Daniel Goleman's Blog, page 20

EI and keeping in line with one’s goals

Q: What would be the one thing you would suggest so one could be aware on the spot that her emotions are activated against her will and pulling her into a direction that is not aligned with her goals?

A: Mindfulness. This attentional training enhances what cognitive scientists call meta-awareness, the ability to monitor your own mind and emotions moment by moment. This lets you see an emotion build and manage it so your actions align with your goals

Emotional intelligence and stress

Q: Does emotional intelligence cause stress? I am a student and practitioner of EI and also your admirer for your extensive work on this comprehensive behavioral system. However, I have experienced stress occasionally for not being able to speak my mind candidly in order to be emotionally intelligent in dealing with others.

A: Emotional intelligence should help you handle stress better, for several reasons. There are four parts to EI: self-awareness, self-management, empathy and social skill.  Self-awareness  can help you notice when you are becoming stressed, which in turn make you better able to calm down before your reaction builds to an unmanageable level. Empathy and social skill should allow you to be more effective in how you express yourself–including knowing how and when to be candid. But these skills need to be learned. Good luck!

Handprints

When I bought  a bag of chips in England it had some bad news printed on the back. First, the chips had 14 grams of fat. Bad enough. Worse, they had caused 75 grams of carbon to be released.

That bag called my attention to my carbon footprint: those 75 grams added to the 2.3 million from the plane I took there and back, plus the total of all the carbon impacts of everything else I do and buy. Call it carbon guilt, but just thinking about it gets me depressed.

Enter the good news: handprints, the sum total of all the positive changes we make that lower our footprint. That’s something we can feel good about.

To know precisely how big our carbon prints are we need to do the math on what we buy and do. The metrics for this come from life cycle assessment, or LCA, which was used to calculate the carbon released over the entire life history of those chips, from the planting of the potatoes to tossing the empty bag in the trash.

Handprints are the brain child of Gregory Norris, who teaches LCA at the Harvard School of Public Health. He has set up a website [RUTH: url TK] that let’s us calculate our handprint and pledge or confirm ways we intend to enlarge it – with a Facebook status update about the action.

One neat feature: if your friends do the same because they learned from you (like boosting fuel efficiency by inflating their tires to the correct pressure), your handprint increases, too. The more people we recruit, the bigger our handprint (picture a girl scout troop going door to door with tire gauges and pumps). Now there’s a feature just waiting for a gaming app – one way more beneficial than becoming “mayor” of the water cooler.

This could grow into a market force for a cooler planet. The more we all pursue our handprints, the greater the financial incentives for eco-friendly innovations like the new carbon-negative cement (5% of the human carbon footprint is from cement) that stores carbon instead of releasing it.

Elke Weber, a cognitive scientist at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, says the handprint might remedy a major reason so few people go from awareness of global warming to ongoing action. When folks harp on the harm we do to the planet we feel bad and want to do something to feel better – and then we tune out. But if we have a positive goal in mind that we can take small, manageable steps toward, we feel good — and so are more likely to keep going.

Any group has a handprint, the sum total of its activities. Norris envisions a day when individuals and families, schools and clubs, companies and cities – maybe even nations – would compete on the size of their handprints.

Now that’s a game where we’d all be winners.

A slightly different version of this article ran recently in Time.

Money is emotional

Q:   I work with my wife. I am a psychologist, financial analyst and family business consultant. She is a financial planner. I have been struck by the need for emotional intelligence regarding money and finance, but have not seen any writings specifically directed at that area. Any resources or ideas that you would recommend as helpful?

A: If there's any topic that arouses the amygdala – the brain's center for hope and fear – it's money.  The connection between emotions and thinking about financial decisions is the focus of the relatively new field of neuroeconomics. These brain scans typically show how irrational we really are while making what we think are rational decisions – especially about money.

In Working With Emotional Intelligence I wrote about research done at a branch of American Express that helped people invest their retirement savings.  In work led by Doug Lennick, financial advisors were given some training in basic EI skills like self-awareness and empathy. These advisors were then better able to raise difficult questions with clients, and so help them make more sound decisions about how best to invest. They could sense their own anxiety, and the uneasiness of their clients, and bring it up rather than try to ignore it.

Does meditation squelch creativity?

Q: I just watched "Creating A-Ha Moments."  Being rather creative in my work, I could very much relate to what you said. One thing however troubles me. I have been reading and enjoying Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn's books on mindfulness, and have been "practicing" as best as I can awareness through out the day. It seems to me that the need for day dreaming as a conduit to "A-ha" is somewhat contradictory to awareness. I am aware of that clutter of thoughts that endlessly flows through my mind and how valuable Awareness is. But on the other hand, I also know the value of day dreaming under the shower or walking my dog, which is when I get my best ideas. How do you suggest one might reconcile those two apparently contradictory states of mind?

