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In a very real sense we have two minds, one that thinks and one that feels.
THE EMOTIONAL SENTINEL
but LeDoux discovered a smaller bundle of neurons that leads directly from
the thalamus to the amygdala, in addition to those going through the larger path of neurons to the cortex.
This smaller and shorter pathway—something like a neural back alley—allows the amygdala to receive some direct inputs from the senses and start a response before...
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Our emotions have a mind of their own,
“precognitive emotion,”
Interpersonal intelligence is the ability to understand other people: what motivates them, how they work, how to work cooperatively with them. Successful salespeople, politicians, teachers, clinicians, and religious leaders are all likely to be individuals with high degrees of interpersonal intelligence.
Intrapersonal intelligence…is a correlative ability, turned inward. It is a capacity to form an accurate, veridical model of oneself and to be able to use that model to operate effectively in life.
In intrapersonal intelligence, the key to self-knowledge, he included “access to one’s own feelings and the ability to discriminate among them and draw upon them to guide behavior.”
Salovey, with his colleague John Mayer, offered an elaborated definition
of emotional intelligence, expanding these abilities into five main domains:
1. Knowing one’s emotions
2. Managing emotions
3. Motivating oneself
4. Recognizing emotions in others
5. Handling relationships
self-observation
it manifests itself simply as a slight stepping-back from experience,
a parallel stream of consciousness that is “meta”: hovering above or beside the main flow, aware of what is happening rather ...
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Self-awareness, in short, means being “aware of both our mood and
our thoughts about that mood,”
Mayer finds that people tend to fall into distinctive styles for attending to and dealing with their emotions:
“Anger is never without a reason, but seldom a good one.”
But after much experimentation, Borkovec discovered some simple
steps that can help even the most chronic worrier control the habit.
The firs...
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Worriers also need to actively challenge the worrisome thoughts; failing this, the worry spiral will keep coming back.
So the next step is to take a critical stance
toward their assu...
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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.
“Praying, if you’re very religious, works for all moods, especially depression.”
Working memory is an executive function par excellence in mental life,
emotional self-regulation: the ability to deny impulse in the service of a goal, whether it be building a business, solving an algebraic equation, or pursuing the Stanley Cup.
self-efficacy,
“People’s beliefs about their abilities have a profound effect on those abilities. Ability is not a fixed property; there is a huge variability in how you perform.
People who have a sense of self-efficacy bounce back from failures; they approach things in terms of how to handle them rather th...
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Empathy requires enough calm and receptivity so that the subtle signals of feeling from another person can be received and mimicked by one’s own emotional brain.
Roger’s talent represents one of four separate abilities that Hatch and Gardner identify as components of interpersonal intelligence:
The two cardinal sins that almost always lead to rejection are trying to take the lead too soon and being out of synch with the frame of reference.
boys take pride in a lone, tough-minded independence and autonomy, while girls see themselves as part of a web of connectedness.
boys are threatened by anything that might challenge their independence, while girls are more threatened by a rupture in their relationships.
All of this means that, in general, women come into a marriage groomed for the role of emotional manager, while men arrive with much less appreciation of the importance of this task for helping a relationship survive. Indeed, the most important element for women—but not for men—in satisfaction with their relationship
best formula for a complaint is “XYZ”: “When you did X, it made me feel Y, and I’d rather you did Z instead.”
Leadership is not domination, but the art of persuading people to work toward a common goal.
advice on the art of the critique,
Levinson also offers some emotional counsel for those at the receiving end of criticism.
What makes the difference between stars and the others is not their academic IQ, but their emotional IQ. They are better able to motivate themselves, and better able to work their informal networks into ad hoc teams.
THE BODY’S MIND: HOW EMOTIONS MATTER FOR HEALTH
