More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Almost three out of four executives see EI as a “must-have” skill for the workplace in the future as the automatizing of routine tasks bumps up against the impossibility of creating effective AI for activities that require emotional skill.
Anyone can become angry—that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way—that is not easy.
which include self-control, zeal and persistence, and the ability to motivate oneself.
The ability to control impulse is the base of will and character. By the same token, the root of altruism lies in empathy, the ability to read emotions in others; lacking a sense of another’s need or despair, there is no caring.
And if there are any two moral stances that our times call for, they are precisely these, self-restraint and compassion.
All emotions are, in essence, impulses to act, the instant plans for handling life that evolution has instilled in us. The very root of the word emotion is motere, the Latin verb “to move,” plus the prefix “e-” to connote “move away,” suggesting that a tendency to act is implicit in every emotion.
In a very real sense we have two minds, one that thinks and one that feels.
feelings are essential to thought, thought to feeling.
But when passions surge the balance tips: it is the emotional mind that captures the upper hand, swamping the rational mind.
The fact that the thinking brain grew from the emotional reveals much about the relationship of thought to feeling; there was an emotional brain long before there was a rational one.
“Some emotional reactions and emotional memories can be formed without any conscious, cognitive participation at all.”
Other research has shown that in the first few milliseconds of our perceiving something we not only unconsciously comprehend what it is, but decide whether we like it or not; the “cognitive unconscious” presents our awareness with not just the identity of what we see, but an opinion about it.7 Our emotions have a mind of their own, one which can hold views quite independently of our rational mind.
While the hippocampus remembers the dry facts, the amygdala retains the emotional flavor that goes with those facts. If we try to pass a car on a two-lane highway and narrowly miss having a head-on collision, the hippocampus retains the specifics of the incident, like what stretch of road we were on, who was with us, what the other car looked like. But it is the amygdala that ever after will send a surge of anxiety through us whenever we try to pass a car in similar circumstances.
emotional intelligence: abilities such as being able to motivate oneself and persist in the face of frustrations; to control impulse and delay gratification; to regulate one’s moods and keep distress from swamping the ability to think; to empathize and to hope. Unlike
People with well-developed emotional skills are also more likely to be content and effective in their lives, mastering the habits of mind that foster their own productivity; people who cannot marshal some control over their emotional life fight inner battles that sabotage their ability for focused work and clear thought.
Self-awareness, in short, means being “aware of both our mood and our thoughts about that mood,”
Alexithymics rarely cry, for example, but if they do their tears are copious.
The goal is balance, not emotional suppression: every feeling has its value and significance.
“Anger is never without a reason, but seldom a good one.”
two main ways of intervening. One way of defusing anger is to seize on and challenge the thoughts that trigger the surges of anger, since it is the original appraisal of an interaction that confirms and encourages the first burst of anger, and the subsequent reappraisals that fan the flames. Timing matters; the earlier in the anger cycle the more effective. Indeed, anger can be completely short-circuited if the mitigating information comes before the anger is acted on. The power of understanding to
use self-awareness to catch cynical or hostile thoughts as they arise, and write them down. Once angry thoughts are captured this way, they can be challenged and reappraised, though, as Zillmann found, this approach works better before anger has escalated to rage.
time after time, found that giving vent to anger did little or nothing to dispel it (though, because of the seductive nature of anger, it may feel satisfying).
The one thing that worked in helping them
get to sleep was getting their minds off their worries, focusing instead on the sensations produced by a relaxation method. In short, the worries could be stopped by shifting attention away.
This combination of mindfulness and healthy skepticism would, presumably, act as a brake on the neural activation that underlies low-grade anxiety.
Two strategies are particularly effective in the battle.16 One is to learn to challenge the thoughts at the center of rumination—to question their validity and think of more positive alternatives. The other is to purposely schedule pleasant, distracting events.
While crying can sometimes break a spell of sadness, it can also leave the person still obsessing about the reasons for despair. The idea of a “good cry” is misleading: crying that reinforces rumination only prolongs the misery.
Distractions break the chain of sadness-maintaining thinking; one
(A note of caution here: Some distractors in themselves can perpetuate depression. Studies of heavy TV watchers have found that, after watching TV, they are generally more depressed than before they started!)
In short, unflappableness is a kind of upbeat denial, a positive dissociation—and, possibly, a clue to neural
mechanisms at play in the more severe dissociative states that can occur in, say, post-traumatic stress disorder. When it is simply involved in equanimity, says Davidson, “it seems to be a successful strategy for emotional self-regulation” though with an unknown cost to self-awareness.
On the other hand, consider the role of positive motivation—the marshaling of feelings like enthusiasm and confidence to enhance achievement. Studies of Olympic athletes, world-class musicians, and chess grand masters find their unifying trait is the ability to motivate themselves to pursue relentless training routines.4 And, with a steady rise in the degree of excellence required to be a world-class performer, these rigorous training routines now increasingly must begin in childhood.
There is perhaps no psychological skill more fundamental than resisting impulse.
Our worries become self-fulfilling prophecies, propelling us toward the very disaster they predict.
People who are adept at harnessing their emotions, on the other hand, can use anticipatory anxiety—about an upcoming speech or test, say—to motivate themselves to prepare well for it, thereby doing well.
Good moods, while they last,
enhance the ability to think flexibly and with more complexity, thus making it easier to find solutions to problems, whether intellectual or interpersonal.
“believing you have both the will and the way to accomplish your goals, whatever they may be.”
Optimism, like hope, means having a strong expectation that, in general, things will turn out all right in life, despite setbacks and frustrations.
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.”
As the noes mount up, morale can deteriorate, making it harder and harder to pick up the phone for the next call. Such rejection is especially hard to take for a pessimist, who interprets it as meaning, “I’m a failure at this; I’ll never make a sale”—an interpretation that is sure to trigger apathy and defeatism, if not depression. Optimists, on the other hand, tell themselves, “I’m using the wrong approach,” or “That last person was just in a bad mood.”
self-efficacy, the belief that one has mastery over the events of one’s life and can meet challenges as they come up.
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.”24
“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.”
Empathy builds on self-awareness; the more open we are to our own emotions, the more skilled we will be in reading feelings.
People’s emotions are rarely put into words; far more often they are expressed through other cues. The key to intuiting another’s feelings is in the ability to read nonverbal channels: tone of voice, gesture, facial expression, and the like.
Just as the mode of the rational mind is words, the mode of the emotions is nonverbal.
Children, they found, were more empathic when the discipline included calling strong attention to the distress their misbehavior caused someone else: “Look how sad you’ve made her feel” instead of “That was naughty.”
is to balance being true to oneself with social skills, using them with integrity.
