Emotional Intelligence

Emotional Intelligence A few notes from Daniel Goleman‟s number one best-seller, “Emotional Intelligence”. A Brief Synopsis The worrier notices something that triggers the image of some potential threat or danger; that imagined threat or catastrophic image in turn triggers a mild attack of anxiety (and so working effectively becomes nearly impossible, mistakes are made due to a lack of concentration, and if employed the person gets fired). Children who endure severe mental abuse can become hyperalert to the emotions of those around them (but rarely will have the confidence to help the other person for fear of rejection). The one perceptual flaw that unites such children is that they perceive slights where none was intended, imagining their peers to be more hostile toward them than they actually are. This leads them to misperceive neutral acts as threatening ones - an innocent bump is seen as a vendetta - and to attack in return. Kids learn social skills in their peer relations - for example, what to do if you want something and aren‟t getting it: watch how other children handle the situation and then try it for yourself. But depressed kids are likely to be among the neglected children in schools, the ones the other kids don‟t play with much. The pain that such children feel leads them to avoid initiating social contacts, or to look away when another child is trying to engage them - a social signal the other child takes as a rebuff. (The reason is because the child feels that the other person is not really interested in them, but only in making jokes at the depressed child‟s expense). The end result is that depressed children end up rejected or neglected on the playground. Another cost to these children is doing poorly in school; the depression interferes with their memory and concentration, making it harder to pay attention in class and retain what it taught. A child who feels no joy in anything finds it hard to marshal the energy to master challenging lessons, let alone experience flow in learning. Those children who develop a pessimistic outlook - attributing the setbacks in their lives to some dire flaw in themselves begin to fall prey to depressed moods in reaction to setbacks. Even after the depression lifts, the person is left with what amounts to an emotional scar, a set of convictions fed by the depression and solidified in the mind: that he can‟t do well in school, is unlikeable, and can do nothing to escape his own brooding moods. Two kinds of proclivities lead children to end up as social outcasts. As we have seen, one is the propensity to angry outbursts and to perceive hostility even where none is intended. The second is being timid, anxious, and socially shy. But over and above these temperamental factors, it is children who are „off‟ - whose awkwardness repeatedly makes people uncomfortable - who tend to be shunted aside. Children who continually have trouble reading and responding to emotions - end up as social isolates, for those who are continually excluded and rejected, their painful outcast status clings to them as they continue their school years. The consequences of ending up at the social margins are potentially great as a child continues into adulthood. We learn how to negotiate intimate relations - to work out differences and share our deepest feelings - in our first close friendships with same-sex chums. But children who are socially rejected are only half as likely as their peers to have a best friend during the crucial years of elementary school. From ages six to eleven, school is a crucible and a defining experience that will heavily influence children‟s adolescence and beyond. A child‟s sense of self-worth depends substantially on his or her ability to achieve in school. A child who fails in school sets in motion the self-defeating attitudes that can dim prospects for an entire lifespan Edited by Ian Mayman – 4th April, 1999 The Opportunity For Change On the evening of Thursday, 21st May, 1999, I was redesigning a self-management table to enhance its effectiveness, which was designed to generate many of your own ideas to motivate you to achieve your goals. I then had the idea to create the “The Fear Table” – designed to minimise and if possible to eliminate irrational fears. To solve problems you must self-analyses. I asked myself „what worries me?‟, „why do I almost always fail in everything I do? Is it low self-esteem?‟ and „what do I fear?‟. Then it hit me… I have a fear – perhaps irrational – of failure at work. As I focused on this fear, I have inevitably lost every job I have ever had and failed at every exam ever taken. Low self-esteem, combined together with this popular „fear of failure‟ has a devastating effect. So the problem has been identified as low self-esteem which promoted a focus on the fear of failure which over time accumulated in actual failure. Now to go in search of the solution:  At £441, Emotional Coaching costs too much, as does Life-Coaching.  Psychotherapy is worth another try, but has failed twice before. 