EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

Why it can matter more than IQ?

Daniel Goleman

Book Summary

Syed Ali Hassan Kazmi

Fa-2019/MSEM/002
 Aristotle’s Challenge

Anyone can become angry—that is easy. But to be angry

with the right person, to the right degree, at the right
time, for the right purpose, and in the right way—that is
not easy.

ARISTOTLE, The Nichomachean Ethics

About the book It presents sixteen chapters clustered in five parts or sections,
six appendices on basic learning about emotions and
emotional learning, notes, acknowledgments, and index.

• In new york times best seller list for one and half
year.

• Published in 1995.

• Best seller in many countries.

• Translated worldwide in 40 languages.

• More than five million copies sold.

About the Author
• Goleman was a science writer of New York Times, obtained his
doctoral degree in psychology at Harvard University with a great
interest on brain and behavior research.

• Curiosity in dynamics of emotion leads him towards writing this

book by tracking the scientific understanding of the realm of
irrational and mechanics of emotions.

• He is famous for the work on FOCUS.

 Arguments by Goleman
• IQ is a genetic given, that cannot be changed through life experiences.

• IQ contributes, at best about 20% to the factor that determine life success.
That leaves 80% to everything else.

• IQ-idolizing view of intelligence is far too narrow. EQ is learnable.

• EQ offer an added edge, in the workplace, where much evidence testifies

that people who are emotionally adaptive, know and manage their feelings
well, lead and deal effectively with other peoples feelings get success, while
people with high IQ often flounder.
 PART ONE

THE EMOTIONAL BRAIN

“WE ARE NOT THINKING MACHINES. WE ARE FEELING MACHINES THAT THINK.”
Christopher Graves
 1.1 What are emotions for?
Dr. Damasio argues, the emotional brain is as involved in reasoning as is the thinking brain.....
The emotions, then, matter for rationality.

• Survival (fear, disgust, anxiety).

• Fight / flight mechanism (aggression, anger).
• Social bonding (trust, affection, love).
• Making our lives meaningful (joy, happiness, enjoyment).
• Allowing us to make decisions.
• Emotion is a powerful motivator of action.
(admiration,enthusiasm,interest).
 Rational Vs Emotional Mind
• We are emotional beings.
• The first impulse is the heart’s, not the head’s. Many successful leaders learn patience with
experience, since they learn that a moment of impatience can lead to a lifetime of regret. As
such, experienced leaders are less likely to be reactionary than their younger, inexperienced
successors.
 Brain Parts and Their Functions

High order Thinking

Emotional responses
pleasure, fear, anxiety
and anger etc.

Survival.
Breathing,eating
,sleeping etc.
 1.2 Anatomy of Emotional Hijacking
“Stress makes people stupid”

In our Limbic system Amygdala’, an almond shaped cluster of Neo Cortex

interconnected structure is only responsible of our emotional
reactions. A person without this can’t have their feelings like fear and
rage, the urge to compete or cooperate, and no longer have any
sense of their place in social order; research studies shows.

Neocortex is responsible for our rational thinking. The emotional

areas of the brain are intertwined via neural circuits to all parts of
our thinking brain. This neural circuit gives the power to the
emotional brain to hijack or kidnap the rest part of the brain.

Limbic region (Emotional mind) can easily hi-jack the

Neocortex (Rational mind) region because it is processing data
before it reaches the neocortex, and responds with an emergency
alert. This sends our body into panic mode and makes it more difficult
for our neocortex to control the actions we take based on our
emotional impulses.
 PART TWO

THE NATURE OF EMOTIONAL

INTELLIGENCE
2.1 When Smart is Dumb:
Goleman proves by presenting ample scientific research

• IQ contributes, at best about 20% to the factor that determine life success.
That leaves 80% to everything else.

• Individuals with Higher marks in IQ test and SAT in college are not
particularly successful in terms of ‘salary, productivity, or status in their field. It
is the emotional aptitude which helps us to use others skills including raw
intellect, by Others Emotions harmony and alignment with ours to achieve
goals.
Five Domains of Emotional Intelligence
Daniel Goleman’s model of emotional intelligence includes five
realms.

2.2 Know your emotions. (Know Thyself)

2.3 Manage your emotions. (Passion’s Slave)
2.4 Motivate yourself. (The Master Aptitude)
2.5 Recognize and understand other people’s emotions. (The Roots
of Empathy)
2.6 Handling relationships. (The Social Arts)
These five realms are broken down into four quadrants:
 PART THREE

