Understanding Emotional Intelligence: Key Domains and Global Perspectives (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Emotional intelligence refers to how well we handle ourselves and our relationships. There are four domains, self-awareness, knowing what we're feeling, why we're feeling it, which is a basis of, for example, good intuition, good decision making. So it's a moral compass. Second part is self-management, which means handling your distressing emotions in an effective way so that they don't cripple you, they don't get in the way of what you're doing, and yet attuning them to them when you need to so that you learn what you must. Every emotion has a function. Also marshaling positive emotions, getting ourselves involved, enthused about what we're doing, aligning our actions with our passions. The third is empathy, knowing what someone else is feeling. And the fourth is putting that all together in skilled relationship. So that's what I mean by emotional intelligence. There are many definitions out there. The part of the brain, it turns out, that supports emotional and social intelligence is actually the last circuitry of the brain to become anatomically mature. And because of neuroplasticity, the brain shapes itself according to repeated experiences. So my argument is, hey, we should be teaching kids regularly, over time, in a systematic way, self-awareness, self-management, empathy, and social skill. And in fact, there are now enough programs, and they've been around enough in schools, that they're about to publish a huge meta-analysis looking at hundreds of schools and kids that had the program versus those that don't. And guess what? All antisocial behavior, you know, disruption in class, violence in school, goes down 10%. Prosocial behavior, liking school, well-behaved, up 10%. Academic achievement scores up 11%. So it really pays. Executive function, which is mediated by the prefrontal lobe, both helps you manage your emotions and helps you pay attention. So as kids learn these skills, they also learn learning, basic learning skills. I think that the fact that that was an argument was one thing that caught people's attention. Then there was a little chapter on, called Managing with Heart, which argued that leaders who were sons of a bitch were actually defeating the company's own mission. And I think that made a lot of people happy, because they worked for people like that. I don't know, some people gave it to other people because they thought they needed help in this domain. I'm sure there's a zillion reasons why people like the book. I know IQ has been going up for 100 years, as children encounter a more sophisticated cognitive environment as they grow. I don't know that we're becoming more emotionally intelligent. I'd like to hope we would, but I think that the number of intergroup wars going on, the intergroup hatred going on, the levels of familial abuse, in other words, indicators of emotions out of control in dangerous ways, don't look that great. Which is why I'm a very strong proponent of getting these social-emotional learning programs in every school worldwide. You have to remember that emotional intelligence is a range of abilities, self-awareness, emotional self-management, empathy, social skills. Women tend to be better than men on average at empathy, particularly emotional empathy, sensing in the moment how the other person's feeling. And also at social skills, at keeping things feeling good between people in a group. Men on the other hand tend to be better on average at self-confidence, particularly in groups, and at managing distressing emotions. But what's very interesting is if you look at leaders who are in the top 10%, there's no difference between the men and the women on any of those variables. In other words, you have a whole human being. So I would say that on average, there probably are differences, men and women, in this domain of ability. But as people develop their skills, as people become more effective, they pick up strengths in areas that they need. I think that emotional intelligence is a universal, but it looks different in different places. Japan has a very rigid set of rules of social interaction, lots of subtleties. Americans typically blunder into the Japanese system, don't get what's going on, and it's embarrassing. But they wouldn't recognize necessarily emotional intelligence in Japanese setting. Brazil is a very different culture. It's very outgoing, kind of like an Italian culture. And so it would look different there. But I think the fundamentals are the same.