21st May, 1999 Emotional Intelligence A few notes from Daniel Goleman‟s number one best-seller, “Emotional Intelligence”. In terms of motivation, when people believe that their failures are due to some unchangeable deficit in themselves, they lose hope and stop trying. The basic belief that leads to optimism, remember, is that setbacks or failures are due to circumstances that we can do something about to change them for the better. While worriers are immersed in their worried thoughts, they do not seem to notice the subjective sensations of the anxiety those worries stir - the speedy heartbeat, the beads of sweat, the shakiness - and as the worry proceeds it actually seems to suppress some of that anxiety, at least as reflected in heart rate. The sequence presumable goes something like this: The worrier notices something that triggers the image of some potential threat or danger; that imagined threat or catastrophic image in turn triggers a mild attack of anxiety (and so working effectively becomes nearly impossible, mistakes are made due to a lack of concentration, and the person gets fired). Emotionally upset, people cannot remember, attend, learn, or make decisions clearly. As one management consultant put it, “Stress makes people stupid.” The virtuoso in interpersonal skills is the corporate future. While emotional neglect seems to dull empathy, there is a paradoxical result from intense, sustained emotional abuse, including cruel sadistic threats, humiliations, and plain meanness. Children who endure such abuse can become hyperalert to the emotions of those around them (but rarely will have the confidence to help the other person for fear of rejection). This amounts to post-traumatic vigilance to cues that have signalled threat. Such an obsessive preoccupation with the feelings of others is typical of psychologically abused children who in adulthood suffer the mercurial, intense emotional ups and downs that are sometimes diagnosed as “borderline personality disorder.” Many such people are gifted at sensing what others around them are feeling, and it is quite common for them to report having suffered emotional abuse in childhood. Not all angry children are bullies; some are withdrawn social outcasts who overreact to being teased or to what they perceive as slights or unfairness. But the one perceptual flaw that unites such children is that they perceive slights where none was intended, imagining their peers to be more hostile toward them than they actually are. This leads them to misperceive neutral acts as threatening ones - an innocent bump is seen as a vendetta - and to attack in return. That, of course, leads other children to shun them, isolating them further. Such angry, isolated children are highly sensitive to injustices and being treated unfairly. They typically see themselves as victims and can recite a list of incidents when, say, teachers blamed them for doing something when in fact they were innocent. Another trait of such children is that once they are in the heat of anger, they can think of only one way to react: by lashing out. The cost to children goes beyond the suffering caused by depression itself. Maria Kovacs - a psychologist at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic in Pittsburgh - told me “kids learn social skills in their peer relations - for example, what to do if you want something and aren‟t getting it, seeing how other children handle the situation and then trying it for yourself. But depressed kids are likely to be among the neglected children in schools, the ones the other kids don‟t play with much.” The sulleness such children feel leads them to avoid initiating social contacts, or to look away when another child is trying to engage them - a social signal the other child takes as a rebuff. (The reason is because the child feels that the other person is not really interested in them, but only in making jokes at the depressed child‟s expense). The end result is that depressed children end up rejected or neglected on the playground. This lacuna in their interpersonal experience means that they miss out on what they would normally learn in the rough and tumble of play, and so can leave them social and emotional laggards, with much catching up to do after the depression lifts. Indeed, when depressed children have been compared to those without depression, they have been found to be more socially inept, to have fewer friends, to be less preferred than others as playmates, to be less liked, and to have more troubled relationships with other children. Another cost to these children is doing poorly in school; the depression interferes with their memory and concentration, making it harder to pay attention in class and retain what it taught. A child who feels no joy in anything finds it hard to marshal the energy to master challenging lessons, let alone experience flow in learning. Understandably, the longer children in Kovacs‟ study were depressed, the more their grades dropped and the poorer they did on achievement tests, so that they were more likely to be held back in school. In fact, there was a direct correlation between the length of time a child had been depressed and his grade-point average, with a steady plummet over the course of the episode. All of this academic rough going, of course, compounds the depression. As Kovacs observes, “Imagine you‟re already feeling depressed, and you start flunking out of school, and you sit home by yourself instead of playing with other kids.” Just as with adults, pessimistic ways of interpreting life‟s defeats seem to feed that sense of helplessness and hopelessness at the heart of children‟s depression. That people who are already depressed think in these ways has long been known. What has only recently emerged, though, is that children who are most prone to melancholy tend toward this pessimistic outlook before they become depressed. This insight suggests a window of opportunity for inoculating them against depression before it strikes. Those children who develop a pessimistic outlook - attributing the setbacks in their lives to some dire flaw in themselves - begin to