Book Byte #35 "Emotional Intelligence" by Daniel Goleman
Why It Can Matter More Than IQ
📣 Curious Quotes from the Author:
“In a very real sense we have two minds, one that thinks and one that feels.”
“The fact that the thinking brain grew from the emotional reveals much about the relationship of thought to feeling; there was an emotional brain long before there was a rational one.”
“People who are optimistic see a failure as due to something that can be changed so that they can succeed next time around, while pessimists take the blame for failure, ascribing it to some lasting characteristic they are helpless to change”
📚 Cognition of the Book’s Big Idea:
Our emotions are crucial because they serve as essential sources of orientation and motivate us to behave. However, they can lead to illogical behavior. That is why we need emotional intelligence. Emotional Intelligence is a collection of skills that allows you to understand and manage emotions, both your own and those of others. Emotional intelligence is possibly the most significant aspect in enabling us to live fulfilled lives. It outperforms IQ as a predictor of academic success, employment performance, and overall success. And, unlike IQ, we may develop our emotional intelligence over time.
Emotional intelligence is crucial for a child's well-being. As a result, if you are a parent or a teacher, you might want to help youngsters develop their emotional skills using one of the following basic approaches.
Encourage them to express their feelings. This will help them develop emotional self-awareness. If they have difficulty with this activity, offer them with the words they need to label their feelings.
If they accomplish something, reward them for their hard work and self-control. This will instill confidence in their potential to change their life via their own efforts.
🛠️Fixing the Tech Industry
Tech Employees are kind of known for not having an abundance of emotional intelligence. We’re Engineers and problem solvers. We take a very logical mindset when it come time to tackle issues, and we tend to use that hammer instead of special tools for each problem.
Emotional Intelligence is a skill though, it can be learned and practiced. I sincerely believe if we get better at not letting our emotions controls us and use our brains to help us feel empathy towards our coworkers and colleagues, we’ll achieve quite a bit of success in our career. It’s been a mission of mine to help tech people gain more emotional intelligence, it’s a big reason why I started this club. Hopefully some of the big issues with our personalities can be mitigated by practicing emotional intelligence.
🤝 Collaborate with others with this Social Media Prompt:
What do you think is the biggest EQ skill that you are lacking in? What actions can you take to get better at it?