EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

Intelligence can come to nothing when the emotions hold sway.

Academic intelligence has little to do with emotional life. people with high IQs can be stunningly
poor pilots of their private lives.
IQ offers little to explain the different destinies of people with roughly equal promises,
schooling, and opportunity. When ninety-five Harvard students from the classes of the 1940s—
a time when people with a wider spread of IQ were at Ivy League schools than is presently the
case—were followed into middle age, the men with the highest test scores in college were not
particularly successful compared to their lower-scoring peers in terms of salary, productivity, or
status in their field. Nor did they have the greatest life satisfaction, nor the most happiness with
friendships, family, and romantic relationships.
Karen Arnold, professor of education at Boston University, one of the researchers tracking the
valedictorians, explains, "I think we've discovered the 'dutiful'—people who know how to
achieve in the system. But valedictorians struggle as surely as we all do. To know that a person
is a valedictorian is to know only that he or she is exceedingly good at achievement as
measured by grades. It tells you nothing about how they react to the vicissitudes of life.
And that is the problem: academic intelligence offers virtually no preparation for the turmoil—
or opportunity—life's vicissitudes bring. Yet even though a high IQ is no guarantee of
prosperity, prestige, or happiness in life, our schools and our culture fixate on academic
abilities, ignoring emotional intelligence, a set of traits—some might call it character—that also
matters immensely for our personal destiny. Emotional life is a domain that, as surely as math
or reading, can be handled with greater or lesser skill, and requires its unique set of
competencies. And how adept a person is at those is crucial to understanding why one person
thrives in life while another, of equal intellect, dead-ends: emotional aptitude is a meta-ability,
determining how well we can use whatever other skills we have, including raw intellect.
The guiding visionary behind Project Spectrum is Howard Gardner, a psychologist at the
Harvard School of Education. 7 "The time has come," Gardner told me, "to broaden our notion
of the spectrum of talents. The single most important contribution education can make to a
child's development is to help him toward a field where his talents best suit him, where he will
be satisfied and competent. We've completely lost sight of that. Instead we subject everyone to
an education where, if you succeed, you will be best suited to be a college professor. And we
evaluate everyone along the way according to whether they meet that narrow standard of
success. We should spend less time ranking children and more time helping them to identify
their natural competencies and gifts, and cultivate those. There are hundreds and hundreds of
ways to succeed, and many, many different abilities that will help you get there.

The high-IQ pure type (that is, setting aside emotional intelligence) is almost a caricature of the
intellectual, adept in the realm of mind but inept in the personal world. The profiles differ
 slightly for men and women. The high-IQ male is typified—no surprise—by a wide range of
intellectual interests and abilities. He is ambitious and productive, predictable and dogged, and
untroubled by concerns about himself. He also tends to be critical and condescending,
fastidious and inhibited, uneasy with sexuality and sensual experience, unexpressive and
detached, and emotionally bland and cold. By contrast, men who are high in emotional
intelligence are socially poised, outgoing and cheerful, not prone to fearfulness or worried
rumination. They have a notable capacity for commitment to people or causes, for taking
responsibility, and for having an ethical outlook; they are sympathetic and caring in their
relationships. Their emotional life is rich, but appropriate; they are comfortable with
themselves, others, and the social universe they live in. Purely high-IQ women have the
expected intellectual confidence, are fluent in expressing their thoughts, value intellectual
matters, and have a wide range of intellectual and aesthetic interests. They also tend to be
introspective, prone to anxiety, rumination, and guilt, and hesitate to express their anger
openly (though they do so indirectly). Emotionally intelligent women, by contrast, tend to be
assertive and express their feelings directly, and to feel positive about themselves; life holds
meaning for them. Like the men, they are outgoing and gregarious, and express their feelings
appropriately (rather than, say, in outbursts they later regret); they adapt well to stress. Their
social poise lets them easily reach out to new people; they are comfortable enough with
themselves to be playful, spontaneous, and open to sensual experience. Unlike the women
purely high in IQ, they rarely feel anxious or guilty, or sink into rumination.

