Emotional Intelligence - with Dan Goleman

a very very warm welcome to this special event on emotional intelligence with intelligence with dan goldman and dan lovely to have you with us thank you for being here mark it's always a pleasure to join action for happiness and you thank you i think this is the fourth event we've done together we're so grateful for all the time you've given over the years to well for everything you're doing but also for supporting our mission as well and it's a really exciting chance to be together because we're celebrating 25 years since your seminal book emotional intelligence was first published so we'll obviously talk a lot more about that but before we dive into our conversation just to let you all know listening at home uh and i can already see three and a half thousand people live on this event and more still joining as i speak so thank you for being here thank you for all the lovely greetings i'm seeing coming up on the chat from all around the world dan and i gonna have a conversation about emotional intelligence the basics but also the ways we can apply in our lives and some of the implications for the world we're living in right now and then you'll have a chance to put some questions to dan as well so please do use the q a function and uh we'll try and get through at least some of the the many questions i know you'll have and we'll wrap up in in about an hour's time so really looking forward to seeing your comments please do use the chat to share your views but also again if you'd rather just focus on dan please feel free to minimize the chat because i can see it's already very busy with lots of enthusiasm so dan welcome uh it's emotional intelligence is the theme and there's all kinds of ways i'd love to explore this topic but before perhaps we even revisit what emotional intelligence is i wondered if we could start back with emotions more generally i've been feeling a whole range of emotions today from worry to enjoy to enthusiasm as every day why do we why do we have emotions what's the what's the purpose of emotions dan well you know from a evolutionary point of view if you really want to zoom out emotions are the brain's way of making us pay attention to something and so when you feel happy about something you zoom in on that when you feel angry about something you pay full attention to that and in fact it turns out that uh emotional distractors in this is from a modern life point of view are more powerful than any other kind our emotions tell us what's matters right now what's important and so uh from a survival point of view emotions uh interestingly uh the emotional centers have a one neuron long connection to the eyes and the ears which means that they get information very fast which and uh evolution must have been key to survival you know here comes something that eats me i'm gonna run or if there's something i have to i eat i'm gonna run after it but you need to do that right away and that's what emotions have done uh unfortunately today in modern life that design which works so well in most of human prehistory presumably gets us in trouble we can have what you might call a emotional hijacker i've called it the amygdala hijack in my book emotional intelligence because it's the amygdala which is a part of the emotional centers which is the brain's radar for threat that's what gets that one neuron long message and it it can hijack the rest of the brain particularly the rational brain the prefrontal cortex the part of the brain that comprehends that makes good decisions it can take it over in an instant if it thinks there's an emergency and of course the sign that we've had a hijack is not only do we have a strong emotion it's very sudden but when the dust settles we regret what we said or we did that's the hallmark of the hijack it just gets in trouble gets us in trouble and it gets us in trouble these days with modern life because we're responding to symbolic realities you know things like i'm not being treated fair rather than biological realities like it's going to eat me but we have the same surge of biology as a result so that's that's the short answer really really helpful reminder of this really powerful signaling system that we have that sort of drives every aspect of our behavior so dan i really enjoyed reading the the new introduction you've written to the 25th anniversary edition of your book and you very humbly in that sort of recognize that it wasn't you that created the concept of emotional intelligence but your book did certainly put it on the map and i um although i read it fairly soon afterwards i wasn't um paying as much attention at that time but i know there was a real distinction between sort of intellectual intelligence and this emotional intelligence iq and eq i wonder if you could sort of remind us of what what led to the birth of eq or emotional intelligence ei as you prefer to call it and perhaps a bit more about what that means well you know i was responding when i wrote the book to an upsurge of interest in the iq measure the intelligence quotient there had been a bestseller that you know pumped it up and said you know if you're reading this book you probably have a high iq and that sets you apart and i you know i went to some very competitive universities and i saw you know uh from fellow students the people who had very high iq were not necessarily very successful uh they sometimes had terrible personal relationships uh and it got me interested in emotional intelligence which means being intelligent about emotions and i realized that the four parts of emotional intelligence self-awareness managing yourself empathizing tune into other people's feelings and then putting that all together to have effective relationships had a huge impact on how we do in life and the book emotional intelligence is in large part an argument for teaching these skills to kids so that they get it right in the first place they don't need you know a psychotherapist to undo the patterns that they've learned and also i was surprised it's had a huge impact in business because it's understood that leaders particularly need emotional intelligence you know you need your technical skills to get the job they're called threshold competencies what gets you in the door but once you're in the game you're basically competing with people as smart as you are and who's going to be the best team member who handles themselves well who can tune into other people can collaborate those are the things that mark you as outstanding and