Make Emotional Intelligence Great Again | Janice Gassam | TEDxHofstraUniversity

so four months ago my grandmother passed away when my mom received the call that my grandmother had passed she was on the way to the pharmacy to pick up my dad's prescription my mom was in line and she was when she got the call she was just stuck she was an absolute and utter shock as you can imagine her body was completely frozen and she didn't know what to do when it was her turn in line to pick up the prescription the pharmacist noticed my mom's facial expression and she asked my mom what was wrong the only thing that my mom could get out was my mom my mom my mom that's the only thing that my mom was even able to say and the pharmacist had seen my mom a couple of times coming in and picking up prescriptions for my dad she wasn't really familiar with my mom but knew her face and the pharmacist was able to recognize that my mom was in a state of despair she saw my mom's facial expression she read my mom's body language and without my mom even having to articulate what had just happened the pharmacist was able to recognize what was going on so she came from behind the counter and she put her arm around my mom and started consoling her she was telling my mom that everything was going to be okay and that things were gonna get better and she was just there for my mom at this really vulnerable time when my mom needed someone the pharmacist was able to recognize for my mom's facial expression and her body language that she was really in need of a shoulder to cry on this is a excellent example of emotional intelligence emotional intelligence is our ability to not only recognize and regulate our own emotions but recognizing the emotions in others emotional intelligence is a trait that we all need and that is beneficial to not only our everyday lives but workplaces emotional intelligence can help us in several different aspects and some of the most successful leaders are those who are high in emotional intelligence but there is one huge detriment to emotional intelligence and that is artificial intelligence so I know that you guys might be thinking what is artificial intelligence has to do with emotional intelligence well artificial intelligence is computer systems that were designed to make our lives simpler so computer systems that are able to perform both complex and simple tasks for us so artificial intelligence makes our lives simpler makes workplaces more efficient and all of us use artificial intelligence in our daily lives whether we realize it or not when you're at the gym listening to a song if you're listening to a streaming service like Pandora or Spotify artificial intelligence knows what song you like a lot of times before you even hear the song how many times have you been listening to your streaming service and you hear a song that you've never actually heard before well that's artificial intelligence artificial intelligence knows what we like before we even like it as we see with Amazon anytime you order something on Amazon Amazon has a laundry list of suggestions that it knows that you will like so artificial intelligence is able to recognize things sometimes before we even realize it a really interesting and scary example of artificial intelligence happened over a decade ago when a father in Minneapolis actually realized that his teenaged high school daughter had received a series of coupons for maternity items upon realizing this the father stormed up to Target who was who had sent the coupons to his daughter and he demanded to speak with the manager to understand why his teenage daughter had received coupons for maternity items so the manager himself didn't understand exactly why this individuals daughter had received these coupons so he said he was going to do an investigation and a couple days later the manager decided to call the father back to further apologize when the manager called the father back the father was rather embarrassed because what he had found out was that his daughter actually was pregnant so artificial intelligence the artificial intelligence system at Target was so advanced that it was able to recognize that this girl was pregnant before her father even knew artificial intelligence and these algorithms that many of these stores use are so advanced and helped our lives to run more easily helped workplaces to be a lot more efficient artificial intelligence is able to tell us when someone has stolen our card or are stolen our identity and is using our card fraudulently artificial and elegance is able to even recognize your likelihood to commit a crime based on your purchases in your purchase history so artificial intelligence is something that's here to stay and it's expanding and it's going to continue to expand as the decades go on but there is that dark side to artificial intelligence so it's really important that we as people and as a society realize and recognize how to sort of buffer these effects of artificial intelligence because of course it's here to stay so this is why it's really important for us to learn what emotional intelligence is and figure out how to increase our emotional intelligence so just to remind you guys emotional intelligence is our ability to recognize and regulate our own emotions as well as being able to recognize the emotions in other people so can emotional intelligence be learned unlike general intelligence emotional intelligence is something that anyone can learn and anyone can increase so I'm gonna talk about some ways that each of us can become more emotionally intelligent and increase our emotional intelligence so that we can each become better managers better leaders better people and better members of society so the first part of increasing our emotional intelligence is being able to regulate our emotions so when you recognize that you are sad or you're upset or you're angry you have to first be self-aware and recognize what it is that you're feeling and then you have to be able to somehow manage the feelings and the emotions that you are experiencing for me stress management and managing my emotions is simple because every morning I we meditate so before I even pick up my phone every single morning I try to sit for 20 or 30 minutes and I just closed my eyes and I meditate and what I