By Daniel Goleman –
“Anyone can become angry — that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way – that is not easy.” Aristotle
P. ix “This book is a guide to making sense of the senselessness… our scientific understanding of the realm of the irrational.
P xii “… abilities called here emotional intelligence which include self-control, zeal and persistence, and the ability to motivate oneself. And these skills can be taught to children, giving them a better chance to use whatever intellectual potential the genetic lottery may have given them.”
*“(This book is about) scientific insights into the emotions… to understand what it means – and how – to bring intelligence to emotion.”
P. xiii “Neurological data suggest a window of opportunity for shaping our children’s emotional habits… At the present we leave the emotional education of our children to chance.” P 27: “Continual emotional distress can create deficits in a child’s intellectual abilities, crippling the capacity to learn.”
P. xiv “Aristotle’s… challenge is to manage our emotional life with intelligence.”
P. 9 “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.”
P 13. Horace Walpole: “Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel.”
P. 20 “Our emotions have a mind of their own, one which can hold views quite independently of our rational mind.”
P. 22 “Many potent emotional memories date from the first few years of life.”
P. 34 “Academic intelligence has little to do with emotional life… The crucial emotional competencies can indeed be learned and improved upon by children – if we bother to teach them.”
P. 36 “Academic intelligence offers virtually no preparation for the turmoil – or opportunity – life’s vicissitudes bring… People with well-developed emotional skills are also more likely to be content and effective in their lives.”
P. 37 Howard Gardner: “We should spend less time ranking children and more time helping them to identify their natural competencies and gifts, and cultivate those. There are hundreds and hundreds of ways to succeed, and many, many different abilities that will help you get there.”
P. 39 Howard Gardner: “the core of interpersonal intelligence includes the capacities to discern and respond appropriately to the moods, temperaments, motivations, and desires of other people. In intrapersonal intelligence, the key to self-knowledge includes access to one’s own feelings and the ability to
discriminate among them and draw upon them to guide behavior.”
P. 41 “many people with IQs of 160 work for people with IQs of 100, if the former have poor intrapersonal intelligence and the latter have a high one. And in the day-to-day world no intelligence is more important than the interpersonal.”
P. 43 Five main domains of emotional intelligence:
1. Knowing one’s emotions: self-awareness
2. Managing emotions
3. Motivating oneself
4. Recognizing emotions in others: empathy
5. Handling relationships
P. 54 “The key to sounder personal decision-making, in short: being attuned to our feelings unlike narcissism… Selfawareness is fundamental to psychological insight; this is the faculty that much of psychotherapy means to strengthen.”
P. 55 “There are two levels of emotion, conscious and unconscious… Emotions that simmer beneath the threshold of awareness can have a powerful impact on how we perceive and react, even though we have no idea they are at work… Emotional self-awareness is the building block of the next fundamental of emotional intelligence: being able to shake off a bad mood.”
*P. 56 “The goal is balance, not emotional suppression: every feeling has its value and significance… what is wanted is appropriate emotion, feeling proportionate to circumstance… Extremes – emotions that wax too intensely or for too long – undermine our stability.”
P. 57 “The art of soothing ourselves is a fundamental life skill… one of the most essential of all psychic tools… We very often have little or no control over when we are swept by emotion, nor over what emotion it will be. But we can have some say in how long an emotion will last.”
P. 63 “Distraction is a highly powerful mood-altering device; it’s hard to stay angry when we’re having a pleasant time.”
*P. 65 “Worry is, in a sense, a rehearsal of what might go wrong and how to deal with it; the task of worrying is to come up with positive solutions for life’s perils by anticipating dangers before they arise.”
P. 73 “Aerobic exercise is one of the more effective tactics for lifting mild depression.”
P. 78 We need to be aware of “the devastating impact of emotional distress on mental clarity… the power of the emotional brain to overpower, even paralyze, the thinking brain.”
*P 80 “Emotional intelligence is a master aptitude, a capacity that profoundly affects all other abilities, either facilitating or interfering with them.”
P. 83 “Emotional skills such as impulse control and accurately reading a social situation can be learned…emotional intelligence is a meta-ability… anxiety undermines the intellect.”
P. 85 “Too little anxiety brings about apathy, while too much anxiety sabotages any attempt to do well…Good moods, while they last, enhance the ability to think flexibly and with more complexity, thus making it easier to find solutions to problems, whether intellectual or interpersonal … The intellectual benefits of a good laugh are most striking when it comes to solving a problem that demands a creative solution.”
P. 86 “Being in a foul mood biases memory in a negative direction… Emotions out of control impede the intellect.”
P. 87 “Hope plays a surprisingly potent role in life… believing you have both the will and the way to accomplish your goals, whatever they may be (is important).”