that's why people become leaders leaders need to be able to manage people they don't need technical skills so much anymore because the people they're managing have them so basically i see iq is important but it's not all that matters emotional intelligence matters extraordinarily so it with that in mind dan i'd love it if you could perhaps dive a little bit deeper into what you consider to be the foundations of emotional intelligence you you already mentioned i think the sort of self-regulation and the relationships with others can we go a little bit deeper into each of those sure and in fact i think you'll find it very congruent with what you've you know the activities of action and happiness the first is self-awareness knowing what you're feeling why you feel it how it's impacting what you do or what you say and the the application of self-awareness is mindfulness meditation which is training in paying full attention to what's happening right now then there's using that information to manage yourself better you know to get over being upset resilience technically is defined as how long it takes you to recover from the peak of your upset i'm really angry or i'm really scared to uh getting back to that calm balanced state that you were in before and people who are highly resilient who recover quickly do much better than people who uh are poor at resilience because if you're poor at it it means you'll be thinking about that thing that upset you you know a day later two in the morning when you wake up it doesn't do you any good to to ruminate about that so it's good to be able to drop it another part of self management is being adaptable being agile and changing uh you know how you get to your goals but keeping your eye on your goals uh despite setbacks and obstacles kind of bouncing back and also staying positive staying optimistic no matter what happens others are saying in tibet if you can do something about what's upsetting you why worry if you can't do something about what's upsetting you why worry in other words worry doesn't help you at all and then the third part is tuning into other people empathy knowing what they're feeling uh and people don't tell us in words they tell us in tone of voice facial expression and so on so picking that up and then using all of this putting it together to have effective positive relationships to have a positive impact i learned a lot from my wife about emotional intelligence she's really got it this morning she changed an appointment with her dentist and for me you know i would have called and i would say yeah i want an appointment in april i don't want to go in december bingo she spent a lot of time chatting with the person at the other end getting to know her they laughed a little about this and that and uh and in in the midst of all that she changed the appointment but really she was connecting with the other person and you know i see her as a teacher for me an emotional intelligence that's a lovely example dan thank you i can already see some questions being raised on the chat asking if this session is being recorded so to all of you watching yes we are recording this session anyone who's signed up to join will have a chance to see this again and we'll also be saying sending out of our emails some links to some associated resources and some helpful things that dan would would like to share with you all so and do just feel free to enjoy the conversation time one thing on my mind is to what extent is emotional intelligence uh something we have inherently right earth um and to what extent is it a skill we can cultivate well this is uh interesting because it separates emotional intelligence from iq iq basically is a measure of how rapidly we can learn something new and it doesn't seem to budge much in life however emotional intelligence is almost entirely learned and learnable and this is key because uh you may not be great at empathy now but you can get better you may not be great at managing your upsets but you can get better and we know this we see it for example mindfulness this is really important mindfulness turns out to strengthen the very circuitry that helps you recover from an emotional upset and this is uh from brain scans done at the university of wisconsin and other centers it turns out that um you know the prefrontal cortex is the rational part of the brain the thinking brain it's the part of the brain that makes decisions the right side of the prefrontal cortex is taken over by the amygdala when we have that hijack i was talking about the left side can just say no it inhibits the amygdala and it turns out that the circuitry on the left side of the prefrontal cortex becomes more strongly connected the longer you've been a meditator so mindfulness is very good for for resilience uh so i've gotten a bit off track but back to you mark no thank you it's a really good point i was just reflecting on uh despite having practiced uh mindfulness for many years myself and having long been an avid student of the idea of emotional intelligence even though i didn't really learn that at school i do feel blessed that i came from a family environment that had a emotional intelligence to it but i even so today we had uh some complicated situations at work we had a sort of technology issue back at home that needed resolving and i could feel sort of tension worries rising and was aware of them had that mindfulness to be aware of them but even so just that managing the relationship between my amygdala and my sort of rationalization of that is a very complicated skill so for for those of us that have the benefit of maybe having some of the blessings i've had or indeed gone much further than i have that's maybe fine but what about someone who hasn't had a chance to learn this at school it's wonderful that you've encouraged such a focus on social emotional learning in schools it must surely continue it's a vital building block but if we are here in adult life and we want to cultivate more emotional intelligence where do we start then what can we do well first of all listen to feedback i think it's good to hear from other people uh what it is we could use help with robert byrne said oh that the gods the gift would give us to see ourselves as others see us it's a rare thing you need someone you trust someone you respect uh someone who can be frank with you to give you an honest uh look at where you could get better and then uh it's possible to actually go through a systematic learning plan to get better so for example with empathy one thing