If your emotional abilities aren't in hand, if you don't have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can't have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.
True compassion means not only feeling another's pain but also being moved to help relieve it.
The emotional brain responds to an event more quickly than the thinking brain.
Smart phones and social media expand our universe. We can connect with others or collect information easier and faster than ever.
Empathy and social skills are social intelligence, the interpersonal part of emotional intelligence. That's why they look alike.
One way to boost our will power and focus is to manage our distractions instead of letting them manage us.
Emotions are contagious. We've all known it experientially. You know after you have a really fun coffee with a friend, you feel good. When you have a rude clerk in a store, you walk away feeling bad.
A prerequisite to empathy is simply paying attention to the person in pain.
The social brain is in its natural habitat when we're talking with someone face-to-face in real time.
But once you are in that field, emotional intelligence emerges as a much stronger predictor of who will be most successful, because it is how we handle ourselves in our relationships that determines how well we do once we are in a given job.
In a high-IQ job pool, soft skills like discipline, drive and empathy mark those who emerge as outstanding.
I would say that IQ is the strongest predictor of which field you can get into and hold a job in, whether you can be an accountant, lawyer or nurse, for example.
There is zero correlation between IQ and emotional empathy... They're controlled by different parts of the brain.
Brain studies of mental workouts in which you sustain a single, chosen focus show that the more you detach from what's distracting you and refocus on what you should be paying attention to, the stronger this brain circuitry becomes.
A little girl who finds a puzzle frustrating might ask her busy mother (or teacher) for help. The child gets one message if her mother expresses clear pleasure at the request and quite another if mommy responds with a curt 'Don't bother me - I've got important work to do.'
The book is a dialogue between The Dalai Lama and a group of scientists about how we can better handle our destructive emotions and how to overcome them.
When I say manage emotions, I only mean the really distressing, incapacitating emotions. Feeling emotions is what makes life rich. You need your passions.
Emotional intelligence begins to develop in the earliest years. All the small exchanges children have with their parents, teachers, and with each other carry emotional messages.
The basic premise that children must learn about emotions is that all feelings are okay to have; however, only some reactions are okay.
Societies can be sunk by the weight of buried ugliness.
