Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman
by Parker · 40 things on Twos
- “It is with the heart that one sees rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” - Antoine de Saint Exupéry
- All emotions are impulses to act.
- Continual emotional distress can create deficits in a child’s intellectual abilities, crippling their capacity to learn.
- Emotional intelligence: abilities such as being able to motivate oneself and persist in the face of frustrations; to control impulse and delay gratification; to regulate ones moods and keep distress from swamping the ability to think; to empathize and to hope.
- People who are emotionally adept—who know and manage their own feelings well, and who read and deal effectively with other people’s feelings—are at an advantage in any domain of life.
- Interpersonal intelligence is the ability to understand other people: what motivates them, how they work, how to work cooperatively with them.
- Intrapersonal intelligence is a capacity to form an accurate model of oneself and to be able to use that model to operate effectively in life.
- Self-awareness—recognizing a feeling as it happens—is the keystone of emotional intelligence.
- The brain is remarkably plastic, constantly learning.
- The key to sounder personal decision making is being attuned to our feelings.
- Reframing a situation more positively is one of the most potent ways to put anger to rest.
- A strong work ethic translates into higher motivation, zeal, and persistence—an emotional edge.
- The more prone to worries a person is, the poorer their performance.
- Good moods enhance the ability to think flexibly and with more complexity, making it easier to find solutions to problems, whether intellectually or interpersonal.
- Hope is believing you have both the will and the way to accomplish your goals.
- Optimism means having a strong expectation that things will turn out all right in life, despite setbacks and frustrations.
- It is the combination of reasonable talent and the ability to keep going in the face of defeat that leads to success.
- People’s beliefs about their abilities have a profound effect on those abilities.
- Being able to manage emotions in someone else is the core art of handling relationships.
- Children learn to do what they see done.
- Emotions are contagious.
- People who are able to help others soothe their feelings have an especially valued social commodity; they are the souls others turn to when in greatest emotional need.
- When two people interact, the direction of mood transfer is from the one who is more forceful in expressing feelings to the one who is more passive.
- To love and to work are the twin capacities that mark full maturity.
- Boys take pride in tough-minded independence and autonomy, while girls see themselves as part of a web of connectedness.
- Men are content to talk about “things,” while women seek emotional connection.
- When emotionally upset, people cannot remember, attend, learn, or make decisions clearly.
- Stress makes people stupid.
- Leadership is not domination, but the art of persuading people to work toward a common goal.
- Taking initiative: being self motivated enough to take on responsibilities above and beyond their stated job.
- People who are extremely scared do terribly in surgery.
- Anger seems to be the one emotion that does most harm to the heart.
- Being prone to anger was a stronger predictor of dying young than were other risk factors such as smoking, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol.
- Social isolation—the sense that you have nobody with whom you can share your private feelings or have close contact—doubles the chances of sickness or death.
- While we cannot decide when we have our emotional outbursts, we can have more control over how long they last.
- “The main hope of a nation lies in the proper education of its youth.” - Erasmus
- We need to be in control of ourselves—our appetites, our passions—to do right by others.
- It takes will to keep emotion under the control of reason.
- Being able to put aside ones self-centered focus and impulses has social benefits: it opens the way to empathy, to real listening, to taking another person's perspective.
- Seeing things from another person's perspective breaks down biased stereotypes, and so breeds tolerance and acceptance of differences.