Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ (original) (raw)
719 reviews626 followers
Descriptive but not very practical--
The main and only thesis of the book is: emotional intelligence is important. That's it. Goleman spends over 13 hours in this audiobook to pretty much buttress the thesis with evidence from various sources including psychology, medicine, and educational programs.
The content is interesting at times but overall, the message got repetitive and I was looking for any useful information to put to use in my daily life from the book to no avail.
Unfortunately the book is very much descriptive and normative, but not very useful or practical. He describes what emotional intelligence is and makes a strong case for its importance over IQ, but fails to make it relevant to daily life.
Also, the content is not as groundbreaking as it used to be due to the recent proliferation of studies, research, and books on the subject (which could be precisely because of this book, but I plead insufficient knowledge on this matter).
So overall, I thought it was too long and not very practical, but there were still some interesting facts.
japan_jul07-aug11 social-science
77 reviews284 followers
This visionary book by Daniel Goleman is one of the most important in my collection. I see it as a seminal contribution to understanding the human condition, and a roadmap of practical steps for living better, both within ourselves and with those around us.
I begin by recommending the excellent review by Lars - a clear, well-written summary of the major points in the book.
Here I will focus on 3 topics from the book: 1) the evolution of brain mechanisms for emotional and rational behavior; 2) how these mechanisms can be hijacked in modern life, both accidentally and intentionally; and 3) the critical need for properly balancing emotion and rational thought in ourselves and our society. The latter challenge has given rise to extremely important research and training endeavors, and I believe these will become even more important in the foreseeable future. I see these endeavors as promising and significant career paths for those who pursue them.
For more information on the brain systems discussed below, McGill University has an excellent web site, with helpful graphics, background and discussion at three levels of complexity, starting with the basics. The links below are to this site.
Brain evolution
To understand Goleman’s message, it is important to consider the human brain as an evolutionary sequence. We can think of it as a layer cake, assembled one layer at a time. The important point is that each layer in the sequence was originally the 'executive' in a functioning brain, with no obvious need for a higher layer. We can think about this sequence by considering a frog, a ‘primitive’ mammal such as a mouse, and a human.
The most obvious difference among these three brains is the relative amount of cerebral (neo)cortex. The frog has essentially none - just a small bulge called ‘cerebrum’. The major portion of this ‘reptilian brain’ closely resembles the brainstem in humans, where vital body functions such as heart rate and respiration are controlled, plus a cerebellum for fine motor control. The mouse has a relatively well-developed limbic system (discussed below) and a respectable neocortex. But the human brain is completely dominated by the massively overgrown neocortex, which must be intricately lobed and folded to fit within the skull.
So what does all that neocortex do in humans? Put simply, it thinks. It makes associations, provides context, and makes decisions to guide behavior in a complex world. Most other parts of the brain carry out simple sensory processing or stereotyped motor programs, or convey information from periphery to cortex or vice versa. Cortex takes crudely processed inputs (mostly from the thalamus) and identifies salient features (speech, faces, odors). By analyzing these features, it provides a rich context for making informed decisions and choosing appropriate actions.
Well, don’t frogs need a lot of cortex to process information and make adaptive decisions? Actually, they don’t. They have gotten along just fine without it for many millions of years. The tradeoff is that they can only perform a limited analysis of sensory inputs, and produce a limited and stereotyped array of behaviors. Mice, with a significant amount of cortex, can perform more sophisticated processing and behaviors, and can show some behavioral adaptation (learning).
Now here is the really important part. Humans did not lose or replace the amphibian or ‘primitive’ mammalian brain. Basically, they just added really elaborate processing layers (neocortex) on top of them. All of that cortical hardware has to work through lower centers that are, for the most part, quite similar to those found in other vertebrates.
A neurologist colleague elegantly summarized this concept for the medical students I was teaching, in a review session for our neuroanatomy lab exam. He pointed to a structure in the human brainstem that assists in fine-tuning motor control (inferior olive). He said, “this structure evolved to help a frog catch a fly by jumping accurately toward the target. We have to use it to do things like play piano and tap-dance. It takes a lot of cortical machinery to get that kind of performance from those cells.”
