You see it in jazz musicians, who never rehearse exactly what they do, but just seem to know when to take center stage, when to fade into the background. When jazz artists were compared with classical musicians in brain function, they showed more neural indicators of self-awareness.15 As one jazz artist put it, “In jazz you have to tune in to how your body is feeling so you know when to riff.
But there is virtually no relationship between being an expert and being seen as someone people can trust with their secrets, doubts, and vulnerabilities. A petty office tyrant or micromanager may be high on expertise, but will be so low on trust that it will undermine their ability to manage, and effectively exclude them from informal networks.
As Marcus Aurelius said millennia ago, pain “is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it, and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.
The neocortex allows for the subtlety and complexity of emotional life, such as the ability to have feelings about our feelings.
A Persian fairy tale tells of the Three Princes of Serendip, who “were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”7 Creativity in the wild operates much like that.
It’s the most important relationships in your life, the people you see day in and day out, that seem to be crucial for your health. And the more significant the relationship is in your life, the more it matters for your health.”43.
The sweet spot for smart decisions, then, comes not just from being a domain expert, but also from having high self-awareness.
And if there are any two moral stances that our times call for, they are precisely these, self-restraint and compassion.
Stress makes people stupid.” On.
The most powerful form of nondefensive listening, of course, is empathy: actually hearing the feelings behind what is being said.
The creative mind is, by its very nature, a bit unruly. There is a natural tension between orderly self-control and the innovative urge. It’s not that people who are creative are out-of-control emotionally; rather, they are willing to entertain a wider range of impulse and action than do less adventurous spirits. That is, after all, what creates new possibilities.
Emotional resilience comes down to how quickly we recover from upsets. People who are highly resilient – who bounce back right away – can have as much as thirty times more activation in the left prefrontal area than those who are less resilient.
We do not compete in our careers with people who lack the requisite intelligence to enter and stay in our field – but rather against the much smaller group of those who have managed to jump the hurdles of schooling, entry exams, and other cognitive challenges to get into the field in the first place.
In a complex world where almost everyone has access to the same information, new value arises from the original synthesis, from putting ideas together in novel ways, and from smart questions that open up untapped potential.
1. Knowing one’s emotions. Self-awareness – recognizing a feeling as it happens – is the keystone of emotional intelligence. As.
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.
Rumination can also make the depression stronger by creating conditions that are, well, more depressing.
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.
Our sense of well-being depends to some extent on others regarding us as a You; our yearning for connection is a primal human need, minimally for a cushion for survival. Today the neural echo of that need heightens our sensitivity to the difference between It and You – and makes us feel social rejection as deeply as physical pain.
A series of studies by Marian Radke-Yarrow and Carolyn Zahn-Waxler at the National Institute of Mental Health showed that a large part of this difference in empathic concern had to do with how parents disciplined their children. 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.