find that this does for me is it really helps to keep me centered throughout the day and on the days when I don't get a chance to do this morning meditation maybe I'm rushing or I'm running out I find that my day is a little bit off and that things just don't feel completely together so recognizing what it is that helps you to manage your emotions and regulate your stress is a critical piece of emotional intelligence so finding outlets for your stress whether that's listening to music or writing down how you feel it's really critical to have a way to manage your stress and manage your emotions positive thoughts and gratitude so this seems like something that is simple but for many of us it can actually be quite a challenge there is an author named Chad Helms letter who came out with the book called what we say when we talk to ourselves and in this book he discusses many of the negative things that each of us tell ourselves every single day these negative things that we tell ourselves often times contribute to our negative emotions so it's important to practice positive self-talk and telling ourselves that things will be okay and encouraging ourselves when we find that we're in a bad mood so practicing gratitude and practicing positive self-talk is a really critical piece of emotional intelligence it sounds like it's an oversimplification but it's really important to analyze some of the things that we are telling ourselves and if those things are negative changing the narrative in order to tell ourselves more encouraging things empathy so empathy is a really crucial piece of emotional intelligence empathy is our ability to put ourselves in other people's shoes empathy can be difficult especially in the times that we live in now and things feel a little bit more divisive empathy is such an important trait to have each of us should be able to empathize with what another person is experiencing increasing our empathy takes listening we have to be willing to listen to other people's stories and other people's experiences even if we don't agree with these experiences or these stories ourselves it's really important to immerse ourselves in other people's cultures and this can be done like I said by just listening to other people if someone is expressing their emotions and expressing something that they are going through even if you don't quite understand what it is that they're experiencing just listening can help you learn a lot and help you to empathize more with what it is that they are experiencing so empathy is a really important trait to have if you want to take time off of work for example because you're experiencing some sort of negative emotion you want a manager or a boss who is able to understand what it is that you need and that you're going through and accommodate you for these emotions that you're experiencing so empathy in every aspect of our lives is crucial increasing our emotional intelligence is going to be a skill that is more and more important as time goes on because like I said artificial intelligence is something that's here to stay so as time goes on our interactions with other people are going to lessen and our interactions with machines are going to increase think of when you walk into a grocery store there are more self checkout lines than there are people to actually check you out when you walk into a bank oftentimes they steer you toward the ATMs and conducting your business with the Machine McDonald's has even introduced machines and a lot of their restaurants in New York City so you walk into a McDonald's and you don't take your order you don't give your order to a person you give your order to a screen so our interactions with machines will actually increase and this is going to have a negative effect on how we recognize other people's emotions if you're interacting with machines machines don't have feelings machines don't have emotions so making sure that you are interacting with other people is a critical piece of emotional intelligence so you may have a job where you work from home or you work on your computer and you don't have to interact with people but it's important to try to join some sort of group maybe if you go on to meetup calm and you interact with other people and social interactions is something that's really difficult for people especially who are introverted because when you're introverted you may not be as excited to interact with people but something as simple as giving someone a compliment is a great way to have an interaction and social interaction so making sure that you are positioning yourself to be networking and interacting with other people is really important because the more people that you are interacting with the better able you will be to recognize other people's emotions an emotional expression emotional expression is something that each of us need to do we know that when we don't express our emotions and don't have an outlet to express our emotions we keep them bottled up and what ends up happening as you guys know is that at some point they'll end up exploding and we'll end up having an outburst on someone and this can have negative effects on our psyche so it's really important to make sure that you have an outlet for your emotions and that you recognize when you're feeling negative emotions and a large part of this is being self aware so when you feel that you're starting to get angry or when you feel that you're sad or that you're upset recognizing what it is that you feel and this goes back to the stress management so however it is that you manage your stress and manage your emotions is the next piece so recognizing what it is that you're feeling and then finding a way to manage these emotions and expressing them is a really important part of emotional intelligence so as artificial intelligence expands and increases our need for emotional intelligence will also increase so we have to find ways to interact with other people in order to increase our emotional intelligence and make the world a more pleasant and happy place you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 31,709

Rating: 4.6391754 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Life, AI, Emotions

Id: lS60_5bALFs

Length: 17min 26sec (1046 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 18 2017