It isn’t quite that simple (of course), but the analogy is a very good one. And this key concept is at the core of Goleman’s magnificent book.
Good amygdala, bad amygdala
With this evolutionary framework in place, we can consider the relative role of the limbic system (‘emotional brain’), which first emerged in early mammals. One of its key components, the amygdala, is a sort of emotional activation zone for the brain. One of its critical functions is to serve as an early-warning system for danger, such as approaching predators, and trigger very rapid fight-or-flight (sympathetic) responses. It gets direct, but crude visual and auditory inputs and processes them more quickly than neocortex. In effect, a portion of the amygdala sits and asks, ‘should I panic? should I panic?’, like an endless loop in software. These responses are, of course, extremely useful when there is real danger.
The difficulty is that, in the ‘civilized’ and complex world of humans, the amygdala can generate many false alarms. Even worse, in extreme situations it can take preemptive control of behavior, and trigger blind rage, panic, or other destructive responses. In those cases, the overgrown neocortex that underlies unique human behavior is left out of the loop. And this is where the trouble starts.
By analogy, neocortex is the executive who normally runs the company, but the workers can rebel and take over the production line. Examples from everyday life: I blew up; I don’t know what came over me; I just lost my head. Actually, your amygdala came over you and shut down your neocortex.
Truth or consequences
Being emotionally intelligent, in Dan Goleman’s brilliant synthesis, means that you understand the destructive potential of emotions, and actively find ways to minimize or eliminate the destruction. To do this, you must put a neocortical wisdom about emotions at the front end of your own thought process – an executive in the chain of command. The job of this executive is to find constructive ways to channel and control both your emotions and those of others. This idea is consistent with the notions of mindful meditation and the best of religious thought. In other words, it is a prescription for a long-term, sustainable vision of human existence. To me, this is the most profound element of Dan Goleman’s vision.
Sounds pretty simple, right? So why is it so difficult for so many people? One big reason is that a great deal of money can be made by encouraging precisely the opposite response. Firing up the limbic system to spew out fear, outrage and hate is good for business. Movie and TV producers (and writers) may not know the difference between the limbic system and limbo, but they are experts at fueling emotional responses for profit.
In stark contrast, calm, rational appeals to the better angels of our nature face a steep, uphill climb. Fear and loathing are much easier to induce, and much more marketable. Those with emotional wisdom understand that, except in the most extreme cases, fire cannot be fought with fire. But they must also understand that it is easier to start a fire and fan the flames than to put it out.
Moving forward
To me, a central challenge of our times is to find an adaptive balance between rational and emotional responses in our lives and culture. To do this, we must put the reasoning cortex in charge of our thoughts and decisions – guided but not overwhelmed by emotions. Fail to find this balance, and disaster will follow. This point is stressed by the following quote from the book:
“Each day’s news comes to us rife with reports of the disintegration of civility and safety, an onslaught of mean-spirited impulse running amok. But the news simply reflects back to us on a larger scale a creeping sense of emotions out of control in our own lives and in those of the people around us. No one is insulated from this erratic tide of outburst and regret; it reaches into all of our lives in one way or another.”
How can these stark realities be reconciled with the urgent need for rational policy decisions, in a world that hovers on the edge of economic and environmental disaster? Another quote:
“This book is a guide to making sense of the senselessness… I have been struck by two opposing trends, one portraying a growing calamity in our shared emotional life, the other offering some hopeful remedies.”
Only by building on those hopeful remedies can we take positive steps with a definite plan. This is big, important work, and visionary thinkers like Daniel Goleman are pointing the way to constructive steps that can be taken, both now and in the future.
favorites neuroscience-cognition-behavior
Author 6 books2,147 followers
Să spun că inteligența nu se poate defini? Spun.