The first part of the book contains new discoveries about the brain’s emotional architecture
that offer an explanation of those most baffling moments in our lives when feeling overwhelms
all rationality. The second part of the book is on emotional intelligence: the ability to rein in
emotional impulse; to read another’s innermost feelings; to handle relationships smoothly.
 
The tendency to act is implicit in every emotion (the root of the word contains the Latin “to
move”).
The main emotions are:

 Anger
 Fear
 Happiness
 Love
 Surprise
 Disgust
 Sadness
 
We are biologically programmed to act out these emotions in a certain way, but our culture and
life experiences dictate just how. For example, we all grieve after a loved one dies, but how we
 show our grieving — how emotions are displayed in private moments — is how we’re moulded
by our culture.
There are two minds: rational and emotional. The more intense the emotion, the more
dominant the emotional mind becomes. Our emotional mind is subject to “hijacking” — the
limbic brain proclaims an emergency and triggers a reaction before our neocortex can process
whether such action is a good idea. Our emotionally charged memories are also stored in a
different part of our brain than ordinary facts. Bottom line: The emotional and rational parts of
our brain need each other, they work in tandem. Emotions are key for good decision making, as
dry logic alone sometimes can’t help us work through an unwieldy array of choices.
 
IQ vs EQ
Academic intelligence has little to do with emotional life (no connection between grades or IQ
and people’s emotional well being). People with high IQs can be stunningly poor pilots of their
private lives. This doesn’t mean IQ is meaningless. Perhaps someone with a 500 on his Math
SAT shouldn’t aspire to be a mathematician, but he could surely aspire to be a U.S. senator or
make a million dollars, since the totality of other characteristics he brings to life dwarfs the SAT
aptitude.
95 students from Harvard ‘1940 were followed into middle age and the men w/ highest test
scores in college were not particularly successful compared to their lower-scoring peers, nor
were they more productive or happy.
“Much evidence testifies that people who are emotionally adept — who know and manage
their own feelings well, and who read and deal effectively with other people’s feelings — are at
an advantage in any domain of life, whether romance and intimate relationships or picking the
unspoken rules that govern success in organizational politics. 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.”
Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences is relevant here. He thinks that there’s not
just one kind of intelligence crucial for life success, but many “personal intelligences.” The core
of interpersonal intelligence, according to Gardner, includes the capacities to discern and
respond appropriately to the moods, temperaments, motivations, and desires of other people.
In intrapersonal intelligence, the key to self-knowledge, includes access to one’s own feelings
and the ability to discriminate among them and draw upon them to guide behavior.
 
Five Main Domains of Emotional Intelligence: 

1. Knowing one’s emotions — self awareness

2. Managing emotions
3. Motivating oneself
4. Recognizing emotions in others
5. Handling relationships
 
Pure Types — The Male High IQ vs Male High EI
Male IQ – Adept in the realm of mind but inept in the personal world. Typified by a wide range
of intellectual interests and abilities. He is ambitious and productive, predictable and dogged,
and untroubled by concerns about himself. He also tends to be critical and condescending,
fastidious and inhibited, uneasy with sexuality and sensual experience, unexpressive and
detached, and emotionally bland and cold.
Male EI – Socially poised, outgoing, and cheerful, not prone to fearfulness or worries
rumination. They have a notable capacity for commitment to people or causes, for taking
responsibility, and for having an ethical outlook; they are sympathetic and caring in their
relationships. Their emotional life is rich, but appropriate; they are comfortable with
themselves, others, and the social universe they live in.
Of course, these are extremes. We’re all a hybrid.
 
