The nature of
emotional intelligence – page 43,5-next page {expanding Gardner’s definitions}
Salovey subsumes Gardner’s personal intelligences in his basic definition of emotion intelligence, expanding these abilities into five main domains:
1. Knowing one’s emotions: Self-awareness- recognizing a feeling as it happens – is the keystone of emotional intelligence. As we will see in Chapter 4, the ability to monitor feeling to moment to moment is crucial to psychological insight and self-understanding. An inability to notice our true feeling leaves us at their mercy. People with great certainty about their feelings are better pilots of their lives, having a surer sense of how they really fell about personal decisions from whom to marry to what job to take.
2. Managing emotions: Handling feeling so they are appropriate is an ability that builds on self-awareness. Chapter 5 will examine the capacity to soothe oneself, to shake off rampant anxiety, gloom, or irritability – and the consequences of failure at this basic emotional skill. People who are poor in this ability are constantly battling of distress, while those who excel in it can bounce back for more quickly from life’s setbacks and upsets.
3. Motivating oneself: As Chapter 6 will show, marshaling emotions in the service of a goal is essential to pay attention, for self-motivated and mastering, and for creativity. Emotional self-control – delaying gratification stifling impulsiveness – underlines accomplishment of every sort. And being able to get into the “flow” state enables outstanding performance of all kinds. People who have this skill tend to be highly productive and effective in whatever they undertake.
4. Recognizing emotions in others: Empathy, another emotion that builds on emotional self-awareness, is the fundamental mental skill. Chapter 7 will investigate the roots of empathy; the social cost of being emotionally tonedeaf, and the reasons empathy kindles altruism. People that are more empathic are more attuned to the subtle social signals that indicated what others need or want. This makes them better at callings such as the caring professions, teaching, sales and management.
5. Handling relationships: The art of relationships is, in large part, skill in managing emotions in others. Chapter 8 looks at social competence and incompetence, and the specific skills involved. Theses are the abilities that under gird popularity, leadership, and interpersonal effectiveness. People who excel in this skills, do well at anything that relies on interacting smoothly with others, they are social stars.
The nature of emotional intelligence – page 59,12-19 {avoiding anger}
Contrast that sequence of building rage with a more charitable line of thought toward the driver who cuts you off: “ Maybe he didn’t see me, or maybe he had some good reason for driving so carelessly, such a medical emergency.” That line of possibility tempers anger with mercy, or at least an open mind, short-circuiting the buildup of rage.
The nature of emotional intelligence – page 60,3-7 {fueling the anger}
The train of thoughts that stokes the anger is so potentially the key to on of the most powerful ways to defuse anger: undermining the convictions that the fueling the anger is the first place. The longer we ruminate about what has made us angry, the more “good reasons” and self-justifications for being angry we can invent. Brooding fuels anger’s flames. But seeing things differently douses those flames. Tice found that reframing a situation more positively was on of the most potent ways to put anger to rest.
The nature of emotional intelligence – page 64,7-11 {write it down}
One of his recommendations (Redford Williams) is to use self-awareness to catch cynical or hostile thoughts as they arise, and write them down. Once angry thoughts are captured this way, they can be challenged and reappraised, though, as Zillmann found, this approach works better before anger has escalated to rage.
The nature of emotional intelligence – page 74,25-32 {cognitive reframing}
One of the most potent – and, outside therapy, little used – antidotes to depression is seeing things differently, or cognitive reframing. It is natural to bemoan the end of a relationship and to wallow in self-pitying thoughts such as the conviction that “this means I’ll always be alone”, but it’s sure to thicken the sense of despair. However, stepping back and thinking about the ways the relationship wasn’t so great, and ways you and your partner were mismatched – in other words, seeing the loss differently, in a more positive light – is an antidote to the sadness.
The nature of emotional intelligence – page 91,28-34 {ways to enter flow}
There are several ways to enter flow. One is to intentionally focus a sharp attention in the task at hand; a highly concentrated state is the essence of flow. There seems to be a feedback loop at the gateway to this zone: it can require considerable effort to get calm and focused enough to begin the task – these first steps take some discipline. But once focus start to lock in, it takes on a force of its own, both offering relief for emotional turbulence and make the task effortless.
The nature of emotional intelligence – page 91,35-next page {slightly taxing your abilities}
Entry in this zone can also occur when people find a task they are skilled at, and engage in it at a level that slightly taxes their abilities. As Csikszentmihalyi told me, “People seem tend to concentrate best when the demands on them are a bit greater then usual. If there is too many demand on them, people are bored. If there is too much for them to handle, they get anxious. Flow occurs in the delicate zone between boredom and anxiety.
The nature of emotional intelligence – page 121,21-28 {lack of social graces}
We all have know Cecils, people with an annoying lacking of social graces – people how don’t seem to know when to end a conversation or phone call and who keep on talking, oblivious to all cues and hints to say goodbye; people who conversations centers on themselves all the time, without the least interest in anyone else, and who ignore tentative attempts to refocus on another topic; people who intrude or ask “nosy” questions. These derailments of a smooth social trajectory all bespeak a deficit in the rudimentary builds blocks of interaction.
Because of the danger of being told, either explicitly or implicitly, “We hate you”, all children are understandably cautious on the threshold of approximating of a group. That anxiety, of course, is probably not such different from that felt by a grown-up in a cocktail party with strangers who hangs back from a happily chatting group who seem to be intimate friends. Because this moment at the threshold of the group is so momentous for a child, it is also, as one researcher put it, “ highly diagnostic…quickly reveling differences in social skillfulness.”
Typically, newcomers simply what for a time, then join very tentatively at first, being more assertive only in very cautious steps. What matters more whether a child is accepted or not is how well she or he is able to enter into the group’s frame of reference, sensing what kind of play is in flow, what out of place.
The two cardinal sins that almost lead to rejection are trying to lead too soon and being out of the sync with the frame of the reference. But this is what exactly unpopular children tend to do; they push their way into a group, trying to change the subject too abruptly or too soon, or offering their own opinions, or simply disagreeing with the others right away – all apparent attempts to draw attention to themselves. Paradoxically, this results in their being ignored or rejected. By contrast, popular children spend time observing the group to understand what is going on before entering in, and then do something that shows they accept it; they wait to have their status in the group confirmed before taking initiative to suggesting what the group should do.