Psihologii au vorbit o vreme de inteligența cognitivă („academică”, o numește Goleman pe bună dreptate). Ea se „măsoară” prin teste cu substantive de aranjat în serii coerente și cu figuri geometrice de potrivit între ele. A, și cu numere... Fiecare dintre noi s-a jucat în școală cu un astfel de chestionar (sau mai multe). Dacă răspundem corect obținem o cifră în jur de 150. Înseamnă asta oare că sîntem la fel de inteligenți ca Einstein? Trec peste faptul că Einstein nu s-a jucat niciodată cu un test de acest soi. Și nici Newton...
Mă grăbesc să spun că rezultatul oferă o imagine asupra abilităților noastre lingvistice și geometrice (căpătate îndeosebi în școală). Cu greu putem numi aceste abilități inteligență. Nu voi spune că ele nu sînt de nici un folos în viață: probabil că sînt necesare, dar nicidecum suficiente. Și mai e o problemă. Testul cu pricina nu poate fi rezolvat de un analfabet. Deși analfabetul nu e întotdeauna un năuc, dimpotrivă. Pur și simplu, el nu înțelege chestionarul ca atare, dar poate înțelege o mie de alte lucruri mai bine decît mulți oameni extraordinar de „inteligenți”.
Daniel Goleman a observat că există o corelație destul de vagă între performanțele școlare (care presupun un IQ ridicat) și „reușita” în viață. Nici termenul „reușită” nu se poate defini. Din păcate, la ruleta vieții nu cîștigă niciodată premianții. Asta ar sugera că indivizii care izbîndesc au o altfel de inteligență. Autorul a numit-o inteligență emoțională. Ea presupune „autocontrolul, zelul, perseverenţa şi capacitatea de automotivare”. Cu siguranță, perseverența și toleranța la frustrare sînt mai utile decît orice abilitate lingvistică sau numerologică.
Conflictul dintre „rațiune” și „pasiune” a fost observat încă de gînditorii antici: la Aristotel, atelajul sufletului e tras de doi cai năbădăioși. Daniel Goleman comentează această venerabilă intuiție. Autorul subliniază rolul decisiv jucat de „amigdala cerebrală” („nucleul amigdalian”). Emoțiile întunecă adeseori rațiunea: „inteligenţa academică are foarte puţin de-a face cu viaţa emoţională. Cei mai deştepţi dintre noi pot cădea pradă unor patimi cumplite şi unor impulsuri necontrolate; persoanele cu un IQ ridicat pot deveni piloţi uluitori de proşti atunci cînd se află la cîrma propriei lor vieţi”. Bine spus! De pildă, un discurs interior rațional nu poate opri panica.
În consecința celor de mai sus, ce ar trebui să „școlarizăm” mai înainte de orice? Răspunsul lui Goleman se subînțelege: inteligența emoțională. Ea nu e neapărat un destin („așa sînt eu, am fost și rămîn un coleric, nu mă pot stăpîni”), firea omului nu e un dat de neclintit. Mintea e mai plastică decît credem. Ar fi de preferat ca educația să fortifice nu numai inteligența noastră cognitivă, ci și inteligența emoțională. Ultima parte a cărții, „Inteligența emoțională aplicată”, se referă tocmai la acest gen de învățare.
P. S. În fine, aș menționa că unii psihologi au ajuns să postuleze (și să deosebească) nu mai puțin de 8 tipuri de inteligență. Asta dovedește că „inteligența e multiplă” și că fiecare individ este inteligent în felul lui. A se vedea și Howard Gardner, Multiple Intelligences: The Theory in Practice, Basic Books, 1993.
30 reviews36 followers
In his fascinating book, Daniel Goleman scrutinizes the notion of Emotional intelligence. the first chapter of this book is about neurological aspects of our emotions. He explains why we developed specific emotions such as anger, stress, joy, fear and... during the course of evolution. Then he thoroughly illustrates the limbic system ( emotional center in the brain) which is very insightful but if you don’t like scientific explanations you can skip this part of the book. The second part of the book is the best and the most practical part. Goleman introduces five major skills related to emotional intelligence.