that helps is to get feedback from other people you know you make your guess as to what people are feeling but then if they tell you what they're feeling well then you know whether you're right or wrong and that helps you with a learning curve if you're going to use to deploy a method to recover more quickly from being upset there are many such methods you need to do it systematically and by the way for mindfulness to help you it's important to do it daily or as close to daily as you can to get the brain effect that i was talking about so in other words there are ways in in the social emotional learning programs you mentioned they take the components of emotional intelligence the four parts self-awareness of management empathy social skill and they teach these to children in an age-appropriate way and they do it continually from even pre-k to to the time they're going off to university and so it helps that the children's brain uh connect better so they don't have to you know do remedial work later in life which we call either psychotherapy or action for happiness or whatever you can find it's going to help you i i love that advice to listen and sort of tune in to feedback about your behavior and and to some extent implicit within that is a sense of sort of vulnerability a willingness to acknowledge that you might need to do some work on yourself and of course the challenge i feel what's coming up for me is what happens when we're in fight or flight mode i you know when we're feeling attacked our sort of defenses go up we're less likely to listen to feedback we're more likely to have a a strong sort of sort of confrontational reaction and i i sort of wonder if many times as i look around us in modern society we're seeing to some extent a societal fight or flight response in some other polarization some of the sort of fear of the other that we're seeing is it possible to help people lower this sort of fight-or-flight mechanism because in many ways you can't begin to tap into your self-awareness and connections to others whilst you're in that heightened state precisely yeah i'll share with the folks on this webinar there's a method that i've been teaching to actually front-line medical people to help shift from that fight-or-flight response where you're not open to hearing anything you get very defensive very angry whatever it might be to a mode where you're calm again relaxation or parasympathetic nervous system mode as we say technically and it's very simple goes like this you take a deep breath you inhale so that your belly expands you hold that breath as long as it's comfortable for you and then you exhale very slowly and then you take another deep breath into your belly hold it as long as it's comfortable exhale very slowly and again inhale deeply hold for as long as you can exhale a long exhale and you do this say six to nine times and research shows that this shifts the body from that fight-or-flight response to a very relaxed state and he does it right on the spot i'm i'm really benefiting from having just done that for some deep breaths done thank you yes i i was intrigued by what you said about teaching this particular skill to frontline healthcare workers because i think that's such a an importantly timely topic we know we have so much even more deep and uh heartfelt affection for people who putting themselves at risk in the current crisis and of course they're dealing with life and death situations is it therefore possible to use that kind of skill in in a real moment of tension just you know to have that in your back pocket even when you're facing a really difficult situation is is it able to act on us as quickly as it felt like it could on me then well i think when you're first doing it it's good to uh you know be in private but if you get good at it you can do it on the spot you can do it when you're talking to someone so yes it's a kind of good thing to have in your back pocket for those moments and you know the healthcare workers are i think they're modern saints because they're putting themselves at risk to save other people's lives and they have high anxiety about getting a virus themselves and also bringing it home to people they care about their family their friends so it's a high anxiety time understandably and anxiety as i said before has its function but if it's too high then it can become immobilizing so it's good to have methods that can help us recover quickly i am i feel moved to turn to the audience and the chat here for a moment i always love people's interaction and um before we move on to sort of a bit more of the relational component which i'd like to talk about next just while we're thinking about dealing with our own personal emotional challenges to some extent i'd like to invite everyone in the audience just maybe to share if you'd like to in the chat just one or two words about how you're feeling right now because such a mix of emotions i'm sure many of us will be feeling uh you know grateful to be here with you and perhaps uh slightly you know calmer after trying out that breathing exercise but of course many people are dealing with loss uncertainty worries fear so i'm just going to read out a few other things that come up grateful and inquisitive tired relaxed awesome engaged overwhelmed curious stressed feeling pretty good happy calm optimistic hopeful sleepy mundane anxious angry exhausted isolated enthusiastic grateful and and so it continues and many others coming past thank you so much for sharing those if someone says relaxed dan's voice was so calming so that's nice to hear um but even in just that short uh excerpt of human experience down we can see the the full sort of roller coaster experience of being alive from anxiety through to hope and much in between so um i'd love for us to continue in this conversation to help us find ways to to to deal with the difficult emotions and move forward but a key aspect of emotional intelligence that you touched on at the beginning is about our not just our dealing with our own emotions but our interaction with others what are some of the ways that we can deepen that sense of social and emotional intelligence the way that we understand each other and relate to each other yeah well it turns out that one of the exercises like mindfulness that strengthens the part of the brain that cares about other people uh is a loving-kindness meditation or a circle of caring which i believe is part of the repertoire in action isn't it yes yes we often ignore that yeah and i i've done it with different