Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

by Charles Duhigg

Emotional intelligence. The concept was just then being defined by two psychologists at Yale, who argued that there was a form of “social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions.” People with emotional intelligence knew how to build relationships and empathize with colleagues, as well as regulate their own emotionality and the emotions of those around them. “These individuals,” the Yale researchers wrote in the journal Imagination, Cognition and Personality in 1990, “are aware of their own feelings and those of others. They are open to positive and negative aspects of internal experience, are able to label them, and when appropriate, communicate them…. The emotionally intelligent person is often a pleasure to be around and leaves others feeling better. The emotionally intelligent person, however, does not mindlessly seek pleasure, but rather attends to emotion in the path toward growth.”