These parts are:
1- The ability of detecting your emotions, which is the keystone of emotional intelligence. For example to be aware of that “ I am angry at the moment”
2- Managing emotions : people who can handle their emotions appropriately are considered intelligent in this part. The author of the book states several methods to manage your anger and other frustrations efficiently and solve their roots in order to be mentally stable.
3- Master aptitude: This is the most interesting part of the book. Goleman shows that if you are a person who delaying impulsive gratifications for your goals, motivate yourself, believe that you are capable of doing anything and change yourself when get defeated to overcome the difficulties with some extra endeavor and you always have hope that you will find a way to achieve what you want. these traits all indicates that you are great at this part.
4-Recognizing emotions in others : 4th part of emotional intelligence is to have empathy. You should be able to detect what people feels from their body movements or their tuned speech and other emotional signals . Lack of empathy could lead to some catastrophic events such as rape or child abuse or even torturing people.
5- Handling relations : this is the last part of emotional intelligence. You ought to have an ability to know the consequences of your behavior on others feelings. People who are proficient at this part are always loved by others because they know how to keep people happy and satisfied, how to persuade people in order to comply with their requests and how to transmit their positive feelings to depressed people.
If someone is good at all of these five skills, he or she is considered to be an emotionally intelligent person.
Daniel Goleman cites so many scientific studies to prove the fact that emotional intelligence is far more important than IQ. And believe me he is totally right. Why is that? Read the book to find out
546 reviews192 followers
After several years of looking at this seminal work on my to-read list, I am happy to have finally read it. It should be on the to-read list of educators and parents.
To learn and to grow, children first need to be ready to learn and to grow. However, how and what we need to learn today can differ significantly from the requirements of our ancestors. Evolution equipped us with an early warning system, the limbic system of our brains and its marvelous filter, the amygdala.
This system connects sensory perception to emotional reactions based on experiences encountered in environments where survival depended on immediate and intense responses--fight or flight. When you are hunting a woolly mammoth or being hunted by a saber-toothed tiger, careful analysis can be less helpful than a rush of adrenaline-filled momentum.
Fortunately, evolution has also met more modern-day needs. The limbic core of our brains is surrounded by the neo-cortex. The front part of this add-on to human brains, which continues to grow after birth, is larger than in other animals, and highly malleable. The way this area develops is the key to emotional intelligence.
The proficiency with which we identify and deal with the emotions engendered in the limbic system is the measure of how well we can avoid becoming victims of what Goleman terms 'emotional hijacking.' It would be futile to try to suppress these emotions entirely, he tells us, but success or failure in monitoring and controlling them is the yardstick of emotional intelligence.
Genetics, Goleman believes, do play a part here. The very outlooks with which we are born, optimistic or pessimistic, indicate obvious propensities for high or low emotional intelligence. The incredible plasticity of our brains, though, means we are not prisoners of nature.
If we consciously develop those neural pathways to the parts of our brains associated with attending to emotions, we can strengthen a 'self-aware' style of managing them that Goleman notes is so much more effective than what he calls 'engulfed' and 'accepting' styles.
While recent studies have indicated the remarkable adaptability of the brain into old age, it is during childhood and adolescence, Goleman notes, where we have the largest 'windows of opportunity.' Since 'Emotional Intelligence' first came out fifteen years ago, 'emotional literacy' has earned a place in the curriculum of many schools. Reading the book strengthened my desire for a continuation of this trend.
Without emotional intelligence, we are susceptible to 'flooding' where an emotional response such as anger generates more anger. Goleman's description of the biology here is fascinating. Anger is amplified as our brains release catecholamines, neurotransmitters that keep the nervous system ramped up and raring to go.
When children are 'flooded,' they can not be good students. 'A child's readiness for school,' Goleman writes, 'depends on the most basic of all knowledge, how to learn.' He goes on to list important attributes of that readiness from a report by the National Center for Clinical Infant Programs: confidence, curiosity, intentionality, self-control, relatedness, capacity to communicate, and cooperativeness.
'Emotional Intelligence' is not only a manual for childhood education. Reading it really made me think about my own style of managing my own emotions. In particular, two observations by Goleman really resonated with me.