groups in terms of what i call a circle of caring where you think of someone you're grateful for gratitude is so important and i know you work with gratitude well maybe we could try this now do you want to just talk us through the stages of those circles and we can all try and visualize it while you're speaking yeah so just bring to mind uh a person or people in your lives that you're grateful for who've been kind to you who've helped you along supported you at some point in your life and with that person or people in mind just to make the following wishes you know may you be safe happy healthy may you have a life of fulfillment may you thrive just repeat those phrases silently to yourself with those people this is the target of that phrase and now bring yourself to mind make the same wishes for yourself may i be safe happy healthy may i have a life that's fulfilled may i thrive repeat those phrases for yourself and now bring to mind people you love people you deeply care about and wish them the same they they you are safe happy healthy have a life of fulfillment may you thrive and then think of people you know your neighbors acquaintances people that work whoever it may be make these same wishes for them may you be safe healthy happy may you have a life of fulfillment may you thrive and now in all directions make those wishes for everyone everywhere may you all be safe happy healthy have lives of fulfillment may you thrive and research mark has shown that this exercise makes people more generous more caring more likely to help someone in need also makes people happier the dalai lama says the first person to benefit from compassion is the one who feels it thank you for sharing that exercise i've i can feel both calmer and more connected to others as a result and we've had a series of wonderful um guests in these events uh to share skills around our relationships with each other dr roxy manning recently helping us understand non-violent communication which feels to me really closely related to the idea of being emotionally and socially intelligent but i guess as we look more widely around the world down there's lots of unhelpful trends in society there are behaviors and attitudes and sort of in group and outgroup and polarization and i don't want us to dive into political conversations but i wonder if we could help everyone everywhere to use your lovely last circle of concern to develop more emotional intelligence do you think that would contribute to a happier karma and kind of world it feels to me like it's the building block or at least one of the building blocks that we're missing in modern society yeah i think there's a fast track and a slow track here the slower track is social emotional learning helping coming generations be less likely to contribute to the problems the fast track actually this comes from a book i did with the dalai lama force for good he's he urges everyone to be a leader for the good to take action for happiness and beyond he says each of us has our own sphere of influence our own set of talents our own capabilities our own levers you know in whatever way we can leverage things and if we use that for the good and if we act now even if we will not see the fruits of our actions in our lifetime we can help as an aggregate create a force for good in the world and i see that as working against you know implicit racism which is a huge problem uh the environmental damage we all do in our daily lives inadvertently but still you know and perhaps even for that gap between rich and poor has only been widening uh which but seems almost criminal as the dalai lama puts it so what he's saying basically is think of yourself as having a sphere of influence might be your family family and friends might be work might be politics if you're situated that way but not necessarily but whatever you can do do it now that's the key darn it it's so lovely to hear that and we were so grateful in that book the force for good book you wrote with his holiness that it mentioned the action of happiness movement so i just wanted to take this opportunity to thank all of those individuals i'm sure many of which are joining us on this event who have taken a step to be a force for good in their local communities they've been running our local community courses we've had since the lockdown people running zoom based groups so if you're not already involved in one near you then please do check those out online folks and there were so many people that i get inspired by every day in our wider community that are such a force for good and it reminds me of that wonderful other book you wrote called focus where you talked about focus on self focus on sort of others and then focus on social change more widely so you've just articulated you know a whole range of really big social issues from systemic racism to inequality climate and so on um you mentioned when we spoke the other day about sort of the bystander effect or how some extent being just aware of these things isn't enough do you want to say a bit more about that yeah i i was telling you about a friend of mine irv style who as a child was saved from death by the nazis in hungary by rural wallenberg who made him a swedish citizen at least temporarily he came to the states and became a social psychologist and he studied the roots of evil and what he found was an unnamed but really important factor is the silence of bystanders if you hear someone make a racist remark a joke or act in some way which is a racist uh you know if you say something if you oppose it on the spot it's very different than if you just stay silent because the silence can be read as support as uh agreeing with what's being said so speaking up is very important even in mundane everyday interactions as a way to stop evil from growing i find that a very powerful recommendation well on that note before we come to questions and i can see there's lots and lots of questions that have come up for you dan as i would have fully expected um i wonder if we could do another sort of interactive moment with our lovely audience we have 4.6 000 people uh with us right now which is lovely um on this idea of taking action uh we've that's what action for happiness is all about and i guess you've helped us think about what we can do around our own emotional regulation how we can have a sort of more loving and compassionate relation to others but also how we can be a force for good in the world so maybe i we could invite the audience to share something that they would like to take as