If your emotional abilities aren’t in hand, if you don’t have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can’t have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.
Empathetic people are superb at recognizing and meeting the needs of clients, customers, or subordinates. They seem approachable, wanting to hear what people have to say. They listen carefully, picking up on what people are truly concerned about, and respond on the mark.
The basic premise that children must learn about emotions is that all feelings are okay to have; however, only some reactions are okay.
Emotional self-control – delaying gratification and stifling impulsiveness- underlies accomplishment of every sort.
One way to boost our will power and focus is to manage our distractions instead of letting them manage us.
People who are optimistic see a failure as due to something that can be changed so that they can succeed next time around, while pessimists take the blame for the failure, ascribing it to some characteristic they are helpless to change.
The more time you put into practicing, then, the greater the payoff.
Mindful meditation has been discovered to foster the ability to inhibit those very quick emotional impulses.
Whenever we feel stressed out, that’s a signal that our brain is pumping out stress hormones. If sustained over months and years, those hormones can ruin our health and make us a nervous wreck.
In a very real sense we have two minds, one that thinks and one that feels.
The other thing is that if you rely solely on medication to manage depression or anxiety, for example, you have done nothing to train the mind, so that when you come off the medication, you are just as vulnerable to a relapse as though you had never taken the medication.
Brain studies of mental workouts in which you sustain a single, chosen focus show that the more you detach from what’s distracting you and refocus on what you should be paying attention to, the stronger this brain circuitry becomes.
But there has also been a notable increase in recent years of these applications by a much wider slice of psychotherapists – far greater interest than ever before.
Scheduling down time as part of your routine is hard but worth it, personally, even professionally.
Empathy and social skills are social intelligence, the interpersonal part of emotional intelligence. That’s why they look alike.
Empathy represents the foundation skill for all the social competencies important for work.
What really matters for success, character, happiness and life long achievements is a definite set of emotional skills – your EQ – not just purely cognitive abilities that are measured by conventional IQ tests.
Our genetic heritage endows each of us with a series of emotional set-points that determines our temperament. But the brain circuitry involved is extraordinarily malleable; temperament is not destiny.
Great leaders, the research shows, are made as they gradually acquire, in the course of their lives and careers, the competencies that make them so effective. The competencies can be learned by any leader, at any point.
Societies can be sunk by the weight of buried ugliness.