One is that men, it appears, generally have a lower threshold for 'flooding' than women. If that seems counter-intuitive, it's because men often use withdrawal--stonewalling--as a way of dealing with flooding, rather than the self-expression we stereotypically associate with femininity.
The second is Goleman's consideration of substance abuse as self-medication. People who are prone to addiction may actually be searching for control of depression, anxiety or rage.
The importance of 'Emotional Intelligence' is apparent in the many references made to it in popular culture. It is also an accessible and entertaining book that deserves a place on the shelves of those concerned with learning and the brain.
366 reviews11 followers
It certainly contains a lot of useful info, but boy, is it ever dense! Reading it is like hacking your way through a dense jungle with a dull machete. It must also be noted that it is most definitely of the school of 80's/90's "hard-wired" thinking about the brain, and hard-sells the view that, to put it simply, mind comes from brain, and not the other way around. In other words, nature, not nurture. (For comparison, try Sharon Begley's Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, which, oddly enough, has a preface by Goleman.)
A further note: I get the distinct impression that Goleman doesn't really like people that don't "fit in". There is little sympathy or compassion for anyone who is a little "different", or not accepted by their peers, and there's a negative tone directed toward social outcasts in general, even those who happen to be children (Sample subheading from the book: "The Making Of A Social Incompetent").
1,711 reviews2,581 followers
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Emotional Intelligence is a book that was recommended to read on a management course that I took, oh, some time way back towards the beginning of the century. The course was taught by a middle aged white woman from southern-Africa. She also recommend Covey's book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, but in my enthusiasm that didn't put me off from reading this, perhaps because of an exercise she conducted with us in which you think of something that you'd like to do but haven't done and then trace back the reasons why you have not done this thing until you get down to fear. This resonated with me .
Anyroad, thenabouts I read Emotional Intelligence in a double edition with Working with Emotional Intelligence. I lent that volume to a colleague and never got it back, I got a second copy which I lent to my Mother and I never got that back either . Finally in recent times I fell across a copy of Emotional Intelligence. The volume was in a bad way, browned and battered. More ready to prop up a wobbly table leg than to be read. The plus side of a book in this condition is that when you stand on a station platform reading in the mizzle as it pizzles down from December skies you accept this as part of the natural life cycle of a book. First treasured, finally read in all weathers and abandoned on a train.
Rereading this was a curious experience. I suppose I had absorbed so much from my first reading that reading it again much of what it said seemed self-evident. Plainly my appreciation of the role of emotion in thought had changed so much I could no longer understand and value the book as I did as a first time reader, although I still enjoyed the anecdote about a drunk on a Japanese metro train .
You know how water trickles down through limestone in curious courses and cunning people in search of wisdom pour in coloured water to record how long it takes to flow out – there is something of that in rereading this book. It was first published in 1995 and while some ideas have flowed out in to the wider culture others are still percolating through- Jon Cabot Zinn and his Mindfulness programme are referred to here while we only had a flurry of related articles in the UK press and news over the last eighteen months or so, sometimes the cultural currents take very circuitous routes indeed.
Alternatively I could see this book as a Matrushka. Nestled within it the next generations of popular science books, the Malcolm Gladwell one about needing to accomplish 10,000 hours of practice in a given field, Csikszentmihalyi's one on Flow, and doubtless others I didn't recognise.
I would recommend it to those who were in the same position as myself some years ago, not bent backed and round shouldered, but schooled in thinking in terms of rational decision making which didn't seem adequate when looking at the surrounding office let alone the wider world, as a first primer in to the hows and implications of emotion in thought from families to workplaces. And as a corrective this is important when one happens to live in a country with elections, jury trials, and a market economy. The assumption of rationality sits alongside explicit attempts to tap into our emotional responses . Tuning into our emotions, Goleman argues, is the first step in avoiding being entirely driven by them.
In terms of history, culture, society, all those big things and what is needed to bring abut change this book reminds me again of water percolating down through limestone. Things take their own time, where and when they emerge is not something that can be known in advance. Looking over this book again it strikes me how twenty years is barely a blink of an eye when it comes to changing fundamental mental models.