an action so folks i guess that might be something about your own emotional state and dealing with the trauma and very real challenges you're facing it might be something to do with rebuilding relationships so it might be to do with something else you'd like to do so dan i might um i know you may not be looking at the chat so i might just read out some of these so you can hear them i'd like to create a group near me be less self-critical start a daily meditation be kinder to others find ways to deal with my depression listen more listen to others worry less encourage empathy in government teach social emotional lessons apply gratitude speak up when i witness kindness be more patient and compassionate live in the moment try not to lose my temper with loved ones show humility creating a group in barcelona connecting more with others being more honest with myself um more about daily meditation self-acceptance and so they continue so a lovely example of everything you've been saying how do you feel hearing that list makes me feel very grateful to everyone who's going to take a step or is taking steps now i think that action for happiness is a wonderful group because you don't say what action to take you give a menu and beyond you welcome everything and i i really feel the great uh sense of gratitude to everyone who's taking a step thanks dan so let's turn to some of these questions and i may still sneak a few of my own in as well but there's been quite a few people asking about uh the teaching of emotional intelligence in schools and i'd just like to credit i mean your book and the foundations you laid has led to a very very wide uptake of social and emotional programs although we'd all love to see it go much further it's really quite remarkable how many schools and institutions have at least some aspects of this built in now what do you think should be the priority as we look ahead in our education system so for example gareth was asking what should we be teaching in schools and um and he was contrasting the sort of curriculum that currently focuses primarily on the acquisition of knowledge which is our you know and our exam based system what would you say about the direction for education well you know i think knowledge is very important i'm not against knowledge you know both my parents were academics uh but i feel it's it's necessary but not sufficient and that uh teaching the basics of emotional intelligence social emotional learning as it's called when it's translated into a curriculum is essential and you know when i wrote emotional intelligence i had just been one of a half dozen people who founded a group called the collaborative for academic social and emotional learning which is the premier group worldwide that's been furthering the cause of social emotional learning and as you mentioned it's remarkably successful but there are many many more schools where you could reach children who don't get that education now but one of the things we've identified is the need to be sure teachers are helped in along these lines because they're the model they're the classroom you know uh person of influence and power and kids are looking to them so if it's just a rote lesson in sel it's not enough you need to be sure the teachers embody self-awareness self-management empathy and so on in order for children to learn it and also that it's age-appropriate we also find it's important to bring families in i wrote another book mark you might want to put this in the show notes it's called the triple focus in education it's about what we feel is the future i did it with peter singh at mit and we say there are three levels the three you mentioned self-focus self-management and there we recommend adding mindfulness to the curriculum relationship management collaboration kindness and we recommended a circle of caring type exercise because that seems to help in enhancing the ability to spontaneously care and then the third was systems learning understanding how systems operate the economy technology uh you know we're all inadvertently culpable in climate warming and it's because the things we buy and use have no marking for us to understand what their actual impact is on the environment there may be some and i i applaud that but you know there are eight global systems that support life on the planet and you may buy some chips that have the carbon impact marked but you don't know about you know how did they grow those potatoes what kind of fertilizer did they use did the fertilizer was it nitrogen based did it run off into a river than the ocean did it kill life in a body of water you don't know that we can know it there's a methodology for it and if those impacts were marked at the point where we making a purchase decision then you could look at one pack of ships or another and decide well i'll get the one that's least harmful which would create a free market mechanism a market force to pressure companies to improve their actual footprint right now we don't know it so that's the kind of thing i'd love to see the next generation insist on or help make real so those are the three and it's called the triple force yeah thank you and i love what you said about the importance of the role of teachers in the education system as well because not only do they need to embody it but of course many teachers are dealing with really difficult emotional situations and these are skills that can really help them thrive in challenging times so let's wind back from the sort of uh learning and social realm back to the individual magnus has asked a fascinating question um i find that when i'm angry what i need to do in order to get back to normal is to cry and give myself a bit of a sort of soothing touch how come my system doesn't go to sadness right away so why so so it feels like in some ways an element of grief helps overcome anger is that is that is there sort of something we can learn from that as i've told you i hesitate to try to do psychotherapy online in a webinar uh and so in a particular case there's no telling why you go from anger to sadness but it's it shows self-awareness that you even notice this and i commend you for that and that you have found a way to manage your anger even if it takes you through some rough emotional passages so i i would say that actually you're on your way to a very positive self-management you might want to deploy other methods and you know you might want to explore where is the source of the hurt that you're soothing in your life but that's not something we can do