fall prey to depressed moods in reaction to setbacks. What‟s more, the experience of depression itself seems to reinforce these pessimistic ways of thinking, so that even after the depression lifts, the person is left with what amounts to an emotional scar, a set of convictions fed by the depression and solidified in the mind: that he can‟t do well in school, is unlikeable, and can do nothing to escape his own brooding moods. These fixed ideas can make the child all the more vulnerable to another depression down the road. Two kinds of proclivities lead children to end up as social outcasts. As we have seen, one is the propensity to angry outbursts and to perceive hostility even where none is intended. The second is being timid, anxious, and socially shy. But over and above these temperamental factors, it is children who are „off‟ - whose awkwardness repeatedly makes people uncomfortable - who tend to be shunted aside. One way these children are „off‟ is in the emotional signals they send. When grade schoolers with few friends were asked to match an emotion such as disgust or anger with faces that displayed a range of emotions, they made far more mismatches than did children who were popular. When kidergarteners were asked to explain ways they might make friends with someone or keep from having a fight, it was the unpopular children - the ones others shied away from playing with - who came up with self-defeating answers (“punch him” for what to do when both children wanted the same toy, for example), or vague appeals for help from a grown-up. And when teenagers were asked to role-play being sad, angry or mischievous, the more unpopular of them gave the least convincing performances due to feeling anxious about convincing their peers. It is perhaps no surprise that such children come to feel that they are hopeless to do any better at making friends; their social incompetence becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Instead of learning new approaches to making friends, they simply keep doing the same things that have not worked for them in the past, or come up with even more inept responses. In the lottery of liking, these children fall short on key emotional criteria: they are not seen as fun to be with, and they don‟t know how to make another child feel good. Observations of unpopular children at play show, for example, that they are much more likely than others to cheat, sulk, quit when losing, or show off and brag about winning. Of course, most children want to win at a game - but win or lose, most children are able to contain their emotional reaction so that it does not undermine the relationship with the friend they play games with. While children who are socially tone-deaf - who continually have trouble reading and responding to emotions - end up as social isolates, this does not apply, of course, to children who go through a temporary period of feeling left out. But for those who are continually excluded and rejected, their painful outcast status clings to them as they continue their school years. The consequences of ending up at the social margins are potentially great as a child continues into adulthood. For one, it is the cauldron of close friendships and the tumult of play that children refine the social and emotional skills that they will bring to relationships later in life. Children who are excluded from the realm of learning are, inevitably, disadvantaged. One of the most common styles of parenting is to ignore a child‟s feelings altogether. Such parent treat a child‟s emotional upset as trivial or a bother, something they should wait to blow over. They fail to use emotional moments as a chance to get closer to the child or to help the child learn lessons in emotional competence. The impact of such parenting on children is extraordinarily sweeping (and the effects can last a life-time, or until the child‟s beliefs in themselves and others are redefined and relearned). (Imagine a child is being bullied at school and so tells his parents. Rather than showing the child how to fight back against the bullies or at the very least build an emotional defence they might just tell the child to ignore them thinking the bullies will go away, but like problems the bullies will not go away. The child remains unprepared and continues as an easy target for the bullies, and so the bullying continues. The child loses confidence, the ability to focus on work, self-esteem goes down and their grades go down). As psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan pointed out, we learn how to negotiate intimate relations - to work out differences and share our deepest feelings - in our first close friendships with same-sex chums. But children who are socially rejected are only half as likely as their peers to have a best friend during the crucial years of elementary school, and so miss out on one of the essential chances of emotional growth. One friend can make the difference - even when others turn their backs (and even when that friendship is not all that solid). A child who cannot focus his attention, who is suspicious, rather than trusting, sad or angry rather than optimistic, destructive rather than respectful and one who is overcome with anxiety, preoccupied with frightening fantasy and feels generally unhappy about himself – such a child a little opportunity at all, let alone equal opportunity, to claim the possibilities of the world as his own. Understandably, those who are rejected report great anxiety and many worries, as well as being depressed and lonely. In fact, how popular a child was in third