163 reviews783 followers
Recommended to: If you think you don't have a high IQ and thus, your are condemned to a mediocre life.
What this book is about:
The apostleship of the book is twofold, Firstly it is to convince you that EQ matters far more than IQ in achieving high levels of success and it does it perfectly through providing N+1 lengthy repetitive case studies.
Second, it provides an almost accurate introduction to what EQ is, what elements contribute to a high EQ and finally what the consequences of strength and weakness in each element would be
Pros of the book are as follows:
1. It fulfils its apostleship very well and by having it finished, (given that you might be hopeless regarding the possibility of one day becoming a highly successful figure) you will be motivated to cultivate your emotional skills.
Cons of the book are as follows:
1. In explaining each aspect of the EQ and results of weakness and strength in that attribute, the book is tooooooooooooo lengthy and repetitive.
2. The book is by no means practical and provides merely an overview of what can be done to obviate the weaknesses.
Here are some selections of insightful parts of the book:
All emotions are, in essence, to act, the instant plans for handling life that evolution has instilled in us.
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When you are under stress, you are functioning on lower, primitive part of your brain while your higher part of the brain (neocortex)which is your rational, conscious thinking mechanism, goes offline, that's why under stress people cannot think stress or even remember simple facts
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At best, IQ contributes about 20 percent to the factors that determine life success which leaves 80 percent to other factors, namely, emotional intelligence, abilities such as: self-motivation, impulse control and delaying gratification, regulating one's mood etc.
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We often have little or no control over when we are swept by emotion, nor over what emotion it will be.But we can have some say in how long an emotion will last.
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The more 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
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Distraction is one of the most potent mood-altering devices
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Being worry psychologically gives us the illusion of being in control and prepared for potential dangers (while none actually exists).
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Saddness can be good: Sadness that a loss brings, closes down our interest in diversions and pleasures, fixes our attention on what has been lost, and saps our energy for starting new endeavours.
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Thoughts are associated in the mind not just by content but by mood. Depressed people hence, jump from one depressing thought to another. Distraction would be a potent remedy.
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Good moods while they last, enhance the ability to think flexibly and with more complexity, thus making it easier to find solutions to problems, whether intellectual or interpersonal.
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Optimism and hope, like helplessness and despair, can be learned.
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You learn at your best when you have something your care about and you can get pleasure from being engaged in.
communications-and-relationship influence-and-leadership psychology
68 reviews116 followers
It is interesting to know how psychology or spirituality trying to work toward a common goal, helping people to get better and be mindful. In this insightful book, author tries to teach about our emotions and getting to know them better such that you would do good at mainly 4 domains,
1 - Self-awareness
2 - Managing emotions
3 - Empathy and social awareness
4 - Managing relations
This books starts off with our brain functioning with respect to emotions, so getting to know about your emotions and becoming aware of your emotions helps in tune the outcome of these emotions, like handling an emotional outburst or be composed instead of lashing out in pressure and so on. It is well documented the costs of not handling your emotions from teens to fully matured adults.
At the same time, it also offers plans and techniques when you're swamped with negative emotions, like you shouldn't ruminate on any of your bad incident, instead go for a movie or read a book (of course not tragic ones). Another is Ventilation Fallacy, if you vent your anger or frustration then you are only making your situation worse by getting consumed by more regret and despair.
This book lays a strong foundation on getting to know about your emotions and explains at length about the advantages and limitations of handling your emotions.
248 reviews114 followers
There are some interesting things in the book, things that are hard to disagree with, such as emotional skills and self-knowledge are important. I think a lot of people who liked this book focused on that self-help aspect. I have no problem with that. My problems with this book stem from the wider claims Goleman makes for EQ as a mental function.
Goleman bases this aspect of his theory on some whopping assumptions. The biggest one is the idea that emotional intelligence even exists. The main aspects of EQ he posits (self-awareness, social-awareness,etc.) aren't objectively measurable and there is no proof that they even correlate with one another on a neurological level, which we would see if these aspects were part of a measurable form of human intelligence.