here online something you might do with a counselor actually thank you very wise dan gary's asked in these strange times with so much disruption in the world how can we support and guide people who are less resilient to help them cope with the uncertainty around us well one of the first things you can do is manage your own emotions because emotions are contagious that turns out that people who are very calm who are very centered can communicate that state to other people non-verbally through parts of the brain that connect invisibly brain to brain they form a kind of emotional back channel to any interaction so the first thing you can do is take care of yourself then the second thing you can do is listen be present to the person what is it that is actually going on with them and having someone who is fully attentive it creates a kind of healing presence you know there are three kinds of empathy there's cognitive empathy you understand how the person thinks you can be an effective communicator because you know the words they use to explain things then there's emotional empathy where you pick up what someone is feeling and then the third kind of empathy is really important it's called empathic concern you care about the other person it's in the brain it's based on the mammalian caretaking circuits it's a parent's love for a child so if you can be there if you can be present to the person with caring it has a very healing and soothing effect on the person they feel seen heard and cared about thank you uh jason's asked a question about emotional intelligence in the workplace how can we use emotional intelligence when we're facing sort of difficult situations he's mentioned incivility from colleagues so when people are being treating us in a way that we feel upset about in the workplace yeah as i said the first thing you can do is help yourself you know manage your reaction to the incivility rather than for example getting angry or being too passive and just taking it but rather you know being calm being clear and then maybe you can say something to the person if it's appropriate if it's your boss i'd recommend you don't say something you might say something to the boss's peer or you might send the boss's vita out to a executive recruiter and maybe they'll get a position somewhere else it's a joke but really some people have done it but basically i think the the way to manage incivility is first to handle your own upset and then if appropriate to say something to the other person that's very wise and i can already feel that there were many times when i um i'm prone to react instantaneously rather than sort of calmly internalizing and dealing with it and then choosing how to respond a bit more calmly and rationally so thank you for that reminder ellie's asked a fascinating question oh sorry go on dan before we move on you know there's a definition of maturity which is widening the gap between your first impulse and how you actually react in that gap which you're talking about mark you can decide well maybe there's a better way to respond and then respond that way sorry go ahead no that's a great reminder ellie's asked a fascinating question which is is it possible to have too high level of emotional intelligence that it might stop you getting things done i'll be able to focus on some more sort of achievement oriented aspects of life i think uh really you're talking about an imbalance in emotional intelligence there's some people for example who have too much emotional empathy there's research that shows that when people see someone in great pain or suffering like a burn patient they get flooded through that second kind of empathy the emotional empathy they get flooded themselves and then they tune out which is not helpful so it really is important to manage your own reactions first and then you can respond and also by the way speaking about the workplace uh the research really shows that the higher a person's emotional intelligence the better their performance the more loyal they are to their organization the more likely they are to help out someone else you know the better organizational citizen they become so i don't think it's really possible to have too much emotional intelligence you can have too little of this though and too much of that thanks and this has come from an anonymous uh attendee but it's an interesting question i think but since you wrote your first book and we're celebrating 25 years since the first book came out what particularly have you learned that sort of supplemented or changed your original thoughts about emotional intelligence what's the sort of latest perspective that has changed along the way yeah well um a couple of things for one in the new introduction to the 25th edition which is coming out now i include an updated model of emotional intelligence at first i thought there were five parts to it now i see there are four the four i mentioned self-awareness self-management empathy and social skill what i did was full motivation which i saw as something separate into self-management because you know keeping your eye on the goal despite setbacks which is the drive to achieve some sees motivation i see it as something that's learned and learnable and is a very effective way to help manage yourself so that's one thing and then within each of those four domains there are about a dozen competencies that we see among outstanding people leaders in the workplace people who are high performers and that model is in the new introduction to the 25th edition and also i've understood as i said before the importance of extending emotional intelligence and the awareness of it to the systems level so that we can be more effective in acting for the common good um we've got a question here from heather which i think may even be my own mum who i know was planning to tune in to this event so hi mum if that is you she said please could you comment on ptsd which is for those who aren't aware of post-traumatic stress disorder obviously lots and lots of people dealing with severe uh trauma and um obviously that can have a really long lasting lifelong impact on our kind of emotional regulation and responses to situations what are your thoughts on how that links to ei dan yes it links very directly in fact the research shows that ptsd is a uh it means that you have an overly reactive amygdala the amygdala is one of the key centers of the brain where the traumatic moment is stored and when something comes along which is reminiscent might be a tone of voice something subtle