grade (age 7) has been shown to be a better predictor of mental-health problems at age eighteen than anything else - teachers and nurses ratings, school performance and IQ, even scores on psychological tests. And, as we have seen, in later stages of life people who have few friends and are chronically lonely are at greater risk from medical disease and an early death. Dr. David Hamburg, a psychiatrist and president of the Carnegie Corporation, which has evaluated some pioneering emotional-education programs, sees the years of transition into grade school and then again into junior high or middle school as marking two crucial points in child‟s adjustment. From ages six to eleven, says Hamburg, “school is a crucible and a defining experience that will heavily influence children‟s adolescence and beyond. A child‟s sense of self-worth depends substantially on his or her ability to achieve in school. A child who fails in school sets in motion the self-defeating attitudes that can dim prospects for an entire lifespan.” Among the essentials for profiting from school, Hamburg notes, are an ability “to postpone gratification, to be socially responsible in appropriate ways, to maintain control over their emotions, and to have an optimistic outlook” – in other words, Emotional Intelligence. Edited by Ian Mayman – 9th April, 1999 The Opportunity For Change After reading many books on personal development, emotional intelligence and social skills, I have finally identified the problem. On the evening of Thursday, 21st May, 1999, I was redesigning a self-management table to enhance its effectiveness. One was called “The Motivational Table” – designed to generate many of your own ideas to motivate you to achieve your goals – this is known as „toward motivation‟ an idea from Peter Thomson on his audionewsletter “The Achievers Edge”. After several adjustments to the table I had the idea to create the „opposite‟ of The Motivational Table. And so “The Fear Table” was created – designed to minimise and if possible to eliminate irrational fears. I know that to solve problems you have to ask yourself the right focus questions. Now came the breakthrough… I asked myself „what worries me?‟, „why do I almost always fail in everything I do? Is it low selfesteem?‟ and „what do I fear?‟. With “The Motivational Table” the current focus was finding the paradigm for „Success At Work‟. Then I thought „can I modify this subject to work with The Fear Table?‟ Then it hit me… I have a fear – perhaps irrational – of failure at work. Because I have always focused on this fear, I have inevitably lost every job I have ever had and failed at every exam ever taken – thus proving The Rosenthal Effect (see Communication Strategies 3). This fear, I believe is one that everyone has, however, as a result of years of bullying resulting in low self-esteem which combined together with this popular „fear of failure‟ has a devastating effect. So the problem has been identified as low self-esteem which promoted a focus on the fear of failure which over time accumulated in failure. It‟s all about having the right focus, it is time to correct my mental vision of the future. With the problem identified it is half solved, something which has taken me 22 years of failures to work out, in which time I have gone through two psychotherapists, two New Deal specialist careers advisors and numerous other careers advisors. Years of continuous bullying effectively „encouraged‟ me to fail leading to the development of a fear of success. Whenever there is even a slight possibility of success at something, i.e. a new job, my internal dialogue (selftalk) suddenly becomes very active with a negative attitude – as a result of my fear of success. I convince myself I‟m going to fail or lose the job. This attitude is especially prevalent in employment as others are relying on me and it can affect future employment. Consequently I am unemployed almost all of the time. It is in effect involuntary selfsabotage. Now to go in search of the solution:       At £441, Emotional Coaching costs too much. At £150 per month, Life-Coaching costs too much. Psychotherapy is worth another try, but has failed twice before. Subliminal tapes may work. Continue testing personal development techniques. 21st May, 1999 Key Ingredients Of Effective Emotional Development Programs Emotional Skills  Identifying & labelling feelings.  Expressing feelings.  Assessing the intensity of feelings.  Managing feelings.  Delaying gratification.  Controlling impulses.  Reducing stress.  Knowing the difference between feelings and actions. Cognitive Skills  Self-talk - conducting an “inner-dialogue” as a way to cope with a topic or challenge or reinforce one‟s own behaviour.  Reading and interpreting social cues - for example, recognising social influences on behaviour and seeing oneself in the perspective of the larger community.  Using steps for problem-solving and decision-making - for instance, controlling impulses, setting goals, identifying alternative actions, anticipating consequences.  Understanding the perspective of others.  Understanding behavioural norms (what is and is not acceptable behaviour).  A positive attitude toward life.  Self-awareness - for example, developing realistic expectations about oneself. Behavioural Skills  Non-verbal - Communicating through eye contact, facial expressiveness, tone of voice, gestures, and so on.  Verbal - Making clear requests, responding effectively and appropriately to criticism, resisting negative influences, listening to others, helping others, participating in positive peer groups.