Experience, particularly in childhood, sculpts the brain. The.
The new measure takes for granted having enough intellectual ability and technical know-how to do our jobs; it focuses instead on personal qualities, such as initiative and empathy, adaptability and persuasiveness.
Our journey begins in Part One with 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. Understanding the interplay of brain structures that rule our moments of rage and fear – or passion and joy – reveals.
An artful critique focuses on what a person has done and can do rather than reading a mark of character into a job poorly done. As Larson observes, “A character attack – calling someone stupid or incompetent – misses the point. You immediately put him on the defensive, so that he’s no longer receptive to what you have to tell him about how to do things better.
But amid the din and distraction of work life, poor listening has become epidemic.
Whenever you notice your mind wandering,” a fundamental instruction in meditation advises, “bring your mind back to its point of focus.” The operative phrase here is whenever you notice. As our mind drifts off, we almost never notice the moment it launches into some other orbit on its own.
In any interaction the more high-power person tends to focus his or her gaze on the other person less than others, and is more likely to interrupt and to monopolize the conversation – all signifying a lack of attention.
Emotionally Intelligent Parenting: How to Raise a Self-disciplined, Responsible, Socially Skilled Child. New.
The goal of attunement is not simply continual meshing, with an utter entrainment of every thought and feeling; it also includes giving each other space to be alone as needed. This cycle of connectedness strikes a balance between the individual’s needs and the couple’s. As one family therapist put it, “The more a couple can be apart, the more they can be together.
This harkens back to Freud’s famous question, “What does woman want?” As Epstein answers, “She wants a partner who cares what she wants.
Tightly focused attention gets fatigued – much like an overworked muscle – when we push to the point of cognitive exhaustion. The signs of mental fatigue, such as a drop in effectiveness and a rise in distractedness and irritability, signify that the mental effort needed to sustain focus has depleted the glucose that feeds neural energy.
When girls play together, they do so in small, intimate groups, with an emphasis on minimizing hostility and maximizing cooperation, while boys’ games are in larger groups, with an emphasis on competition. One key difference can be seen in what happens when games boys or girls are playing get disrupted by someone getting hurt. If a boy who has gotten hurt gets upset, he is expected to get out of the way and stop crying so the game can go on.
Not that leaders need to be overly “nice”; the emotional art of leadership includes pressing the reality of work demands without unduly upsetting people.
Just seeing someone express an emotion can evoke that mood, whether you realize you mimic the facial expression or not. This happens to us all the time – there’s a dance, a synchrony, a transmission of emotions. This mood synchrony determines whether you feel an interaction went well or not.” The.
Academic intelligence has little to do with emotional life. The brightest among us can founder on the shoals of unbridled passions and unruly impulses; people with high IQs can be stunningly poor pilots of their private lives.
Rapport demands joint attention – mutual focus. Our need to make an effort to have such human moments has never been greater, given the ocean of distractions we all navigate daily.
The inability to resist checking email or Facebook rather than focus on the person talking to us leads to what the sociologist Erving Goffman, a masterly observer of social interaction, called an “away,” a gesture that tells another person “I’m not interested” in what’s going on here and now.
In fact, people who are extremely adept at mental tasks that demand cognitive control and a roaring working memory – like solving complex math problems – can struggle with creative insights if they have trouble switching off their fully concentrated focus.5.
Emotional intelligence skills are synergistic with cognitive ones; top performers have both. The more complex the job, the more emotional intelligence matters – if only because a deficiency in these abilities can hinder the use of whatever technical expertise or intellect a person may have.
It’s not the highs along the way that matter. It’s who you become.