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February 4 - June 21, 2023
Emotion skills are both personal and mutual. They can be used privately, but their best application is throughout a community, so that a network emerges to reinforce its own influence.
In seminars I conduct with teachers, I’ll sometimes ask them to list their students and consider the feeling that each name automatically prompts. Is it love, dislike, trust, joy, fear, disgust? Next I’ll say, Be honest and think about how that emotion causes you to act toward each of those children. I’ve had people break down crying during this exercise.
So much of what happens between human beings is a result of how we communicate our emotions. And it all depends on something deep inside us, perhaps hidden from our own view: our emotional state.
According to one study, a thirty-minute argument with your significant other can slow your body’s ability to heal by at least a day. And if you argue regularly, that delay is doubled.
In one study, laughter caused by watching a comedy film increased the flow of beta-endorphins, which enhance our mood, and stimulated growth hormones, which repair our cells.
Many of us need to feel creative in order to feel alive, engaged, and fully involved in life and whatever it throws at us. Otherwise we’re just treading water.
But there can be something scary about creativity too. It represents a break with the status quo and a step into the unknown. Creative decisions, even in the smallest matters, are a way of saying we think we have a better idea. And then comes the feedback—from others, but even from ourselves: What if your new way doesn’t work out so well? What if you’ve made things worse (at least in somebody’s eyes, though maybe not yours)?
The creative process needs to be followed by concrete action. Once we devise new strategies, we must have the confidence to put them to use. Effective performance is as much a part of creativity as the initial, animating idea.
more and more schools are incorporating project-based learning and design thinking—a five-stage process for solving complex problems that includes (1) defining a problem; (2) understanding the human needs involved; (3) reframing the problem in human-centric ways; (4) generating a multitude of ideas; and (5) a hands-on approach in prototyping and testing.
I’ve had my share of students who, emboldened by the belief in the power of grit, go so far overboard that they undermine their own best efforts owing to their lack of social awareness.
acronym
Recent research emphasizes that emotions are fully intertwined not only with our biology but also with our individual life experiences and culture. We don’t all fear the same things, and we don’t all express joy in the same ways.
We can even have emotions about emotions. We call them meta-emotions. I could be afraid of public speaking and embarrassed about being afraid. Or I’m being bullied so I feel victimized, and I’m ashamed of myself for allowing that to happen.
Emotionally intelligent individuals had an intuitive understanding of one of the central conclusions of happiness research: Well-being depends less on objective events than on how those events are perceived, dealt with, and shared with others.
life—how often do we see full-blown anger in a business meeting? In real time, the emotions we’re attempting to read in others are a good deal more subtle, ambiguous, fleeting, and mixed.
In the real world, all those neat categories of emotion no
longer work so well at interpreting others’ inner lives.
“attribution bias,” meaning we observe someone’s cues or behavior and wrongly attribute them to our own emotional state.
This is certainly true of our own feelings—there are plenty of times when it’s easiest to take whatever emotion we’re experiencing and hide it in an airtight compartment, to be dealt with at a more convenient time (maybe). This is also the moment of truth when we’re faced with exploring someone else’s feelings. It’s like opening Pandora’s box: we don’t know what will emerge, or how it will affect us, or—most critically—what we’ll be expected to do about it.
What strikes fear or anxiety into the heart of one person may scarcely register in another. But what matters is the person’s experience—that’s what we’re trying to identify, so we can address it. That’s another part of the emotion scientist’s skill set—the ability to put aside one’s own appraisals so we can comprehend and empathize with those of other people.
let’s go back to the four quadrants of the Mood Meter and start there. Within each quadrant, there exists a wide range of individual emotions. Knowing these can help us direct our questions.
Paradoxical to what we’ve been taught, the constant pursuit of happiness can be self-defeating. Accumulating research shows that the more we value happiness, the more likely we are to feel disappointed.
The questions we ask to understand someone’s feelings are necessary to encourage answers that go beyond a simple yes or no, or “I feel angry,” or “I feel sad,” and so on.
Understanding requires the use of our storytelling ability, perspective-taking skills, and pattern seeking to piece together the concatenation of feelings and events that led to the current situation.
There’s a body of research showing the health benefits of social connectivity, and this is where it begins—in being able to identify with one another. The terminology of emotion allows us to read one another’s lives, almost as we would in a novel. The words give us each a story to tell.
The more words we can use to describe what we feel, the better able we’ll be to understand ourselves and to make ourselves understood to others.
When we don’t have the words for our feelings, we’re not just lacking descriptive flourish. We’re lacking authorship of our own lives.
It should come as no surprise that something as untamed and unpredictable as our emotional selves requires a complex set of regulations governing expression. So we have what are known as “display rules”—the unwritten but widely agreed-upon guidelines for how, where, when, and in whose presence we may express our feelings.
Expression is generally a co-skill. It’s kind of like tennis—you can’t really do it alone. If the listener doesn’t do her or his part, it’s unlikely that anything useful will come of it.
If we notice increasingly intense anger expressed by women, African Americans, and other historically disadvantaged groups, we can take that as a positive sign—an indication that we live in a more just society than before.
Sometimes, sharing with other people is too difficult. In those cases, it may be better to express it in writing.
What emotions do you show the most, at home and at work? Are they what you are really feeling or only the ones you feel you’re allowed to display? How would your spouse or partner, colleague or boss, or kids rate your expression skills?
Stanford University psychology professor James Gross, an authority on emotion regulation, defines it as “the process by which individuals influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express these emotions.”
The initial goal of Regulation is to manage our own emotional responses, but then this skill makes a leap into even greater complexity: co-regulation. Every human interaction we’ve ever had, from infancy onward, has involved co-regulation.
Researchers use the term co-regulation to refer to how we affect one another’s feelings, moving another’s feelings up or down by our own actions.
Once we’ve acknowledged the power of the past in our current emotional lives, we’re ready to begin dealing with the present.
There’s another tool we can try that usually succeeds in groups where emotion skills are valued: a charter
Putting our emotional needs in writing has a way of making them real for ourselves and everyone else.
The three most important aspects of learning—attention, focus, and memory—are all controlled by our emotions, not by cognition.
If the people in charge are not drawing on their emotional intelligence in how they convey themselves and manage others, who will?
So perhaps you can bully your way to the top of a thriving business, but you’re going to be lonely up there.
When the friendship between passion and reason can freely exist, it will mean greater equity as emotion skills level the playing field for all children, regardless of race, class, or gender. For adults in the workplace, it will mean that collaboration functions seamlessly; no one will ever have to use words such as “synergy,” “team building,” or “creating a leadership pipeline” again, because emotion skills will turn these concepts into reflexes.