Another assumption is that there is an acceptable norm of emotional intelligence. This raises the question, what about people who don't meet the norm? Under Goleman's narrow definition, people with autism, even many on the high-functioning end of the spectrum, would not qualify as possessing a desirable EQ level, neither would the introvert who prefers books to people. It is here that I found Goleman's ideas to be particularly objectionable. There's a whiff of something truly unpleasant here. However, we know that even people with severe autism are able to learn emotional skills.
Goleman makes the grand claim that, throughout history, great leaders all had high EQ levels. (As a historian, this made me cringe when I first read it.) Unless one has access to a person's psychiatric records, it is always extremely problematic to make all but the most qualified claims about the psychology of historical figures.
The EQ theory has many of the same flaws as theories of IQ. Older IQ tests assumed that intelligence was easily measured and that there was a single kind of intelligence. One frequently encountered people who had low IQ scores but who functioned intelligently or had highly advanced skills in some areas but not others. We now speak of multiple intelligences, seeing them as a skills set. We might be born with a tendency to some intelligences over others, but these are shaped by enviromental factors and can be influenced through learning, rather than something neurologically innate.
I'm willing to accept the idea that people are born with a range of abilities to recognize and respond to emotional interaction. I think these emotional responses are learned behaviors to a much greater degree than Goleman would allow. The problem with books like Goleman's is that it presents one side of a very contentious debate, but it might be the only book on the subject many people will read.
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2,131 reviews792 followers
A brief overview of Emotional Intelligence and how it plays a huge role in our lives...and how it can solve a lot of problems that have arisen within our culture.
This read like a book published in the 90s by a white dude. It, um, hasn't aged well?
This made a lot of good points about self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skill, but I felt Goleman attributed a bit too much of society's problems to a lack of emotional intelligence instead of on systematic issues such as racism, prejudice and discrimination. For example, he makes the argument that people experiencing poverty and people who are imprisoned can learn to better themselves by improving their emotional intelligence (or if they had more emotional intelligence they wouldn't be in that situation in the first place), which was a gross over-simplification and also put the onus of a person's fate entirely on them instead of putting any on a broken system/a system design to keep people of color (and specifically Black people) down.
Additionally, I was underwhelmed and exhausted by the heteronormativity of his arguments and points.
So straight.
So white.
So tiring.
So dated.
625 reviews847 followers
Daniel Goleman's seminal work in the field of human emotion addresses the absence in our culture of an early (and ongoing) education about feelings. He contends that, just as we teach ourselves the academics to better navigate the world, it is equally vital to become conversant in the experience of our emotions; detecting what we feel, labelling it, and harnessing the knowledge communicated by that feeling to make more productive choices in our lives.
Originally published in 1995, the book's pages have a bit of a dated curl to them - not because the insights have been surpassed over time, but because so very many later works have drawn so heavily upon them that they feel familiar to the core. Here is a great part of the foundation of our literature on emotion, and as such it will always be an important part of the oeuvre.
Frankly, I wish I'd read this book earlier in my literary excursion through psychology. All the fundamentals are here in terms of distress and despair, empathy, conflict resolution, and the effect of emotion on our abilities to assess, attack, and resolve the problems we meet in everyday life.
Self-awareness - recognizing a feeling as it happens - is the keystone of emotional intelligence...the ability to monitor feelings from moment to moment is crucial to psychological insight and self-understanding. An inability to notice our true feelings leaves us at their mercy. People with greater certainty about their feelings are better pilots of their lives, having a surer sense of how they really feel about personal decisions from who to marry to what job to take.
I believe much of the relational approach in therapy is founded upon such principles. In fact, I suspect clients of therapists who specialize in relational dynamics are actually being provided with the emotional education they missed along the way, whether through faulty parenting or early trauma or simply the neglect of this arena of being. Daniel Goleman's material offers a wide range of practical truths about the need and value of such education, and is reading I recommend to anyone struggling with conflict or searching desperately through bookshelves for a path across the morass of melancholy and pain. Much of that quest will likely be addressed in this place.
