[2021-04-19] Emotional intelligence (part 1)
A friend recommended an interview with Daniel Goleman, psychologist, science journalist and author of Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. Goleman was interviewed by Tami Simon, host of the podcast Sounds True: Insights at the Edge.
One of the most touching points in the interview occurs when Simon asks Goleman to tell a story of an emotionally intelligent leader. Without hesitation, Goleman replies:
I’ll tell you about Govan Brown. Govan Brown was a bus driver in New York City. He drove a bus up Madison Avenue. I once got on his bus. It was a very hot August day, very humid. And I was feeling a little irritable, like many people in New York City on a day like that. And when I got on his bus, Govan looked at me and asked, as though he really cared, "How has your day been going?" And I was shocked, because people in New York City usually don’t have a direct human encounter like that with someone they’ve never seen before. As I sat on the bus, I realized he’s carrying on a conversation with everyone on that bus. People would get off the bus, and he would again say very warmly, "I hope your day turns out to be a wonderful day for you."
Goleman learned the bus driver's name years later when he came upon Brown's obituary in the New York Times. He discovered that people would wait to get on Brown's bus. Brown was a pastor of a church and saw everyone on his bus as part of his flock. He connected with people and helped them get into an even better state than when they had gotten on the bus.
Simon leads off the interview with a basic question: "What are emotions?" Goleman offers this definition:
Emotions are the brain's way of making us pay attention to, and act quickly on, something that the brain's radar for threat thinks is extremely important, or the brain's circuitry for motivation thinks is extremely important.
Simply put, all emotions serve a purpose, that is, to get us to do something that matters.
That said, some emotions—such as worry—can have an upside and a downside. Goleman makes a helpful distinction between constructive worry and destructive worry:
Constructive worry is when you think about something that's upsetting you and you think of something you can do to change the situation for the better, then you stop thinking about it. That’s constructive. Destructive [worry] is you loop it over and over, and you just can’t think about it.
I made a similar point in a conversation with a friend today. I told my friend that I've concluded that there's little point in worrying about the things I can't control. The things I can control—such as following my doctors' directions regarding diagnostic testing, getting blood work, and taking medication—are productive ways to channel my worry. For everything else I can't control, why ruminate?
While destructive worrying and ruminating serve little purpose, says Goleman, generating positive emotions is valuable, as it contributes to our physical and emotional well-being:
Generating gratitude is quite positive because we know from lots of research that positive emotion—gratitude, feeling OK, feeling secure, feeling content, feeling positive, feeling upbeat—is good for your health, both mental health and physical health. There’s lots and lots of data that shows that. And being able to generate positive emotion...learning how to do it is a great skill.
Goleman points out that the people most skilled at generating emotions are actors and bill collectors. But he adds:
Being able to generate one emotion or another is a craft. I wouldn’t say it’s a gift. Some people may be gifted, but it’s learnable. And because it’s learnable, you can learn it, as a bill collector does for what I see as a negative reason, or in a positive way, learning gratitude, for example. Or loving-kindness is another positive set of emotions that you can learn to master. And those are good for you and for your relationships.
In spite of my illness, I've managed to remain upbeat. My daily posts are often an opportunity to reflect on and express gratitude, and your responses to my writings generate further positivity.
While Simon doesn't seek, nor does Goleman provide, a definition of emotional intelligence, he does describe the four domains of emotional intelligence: self-awareness, self-management, empathy, and social skill. Goleman believes that meditation supports every part of emotional intelligence. It improves self-awareness. It helps people become aware of what they're feeling, which is a first step in self-management. Practicing a form of meditation known as loving-kindness enhances empathy and makes people kinder in their relationships. And meditation supports the development of social skill. Goleman elaborates:
If you practice a mindfulness of the breath, it turns out that that enriches connectivity and circuitry in the brain that helps you calm down. The more you do it, the better the benefit. There’s a dose-response relationship. So people who do it a lot, like long-term meditators, get triggered less often in a negative way. If they do get triggered, then they have a less strong negative response, and they recover more quickly. The definition of resilience is how quickly you recover from being upset. And it turns out the same circuitry helps you focus. It improves your concentration. We see this in the data pretty much from the outset: people get better, they get calmer, and they are better able to focus on what’s important to them.
I'm fascinated by how often meditation comes up in what I'm reading. While I had understood that meditation has a calming effect, I had not previously heard that it could reduce the likelihood that I would respond in a negative way, improve my focus, increase my empathy, and enhance my social skill.
The interview packs so much interesting information into its one hour that I couldn't include all its contents in just one post. So tonight, I've touched on some of the basics Goleman covered in talking about emotional intelligence. I'll come back to his more specific guidance around the four domains of emotional intelligence in a future post. In the meantime, I'll add his book—the 25th anniversary edition—to my reading list.