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE APPLIED

3.1 Intimate Enemies
Role of emotion in marital life
• Different studies are placed to prove that girls can express their emotions better than boys.
• Goleman observes that men are reluctant to talk with their wives about their relationship.
• Wives, in general, are more vocal about their complaints than their husbands, particularly
among unhappy couples.
• Stonewalling/Defensiveness, attacking the character and not the behavior, are some of the
major emotional problems that can ruin marriages.
• Goleman presented some research evidence to show that the brought up stage of men and
women has built a different emotional orientation on them. This orientation sometime makes
a disturbance in their conjugal life; sometimes move towards divorce.
• The ability to calm down, keeping the discussion on track, empathy and listening well.
Goleman says that if you concentrate on these above emotional competencies you get a
smoother relationship.
3.2 Managing By Heart:
Managing the job or Business with Heart
• Study proved that the stars in the emotional intelligence tests were the people who used to
get their work finished.
• Overbearing bosses have a dramatic bad effect on teamwork and personal performance.
People leave due to bad bosses.
• According to Goleman, in our corporate system the managers are chosen with a number of
wrong procedures such as by judging their ‘technical expertise’, ‘political connection’ etc.
Sometimes we are choosing the CEOs by the academic model of selection; ignoring the
emotional intelligence.
• Star bosses and employees have a thick connection of informal networks, for
communications, expertise and personal trust.This emotional skill is required for the best
performance in any organization.
• In a study on the Leadership Styles of Educational Leaders, high correlation was found
between the all components of emotional intelligence and transformational leadership style.
3.3 Mind and Medicine
Emotions have a powerful effect on the nervous system

• Hostility puts people at risk of a heart attack.

• Goleman emphasizes the fact that the emotions have a powerful effect on the autonomic
nervous system, which regulates everything from how much insulin is secreted to what blood
pressure levels are maintained.

• Chronic anger and anxiety can make people more susceptible to a range of disease; and
depression lengthens medical recovery and heightens risk of death.

• Goleman emphasizes that a range of positive emotions can be good ‘tonic’ for health.
 PART FOUR

WINDOWS OF OPPORTUNITY
4.1 The Family Crucible
Family life is our first school for emotional learning
• It is not just the way parents advise and act directly to their children, but in the models they
offer for handling their own feelings.
• According to Goleman, a couple can provide the best lessons to their children by making
instance; how they handle their feelings between themselves.
• The three most emotionally inept parenting styles prove to be: 1) Ignoring feelings
altogether; 2) being too laissez faire; 3) being contemptuous, and showing no respect for
how a child feels.
• Effective parenting style is that when the parent can grab the opportunity of a child’s upset to
act as emotional coach or mentor. ‘Taking their child’s feelings seriously, they try to understand
what is upsetting them.
Example: (Are you angry because Tommy hurt your feelings?); and to help children find
positive ways to soothe their feelings (Instead of hitting him, why don’t you find a toy to play
with on your own until you feel like playing with him again?)
4.2 Trauma and Emotional Relearning
• Goleman presented the ways in which abuse destroy the empathy and creates violence in
children. Early experiences of brutality or ‘love–leave’ have a lasting imprint on the brain.
What is the effect of trauma on emotional learning?
• Goleman shows how these crucial moments become memories such as “emblazoned in the
emotional circuitry, impelling vivid memories of a traumatic moment to continue to intrude on
awareness.” These “emotional hair-triggers” makes an alarm in our brain when our brain
found a slightest clue that a trauma may be occur again.
Can these experiences be healed?
• Goleman believed that the life long emotional learning can healed those bad experiences.
The medication and/or intensive psychotherapy can be a main part of Emotional lessons.
4.3 Temperament Is Not Destiny

Brain remains plastic throughout life, though not to the spectacular extent seen
in childhood. All learning implies a change in the brain, a strengthening of
synaptic connection. The brain changes in the patients with obsessive-
compulsive disorder show that emotional habits are malleable throughout life,
with some sustained effort, even at the neural level.
 PART FIVE

EMOTIONAL LITERACY
5.1 The Cost of Emotional Illiteracy
• Emotional illiteracy, is more than immaturity, it may account for the global statistics on
teenagers suffering from: withdrawal and social problems, anxiety and depression, attention
deficit, eating disorders and thinking problems, and delinquent and aggressive behavior.

• Family, the source of emotional learning, is fractured and economically stressed so that both
parents work leaving the children to screens and to strangers, to learn how to handle their
emotions.

• The emotional illiterates tend toward aggression. The boys become bullies; and they will
pass on to their children the same lack of emotional intelligence.

• In 1990, compared to the previous two decades, the United States saw the highest juvenile
arrest rate for violent crimes ever; teen arrests for forcible rape had doubled; teen murder
rates quad-rupled, mostly due to an increase in shootings. During those same two decades,
the suicide rate for teenagers tripled, as did the number of children under fourteen who are
murder victims.
5.2 Schooling the Emotions
• A growing movement in education involves prevention courses, basically courses focused on

preventing suicide, drug use and other problems by training children at critical stages how to
recognize, read and respond to emotions.

• Emotional intelligence skills should have age-appropriate learning windows. For example:
teaching a child anger management and impulse control before puberty can enable them to
control their emotional extremes. Psychologists and educators agree that these skills make
all the difference in helping all students reach their potential in life.
• Goleman’s cirriculum of self science for upbringing lists following EI skills
Self-awareness, Personal decision-making, Managing feelings, Handling stress, Empathy,
Communications, Self-disclosure, Insight, Self-acceptance, Personal responsibility,
Assertiveness, Group dynamics, Conflict resolution.
Goleman Concluded

Emotional intelligence deserves the

same or even more of the limelight
that Mental IQ has enjoyed over the
last 100 years.
Thank You