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If you're like me, you're extremely leery of anything that reeks of pop psychology. But Emotional Intelligence has no such odor. First, author Daniel Goleman is the real deal. He has his PhD, of course, as do many snake oil salesmen, but unlike these others, Goleman has academic street cred: he founded an institute at Yale, heads up another at Rutgers, and wrote science columns for the New York Times.
At first glance, I can see that this book, though written more than 10 years ago, still packs a punch. We still live in a world, after all, of road rage and horrific, random violence.
From my brief inspection, it appears that Goleman describes how the emotional mind is just as important as the rational mind. Its short, pithy chapters are full of anecdotes. But be patient: it is packed with science. This is good, in case you want to get deeper into the subject.
Here's Goleman's website and blog: [http://www.danielgoleman.info/blog/]. Somebody needs to tell him to update his mugshot or lose the fro.
Emotional Intelligence produced such conflicting feelings in me that I am torn as to what to write about it. For the most part, it is well-written, intelligent and compelling. The messages are simple yet profound, and I have to agree that the importance of social and emotional skills can’t be understated. On some level I think Daniel Goleman and I think in much the same way, and even though the book is 15 years old now, on the whole it is as applicable as it ever was.
That said, there are some critical issues with the book. One problem is that Goleman quite often makes the correlation = causation fallacy when citing research. Secondly – at certain points he editorialises and catastrophises pretty shamelessly. He laments the degradation of society, the decrease in moral fibre, and equates rising divorce rates with lower prospects for good relationships (ah the “divorce = unhappiness, marriage = happiness” argument – *barf*).
He cites a study that found children in their teenage years are more moody, secretive and irritable than when they were children – and uses that to support an argument that people are getting unhappier across the lifespan (really? Because that sounds like ADOLESCENCE to me). What makes the doomsday predictions particularly embarrassing is the statistics he cites regarding rising violence and cocaine use, stating expert predictions that violent crime among the young would increase drastically in the years to come. Too bad that this “crime boom” widely predicted in the 90s never happened, and that the cocaine bubble burst that decade – resulting in the rates of both violent crime and cocaine use in the US decreasing drastically.
Truthfully, he didn’t need all the catastrophising about the crumbling fibre of society to make a point for the importance of emotional intelligence – the rest of the book does that on its own. So all I can say is: on the whole it’s a great book, which could have been much better without the over-exaggerated scare tactics, manty of which have since turned out to be false. I know that most of this review is a rant about its flaws, but I've still given it four stars because I chose to be reasonable and not let those things be deal-breakers. I really did enjoy the vast majority of this book. Really.
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The subtitle "Why It Can Matter More Than IQ" is misleading.
It should be "Why It MIGHT Matter More Than IQ (provided you're comparing people of similar age, education, background, career, aspiration, social economic status, race, ethnicity, gender, and so on and so forth)."
The group that was looked at in this book was executives, and what the author found was that the thing that set these people apart from their peers and others vying for the same positions is people skills. When you're good with people (and also a good speaker), you reach leadership level positions much faster. Seems obvious, yeah? Well, this book was written in the early 1990s, and while it's been revised and updated since then, the information has been repeated so many times, it's nearly common knowledge by now. (Forgot to clarify this look at executives and their peers is only a small part of the book.)
What I was interested, but sadly wasn't addressed head-on, was whether or not emotional intelligence is innate. There's a lot of talk about brain chemistry and the evolution of the brain, yet no discernible answer as to the innateness of this type of intelligence. I get the impression the author thinks it can be taught--he does call it intelligence after all--but can it though? Don't you need a certain (innate) temperament to learn it? I mean, if you don't like people, that can certainly hamper the process.
Anyhow. This is a good textbook overall and an easy read as it was written for the general public. Lots of concrete, ripped-from-the-headlines scenarios are used and dissected. So for me, there was a lot of "fluff" (for lack of a better word) to wade through before I found something interesting. However, people who don't have a background in psychology or are unfamiliar with it altogether will find this book a great introduction to contemporary theories.