it can trigger the whole reaction and so i i think that there are kind of two two ways to uh deal with ptsd one is to know your triggers and what the emotional pattern is how you automatically respond when you're triggered and you know i i'd like to recommend my wife's book tara bennett coleman emotional alchemy she talks about the 10 most common kinds of trigger uh and lots of us you know everyone has something as they say so the book explains how to use mindfulness as a way to intervene in the reactivity and then generally for trauma it's important if you're working with trauma to know what your triggers are why you're being triggered and to try to widen that gap between your impulse and the reaction but also it's very important to have an environment or a relationship with someone you trust someone you feel safe with psychological safety is key to a remedy for a personal trauma so i i recommend all of those things it's a tough one and good luck thanks dan and i i think that concept of psychological safety you just mentioned is is fascinating i'm not sure i fully understand it is there a way that we can help people feel more psychologically safe through our own actions sure well really it comes from the work of john bulby the british psychoanalyst psychotherapist who studied children and realized that if a child was going to have a good emotional intelligence uh you know emotional and psychological well-being over their life it was important that a caretaker a mom or a dad or someone tuned into them empathized with them understood them and spoke to their needs and made them feel psychologically safe and we can do that with people we love people we care about with anybody else by being fully present and understanding really listening to what it is they are needing in the moment psychologically and if we're able to provide that for them or at least to give them a safe place a safe relationship to be open and honest about what they're feeling thanks so i accidentally muted myself the classic zoom 2020 uh skill we've all developed um lots of people have been asking me about autism dan anya is just one i can see on screen right now to what extent is it possible to have someone on the autistic spectrum to be able to develop or at least cultivate more emotional intelligence as far as we know autism is is brain-based and it seems to be somewhat genetic in nature i don't really buy theories that say it's learned i think it's rather determined by birth and one of the sad defects in people with autism or on the spectrum is a failure and the ability to empathize to tune in uh to be present to another person uh and i think the the most immediate promising path to helping people with autism lead a more normal life if you want if they want to is a workaround where people learn for example the norms of interaction looking people in the eye so on shaking hands and so and this is taught in some approaches to helping people with autism and of course we need to recognize there's a spectrum and people with autism often have great gifts too and you don't want to diminish the gifts at all but if you want people to be able to handle people on the spectrum to handle their own anxiety and often great anxiety goes with this pattern you can help them learn methods and there are many some of which you use mindfulness being one deep relaxation or the breath practice i just shared might be another and you need to do some experimentation to see what will help a given person dan a slight shift of topic uh here we are in hopefully the beginnings of a post covid world obviously lots of you know promising news about vaccines coming out this week but still really in the thick of a very difficult situation for our global family one of the aspects of that which i think does link to our emotional and social intelligence is the extent to which our physical proximity to others has been sort of challenged we've talked about social distancing i've always felt that it's physical distancing we need not social distancing we must stay socially connected so lundy's asked an interesting question how do we create social connections or enhance our social connections in a digital and virtual world you know whether that's post covert or anywhere a lot of us are spending more time on screen how do you see that well first of all i think it's important to recognize the need for i like the term friendly distancing because distancing is something you do because you care about yourself and the other person and you want yourself and the other person to be safe and healthy so it's a friendly thing to do on the other hand it's distancing and it means that there's a whole category of interaction that we're missing now and there are many people are feeling a great loneliness from the isolation and how do we make up for it i think we can partially remedy it i don't think we can undo everything i think we'll wait for a vaccination so that we can go back to life as normal but while we're on zoom with each other while we're on webinar it's important i think to reach out to another person you care about and do it separately from the meeting do it one on one do it in a phone call phone carries a lot of emotional information and a phone call to a friend or a colleague about the person not about a job or about some project you're doing just how are you doing how's life going this is important it's more important now than it has been in the past i think it can't make up for everything but at least it helps and until we can go back to life as normal doing that more and more to maintain connection and preserve the sense of relationship i think is quite important and building on that which i think is so wise uh how do how do you see this uh balance around sharing our own emotional state and needs with others in certain different contexts i mean i'm as with many others very moved by brene brown and others work about vulnerability and about when you can take off the mask and reveal your true self and what's really going on emotionally for you that is you know helping you process difficult emotions also brings the whole sort of spectrum of your authentic self more to the surface but of course there's only there's certain times when that may be more appropriate than others with people you trust in certain situations how can we judge when it's best to really reveal our emotional sort of inner state and when it might be wiser to sort of uh take a slightly different approach and i really applaud what you're talking about mark because i think