Know Thyself
Self awareness means being aware of both our mood and our thoughts about that mood.
Typical thoughts bespeaking emotional self-awareness include “I shouldn’t feel this way,” “I’m
thinking good things to cheer up,” and, for a more restricted self-awareness, the fleeting
thought “Don’t think about it” in reaction to something highly upsetting.
Are you a “passionate” or an “indifferent”?
Imagine for a moment that you’re on an airplane flying from NY to SF. It’s been a smooth flight,
but as you approach the Rockies the pilot’s voice comes over the plane intercom. “Ladies and
gents, there’s some turbulence ahead. Please fasten your seatbelts.” And then the plane hits
the turbulence, which is rougher than you’ve ever endured — the airplane is tossed up and
down and side to side like a beach ball in the waves.
The question: What do you do? Are you the kind of person who buries yourself in your book or
magazine, or continues watching the movie, tuning out the turbulence? or are you likely to take
out the emergency card and review the precautions, or watch the flight attendants to see if
they show signs of panic, or strain to hear the engines to see if there’s anything worrisome?
Which of these responses comes more naturally to us is a sign of our favoured attentional
stance under duress. It assesses whether people tend to be vigilant, attending carefully to every
detail of a distressing predicament, or in contrast deal with such anxious moments by trying to
distract themselves. These two attentional stances toward distress have very different
consequences for how people experience their own emotional reactions. Those who tune in
under duress can, by the very act of attending so carefully, unwittingly amplify the magnitude of
their own reactions — especially if their tuning in is devoid of the equanimity of self-awareness.
Those who tune out, who distract themselves, notice less about their own reactions, and so
minimize the experience of their emotional response, if not the size of the response itself. At
the extremes, this means that for some people emotional awareness is overwhelming while for
others it barely exists.
 
Emotions and Decision Making
Damasio research suggests that role of feeling is critical to making decisions…emotional wisdom
garnered through past experiences. Logic alone can’t decide what job to take or who to marry.
 
Our Emotional Well Being
Average our moods over weeks or months and we get our basic sense of well being. Most of us
don’t feel extremely intense feelings — we hum along each day and fall into the gray middle
range of intensity.
We have very little control when we will be swept with emotion or what emotion it will be.
__We can have some say in how long an emotion will last__. There are some “mood purists”
who believe we should experience what we feel. Some people try to shake bad moods (not
terribly successfully, Goleman notes).
On depression and sadness — casual rumination doesn’t help the cause. Deep immersion in the
issue with serious reflection can lead to insights or actions that will change conditions. But
passive immersion in sadness will simply make it worse. Ruminating on depression can make it
worse.
One of the best ways to lift your mood is to achieve a small triumph or easy success: tackling a
long delayed chore, for example. Cognitive re-framing is also helpful (this sounds like Martin
Seligman) — get perspective.
 
Showing Emotion
Three ways: a) minimize emotion (Japan style), b) exaggeration, and c) substitution (yes instead
of no, in Asian culture). How well we display these emotions is a factor in our social
competence.
Men vs Women — Women on average feel the fuller range of emotions and express them with
greater intensity, hence they’re “more emotional” than men.
 
Marital Relations
In one study of marriages men had a rosier view than the wives of just about everything in their
relationship — lovemaking, finances, ties with in-laws, how well they listened to each other,
etc. Wives in general are more vocal about their complaints than are their husbands. In bad
relationships, when one partner screws up, the other blames it on the character of the person,
not as a misdeed.
When a wife shows the facial expression of disgust four or more times within a fifteen-minute
conversation, it’s a silent sign that couple is likely to separate within four years (study has made
these predictions with 94% accuracy).
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EI and Leadership
We’re often too frugal with praise and too willing with criticism. We need to increase our own
awareness of our emotions (are we truly satisfied?) and get better at recognizing others’
emotions. Nothing may be more critical in leadership.
When criticizing:
– be specific
– offer a solution
– be present
– be sensitive
 
Discrimination
“It’s more practical to try to suppress the expression of bias rather than trying to eliminate the
attitude itself; stereotypes change very slowly.”
 
EI and Groups
The key to high group IQ is social harmony. The single most important factor in group
productivity is not average IQ, but the group’s collective emotional intelligence.