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.
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.
Add the sounds of silence to the list of emotional risks to health – and close emotional ties to the list of protective factors. Studies done over two decades involving more than thirty-seven thousand people show that social isolation – the sense that you have nobody with whom you can share your private feelings or have close contact – doubles the chances of sickness or death.37.
In the calculus of the heart it is the ratio of positive to negative emotions that determines the sense of well- being.
There is perhaps no psychological skill more fundamental than resisting impulse. It is the root of all emotional self-control, since all emotions, by their very nature, lead to one or another impulse to act.
We typically avoid situations or fields in which we fear we might fail; even if we actually have the abilities it takes to succeed at a job, if we lack the belief that we can handle its challenges, we can start to act in ways that doom us. The thought “I can’t do this” is crippling.
Ordinarily, small children learn much about emotions by looking at the other person’s eyes, while those with autism avoid the eyes and so fail to get those lessons.
It demoralizes people just to hear that they are doing “something” wrong without knowing what the specifics are so they can change.
Steve Jobs gave a heartfelt talk to a graduating class at Stanford University. His advice: “Don’t let the voice of others’ opinions drown out your inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.”3.
We’re being judged by a new yardstick: not just by how smart we are, or by our training and expertise, but also by how well we handle ourselves and each other.
Great spiritual teachers, like Buddha and Jesus, have touched their disciples’ hearts by speaking in the language of emotion, teaching in parables, fables, and stories. Indeed, religious symbol and ritual makes little sense from the rational point of view; it is couched in the vernacular of the heart.
In Japan, I learned the hard way that the moment of exchanging business cards signals an important ritual. We Americans are prone to casually pocketing the card without looking, which there indicates disrespect. I was told you should take the card carefully, hold it in both hands, and study it for a while before putting it away in a special case.
Visionary leaders help people to see how their work fits into the big picture, lending people a clear sense not just that what they do matters, but also why.
In many or most moments these minds are exquisitely coordinated; feelings are essential to thought, thought to feeling. But when passions surge the balance tips: it is the emotional mind that captures the upper hand, swamping the rational mind.
The hippocampus is crucial in recognizing a face as that of your cousin. But it is the amygdala that adds you don’t really like her.
Hope, in a technical sense, is more than the sunny view that everything will turn out all right. Snyder defines it with more specificity as “believing you have both the will and the way to accomplish your goals, whatever they may be.” People.