it creates huge closeness even despite the you know technology and the distancing if you can be vulnerable with someone else that person vulnerable with you open about their deepest feelings that creates intense intimacy and rapport and i think the question of with whom can you do that uh you need to decide on the spot who are you comfortable with who's comfortable with you are you pushing the other person more than they can handle by being open and vulnerable so this i think you need to use your empathy your radar emotional radar for the other person to sense in the moment so we've talked down about the importance of teaching emotional intelligence to children the next generation absolutely vital um dr bravo marcelo here has uh asked how can we teach eq to adults or even to seniors as opposed to teaching to kids well perhaps we haven't got the formal education system and maybe they're not involved involved in a mindfulness practice or something else are there any ways that we can help build that into later life as well well here's the challenge when you're working with older people not with children during childhood we form anatomically our emotional and social circuitry of the brain and maybe we've learned to manage our emotions well or upsetting emotions maybe we've learned to empathize or maybe not uh and if you're dealing with someone who still you know gets overly angry at the least trigger and you want to help them you have a double challenge because you have to overcome their deeply automatic habit and help them learn a new one so you have a twofold task i i've worked with a lot of training and development officers and companies are doing this with people who are adults of course at work and the first question i urge them to ask the person is do you care because if the person doesn't care forget it it takes effort it's going to take time and if the person cares then can you give them some good feedback there are instruments called uh 360 degree instruments where people who you ask to evaluate you these are people you know well know you well whom you trust uh and they evaluate you across say the spectrum of those competencies in my model that one is the emotional and social competence inventory it's a 360 for the workplace but you want to be able to give the person or help them get honest feedback about where they could benefit from doing the most work and it might be in their anger then uh you want to help them rehearse a different habit what would you rather do rather than just you know barking at the person you're angry at would you like to count to 10 and then respond more evenly more assertively rather than aggressively well let's practice it and then you want to help that person practice at every naturally occurring opportunity in their lives and then with luck there will come a moment when they do the right thing the new thing in the right way at the right time without even thinking about it which means from a brain point of view that habit is now based in the center for habits the basal ganglia and they'll have that habit good habit for life that's a successful habit change then i know you've got lots of resources that we can potentially share with the community in our follow-up tomorrow we'll send a link to the the updated book i believe you have a free resilience based program is that correct yes and the url i think you can give to people i can share with people yes is there anything else we'd like to share in terms of resources that people could use to put some of this into practice as they leave and people who find this work interesting might be might want to know i'm starting a new podcast and you can give the url to help get that going uh where i'll be interviewing people i just did one with lori santos who taught this wonderful course on happiness at yale yes laurie joined us for one of these webinars as well she's fantastic exactly yeah so i'm people who interest me will be on the podcast and uh i think you'll be able to mention other resources but yes the resilience program for people who really want to work on uh you know and with lockdown and covid we're all being challenged this is a free program uh that's being offered and mark it's kind of you to put that and other resources people may want to follow up on uh on your website one of you to share so much of this stuff you know for free with the world done um we're rapidly running out of time a couple of comment stroke questions here um judy has said are there any other exercises that dan could briefly share with us to help us relax and related to that chantelle said could we do that deep breathing again at the end please it was so special thank you dan so dan would you like to share one other idea or perhaps just another mindful breath or two with us well let's do the deep breathing just to be sure because if you want to master it it's good to practice it so here we go breathe in deeply you can close your eyes if you want so your belly expands hold that breath as long as it is comfortable for you then exhale slowly and again breathe in deeply expand your belly hold it and when you need to just exhale slowly and again deep inhalation belly expand hold it exhale slowly and there you go and on your own you can do this six to nine times when you feel you really need it thank you mark dan thank you i'm saying so much gratitude and lovely comments on the chat thank you everyone for being here and for all the great contributions i'm sorry we haven't had a chance to answer more of the questions but thank you for all the great questions that came in dan just as we leave with a minute to spare i wondered if you had any final thoughts to sort of summarize this idea of emotional intelligence and and particularly how we can put it into practice in the situation we find ourselves in the world right now what would you like to leave us with so just a few words first help yourself then second tune in be present for other people and third show them that you care that's emotional intelligence that's very wise very moving uh and very much appreciated dan thank you so much for making time for this and for being here and thank you all for joining us on this event and we will be sharing the follow-up uh resources and video with you soon dan it's pleasure to see you again best of luck and keep up the great work thank you mark always a pleasure

Channel: Action for Happiness

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Length: 59min 2sec (3542 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 25 2020