Emotional Intelligence

by Daniel Goleman

People who are optimistic see a failure as due to something that can be changed so that they can succeed next time around, while pessimists take the blame for failure, ascribing it to some lasting characteristic they are helpless to change.

My hunch is that for a given level of intelligence, your actual achievement is a function not just of talent, but also of the capacity to stand defeat.”

Optimism and hope—like helplessness and despair—can be learned. Underlying both is an outlook psychologists call self-efficacy, the belief that one has mastery over the events of one’s life and can meet challenges as they come up. Developing a competency of any kind strengthens the sense of self-efficacy, making a person more willing to take risks and seek out more demanding challenges. And surmounting those challenges in turn increases the sense of self-efficacy. This attitude makes people more likely to make the best use of whatever skills they may have—or to do what it takes to develop them.

People who have a sense of self-efficacy bounce back from failures; they approach things in terms of how to handle them rather than worrying about what can go wrong.”

blissful,

ennui of depression

“People seem to concentrate best when the demands on them are a bit greater than usual, and they are able to give more than usual. If there is too little demand on them, people are bored. If there is too much for them to handle, they get anxious. Flow occurs in that delicate zone between boredom and anxiety.”28

Creative achievements depend on single-minded immersion.”

But you learn at your best when you have something you care about and you can get pleasure from being engaged in.”

bespeak

rapport,

telling.

The skills that allow us to do this well or poorly are also, for the most part, learned tacitly.

Such motor mimicry, as it is called, is the original technical sense of the word empathy as it was first used in the 1920s by E. B. Titchener, an American psychologist. This sense is slightly different from its original introduction into English from the Greek empatheia, “feeling into,” a term used initially by theoreticians of aesthetics for the ability to perceive the subjective experience of another person.

Of all such moments, the most critical are those that let the child know her emotions are met with empathy, accepted, and reciprocated, in a process Stern calls attunement.

Stern contends that the countlessly repeated moments of attunement or misattunement between parent and child shape the emotional expectations adults bring to their close relationships—perhaps far more than the more dramatic events of childhood.

Attunement is very different from simple imitation. “If you just imitate a baby,” Stern told me, “that only shows you know what he did, not how he felt. To let him know you sense how he feels, you have to play back his inner feelings in another way. Then the baby knows he is understood.”

But there is hope in “reparative” relationships: “Relationships throughout life—with friends or relatives, for example, or in psychotherapy—continually reshape your working model of relationships. An imbalance at one point can be corrected later; it’s an ongoing, lifelong process.”

were very poor at surmising what their partner was feeling. Only when their bodies were in synch was there empathy.

in adolescence, can buttress moral convictions centered on wanting to alleviate misfortune and injustice.

In the attack, Kerrigan’s knee was battered,

The cruelest of criminals, such as sadistic serial killers who delight in the suffering of their victims before they die, are the epitome of psychopathy.

Psychopaths are also glib liars,

This means they are growing physiologically calmer, even as they get more belligerent and abusive.

But Len is proffered comfort from an unlikely source: Jay, who, although the original injured party, is now so concerned by his older brother’s tears that he undertakes a campaign to calm Len down. The exchange goes something like this:

Attunement to others demands a modicum of calm in oneself. Tentative signs of this ability to manage their own emotions emerge around this same period: toddlers begin to be able to wait without wailing, to argue or cajole to get their way rather than using brute force—even if they don’t always choose to use this ability.