A: There's a good reason your best ideas come to you in the shower or while walking your dog: the mind makes more associations while in a relaxed state. Creativity comes from finding fresh connections, and when you relax your brain goes into an alpha wave state that activates your right hemisphere. The right hemisphere makes more and wider connections to the rest of the brain than does the left, which is active when we are task-focused.

When you are practicing mindfulness, your stance toward the contents of your stream of awareness is neutral: your worst fear and your best creative insight are supposed to be treated the same – you just note them and let them go.  As Jon Kabat-Zinn (an old friend) has shown, this change in our relationship to our thoughts has huge benefits for many people who suffer from chronic disease or intractable pain. And a stream of new clinical benefits from mindfulness-based stress reduction, which Jon developed, continues to be discovered.

One area that strict mindfulness may inhibit, though, is creative insights. You may get into a relaxed brain state while practicing mindfulness, and have Aha! moments, but if you are rigorous in following the instructions, you are supposed to just let these go.  When I first tried mindfulness while in my 20s with a teacher in India, I told him I was frustrated that I'd get a great idea, but have to just let it go. He advised me to keep a notepad nearby and make a quick note if I had a fantastic insight, then just continue with mindfulness and follow the idea up afterward.

There are, of course, many ways to get into a relaxed state. Jon Kabat-Zinn and I collaborated on some research years ago on which relaxation methods worked best for which people – not everyone, for instance, relaxes best with yoga or with meditation. That's why I made "Relax"which gives instructions in six different relaxation methods, so folks can try out several and then stick with the one that appeals most to them.

What is leadership?

Q: My question for you: If you had to write a definition of leadership what would it be?

A: Leadership is Influencing people to take action.  In the workplace, leadership is the art of getting work done through other people.  Leadership can be widely distributed within an organization – most everyone leads at some time or other, if not all the time.  And it's highly situational: anyone might step forward to lead, given the right circumstances.

Chess, anyone?

Q: I have a chess school for young kids (from 4 years old) and our great challenge is how to deal with their emotions and feelings related to winning and losing, i.e., how to face the results. Our principal goal is to improve thought habits through chess and pre-chess, but it is not easy when kids have to face competition. How can we improve our work in this way? (We are a professional chess player and a neurobiologist.)

A: This sounds like a wonderful way to help kids develop both their analytic skills and some key emotional intelligence abilities, like self-management.  In helping kids manage their feelings about winning and losing, you might consider using some cognitive reframing — that is, redefining the situation in a better way for them.  So you might talk about how many games you played at their age, and how even when you lost you learned valuable lessons that helped you win later. Or you might help them see every game as a chance to master specific moves or sequences of moves, and that the overall outcome is not that important at this point.  In other words, tell stories that help them care less about winning and losing these particular games, and make the process of learning more important.

Growth stages of EI

Q: Are there growth stages defined regarding emotional intelligence? I'm thinking about Erikson, Maslow, Kohlberg and so on. The question therefore looks to understanding how early parenting and education might impact the development of mature emotional intelligence and what might lead us to a better understanding/development of creative emotional qualities.

A: Yes, the stages are well-defined, and have been known to developmental psychologists for many years.  So an EI ability like empathy begins with early roots in infancy, grows among toddlers, and develops further as a child brain matures throughout childhood and the teen years. This is the basis of social-emotional learning, which uses school-based programs to ensure that every child gets the EI lessons they need at the right time and in the right way to foster their emotional and social development. See the outstanding work of the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning particularly the developmental standards they put together for the State of Illinois.

 

Positive vs. negative work environments

Q: I ran across a site citing you as saying "positive work environments outperform negative work environments." Do you have any research or studies that support this?

A. I wouldn't put it exactly that way. You need to be more specific about what you mean by "positive" and "negative". For example, in my books I've reviewed much research on workplace climate that shows a more positive emotional atmosphere fosters better performance, and so does positive mood on teams. And then there's the crucial emotional impact of an emotionally intelligent leader in creating that positive emotional climate.   Much of this research is reviewed in the new collection of my writings, Leadership: The Power of Emotional Intelligence.

A successful virtual office

Q: My industry has a severe shortage of engineers, especially locally. Our recruiting difficulties have caused me to consider making my company a "virtual office," so that I can recruit the top engineers from around the country without having to overcome the large hurdle of relocation. I've read what you've written about the emotional barrenness of emails and about the improvements seen in work effectiveness seen when people communicated in-person, even as informally as a "hello" over the water cooler. Can you provide some guidance on how to set up a successful "virtual office" or point me towards some recommended reading?

A: A virtual office makes great sense in your case, and can be quite workable.  The key will be balancing some in-person time, when you gather everyone together for some days together to plan, generate objectives, divide functions clearly, and so on.  But during that face time there's another crucial goal: having down time to get to know each other.  That will make the virtual part work better. The expert on this is Clay Shirky. I had a conversation with him about the pitfalls and how to avoid them, available as a downloadable audio conversation.