P. 89 “While the pessimist’s mental set leads to despair, the optimist’s spawns hope… temperament can be tempered by experience. Optimism and hope – like helplessness and despair – can be learned.”
*P. 89 “Self-efficacy: the belief that one has mastery over the events of one’s life and can meet challenges as they come up. Developing a competency of any kind strengthens the sense of self-efficacy, making a person more willing to take risks and seek out more demanding challenges.”
P. 90 “People’s beliefs about their abilities have a profound effect on those abilities.”
P. 91 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: “People seem to concentrate best when the demands on them are a bit greater than usual, and they are able to give more than usual. If there is too little demand on them, people get bored.”
P. 95 “Channeling emotions toward a productive end is a master aptitude…(consider) the power of emotion to guide effective effort.”
P. 96 “Empathy builds on self-awareness; the more open we are to our own emotions, the more skilled we will be in reading feelings (in others)… For all, rapport – the root of caring – stems from emotional attunement, from the capacity for empathy… People’s emotions are rarely put into words; far more often they are expressed through other cues. The key to intuiting another’s feelings is in the ability to read nonverbal channels.”
P. 97 “Empathy is independent from academic intelligence… 90% or more of an emotional message is nonverbal.”
P. 105 “The roots of morality are to be found in empathy.”
P. 113 “One key social competence is how well or poorly people express their own feelings.”
*P. 114 “Emotions are contagious… Most emotional contagion is far more subtle, part of a tacit exchange that happens in every encounter… We send emotional signals in every encounter, and those signals affect those we are with. The more adroit we are socially, the better we control the signals we send.”
P. 118 Components of interpersonal intelligence:
1. Organizing groups (initiating and coordinating the efforts of a network of people)
2. Negotiating solutions (the talent of the mediator)
3. Personal connection (a talent for empathy and getting people together)
4. Social analysis (being able to see other’s feelings, motives and concerns)
P. 124 “Popular children spend time observing the group to understand what’s going on before entering in.”
P. 133 There is an emotional gender gap. “Simply having reached an agreement about how to disagree is key to marital survival.”
P. 141 “When grievances simmer, they build and build in intensity until there’s an explosion; when they are aired and worked out, it takes the pressure off.”
*P. 143 “Calming down: every strong emotion has at its root an impulse to action; managing those impulses is basic to emotional intelligence.”
P. 146 “The best formula for a complaint is ‘XYZ’: When you did X, it made me feel Y, and I’d rather you did Z instead.”
P. 149 “When emotionally upset, people cannot remember, attend, learn or make decisions clearly. As one management consultant put it, ‘(Doing) stress makes people stupid.’”
P. 151 “Without feedback people are in the dark… How criticisms are given and received goes a long way in determining how satisfied people are with their work, with those they work with, and with those to whom they are responsible.”
P. 160 “Emotional Intelligence, the skills that help people harmonize, should become increasingly valued as a workplace asset in the years to come.”
P. 189 “Family life is our first school for emotional learning.”
P. 193 “school success is not predicted by a child’s fund of facts or a precocious ability to read so much as by emotional and social measures: being self-assured and interested; knowing what kind of behavior is expected and how to rein in the impulse to misbehave; being able to wait, to follow directions, and to turn to teachers for help; and expressing needs while getting along with others.”
P. 193/4 Seven key ingredients of how to learn in an emotionally intelligent way:
1. Confidence
2. Curiosity
3. Intentionality
4. Self control
5. Relatedness
6. Capacity to communicate
7. Cooperativeness
P. 207 “Strong emotional memories and the patterns of thought and reaction that they trigger, can change with time.”
P. 215 “Emotional circuitry; for any given emotion people can differ in how easily it triggers, how long it lasts and how intense it becomes.”
P. 221 “Those parents who engineer gradual emboldening experiences for their children offer them what may be a lifelong corrective to their fearfulness.”
P. 223 In working with children, “No human quality is beyond change.”
P. 227, “Emotional habits are malleable throughout life.”
P. 231 “Emotional illiteracy… this new and troubling deficiency is not being addressed in the standard school curriculum.”
P. 239 “Particularly in young people, problems in relationships are a trigger for depression.”
P. 246 “Moods like anxiety, sadness and anger don’t just descend on you without your having any control over them; you can change the way you feel by what you think.”
P. 262 “Learning doesn’t take place in isolation from kids feelings. Being emotionally literate is as important for learning as instruction in math and reading… the goal is to raise the level of social and emotional competence in children as a part of their regular education.”
Glenn Detrick