolation is as big a health risk if not bigger than lack of exercise, obesity, high blood pressure and cholesterol, and smoking. Where smoking increases your risk of mortality by a factor of 1.6, isolation increases it by 2.0. Social isolation is more deadly than smoking.
Social isolation takes a greater toll on men than on women. Isolated women are 1.5 times more likely to die than social women; for men, the risk is 2-3 times.
Isolation isn’t the same as solitude. It doesn’t matter how few friends you have or how infrequently you see them. Isolation implies feeling like you’re cut off from people without it being your choice.
Goleman says medicine must take to heart 2 findings from this research:
To improve the emotional intelligence of both patients and doctors, medicine can:
There are 3 target groups that, if they received instruction in basic emotional intelligence, could lead to broad public-health benefits:
Medicine has become more of a business and less of a public health service. But again, though it might cost more up front, addressing the impact that emotions have on physical wellness would ultimately save the medical industry more money down the line by preventing disease and illness before they occur or offsetting some of the additional damage done by toxic emotions. And since, more and more, patients get to choose their doctors and health plans, medical practitioners and hospitals that have more satisfied patients will be more likely to retain those patients and gain others through member loyalty.
The issues discussed here are not simple issues and can’t be written off as having a single source that causes them. They’re complex, stemming from biological characteristics, family status, parental nurturing, class, location, and many other factors. Emotional intelligence won’t solve all these problems by itself--but alongside other solutions, emotional intelligence is a necessary component and should be more widely taught.
Research psychologists also can’t make the change on their own: we need better emotional intelligence training in our school systems, our homes, and our hospitals. Information isn’t enough. Handing out a pamphlet on emotional intelligence won’t help anyone solve their emotional issues. Practice and dedication are the only way to learn these skills.
Learning emotional intelligence can of course help us improve later in our lives, since emotional learning is lifelong learning. But many of our major societal problems could be positively offset by training children in emotional intelligence early in their lives, so that they have the skills they need to be resilient and bounce back later in life.
No one realm can do it alone. The more all parts of our society work in tandem, the better the results will be. Imagine what the world would look like if every individual worked on their own emotional intelligence, and couples practice emotional intelligence between themselves, and parents raised their kids with emotional intelligence, and workplaces made it a priority, and schools taught it in their classrooms, and hospitals practiced it in their halls.
Self-awareness is one of the first major steps towards controlling your emotional responses. Use this exercise to help analyze your own emotional responses and improve the way you act on them.
Think of a situation where something small seemed to set off an overwhelming emotional response in your brain. Briefly summarize the situation, what it was that set you off, and what emotions it sparks in you (refer back to the list for emotion words in Chapter X).
How do those feelings affect your actions afterwards? For example, some people lash out and attack the other person when they feel hurt, or shut down emotionally and withdraw from the conversation if they feel embarrassed.
Based on what we’ve covered, what’s one small thing you could do the next time you feel that way to better handle your emotional response? (For example, physically cool off, remind yourself the other person’s acting out of love, use the XYZ formula for expressing complaints.)
Once we begin improving our emotional intelligence skills in any arena of life, they translate over to other arenas--but we have to start somewhere. Use this exercise to explore which of the 5 life areas you’d most like to improve in, and how to start.
Which of the 5 arenas (romance, family, work, school, and medicine) would you like to improve your emotional intelligence in first? Why is that arena important to you?
Referring back to the “what X can do” section for your chosen arena, pick one of the helpful suggestions and write down how you can apply it to your own life immediately or the steps you can take right now to start putting that suggestion into action.
As we know, putting thoughts and feelings into words is one way to process them, reflect on them, and take ownership of them. Use this exercise to help solidify your biggest takeaway from the book.
In a few sentences, what was your biggest takeaway from the summary? What idea lodged in your brain, or what’s the first idea that jumps into your brain when you think about this summary?
How can you apply this takeaway to your life, and how will it help you? For instance, you know now that emotions can’t be controlled, but you can control how you act on them. This might help you avoid judging your emotions, and take time to decide what to do about them.