Zitat des Tages von Daniel Goleman:
While there I began to study the Asian religions as theories of mind.
The emotional brain responds to an event more quickly than the thinking brain.
Societies can be sunk by the weight of buried ugliness.
But once you are in that field, emotional intelligence emerges as a much stronger predictor of who will be most successful, because it is how we handle ourselves in our relationships that determines how well we do once we are in a given job.
The book is a dialogue between The Dalai Lama and a group of scientists about how we can better handle our destructive emotions and how to overcome them.
Well, any effort to maximize your potential and ability is a good thing.
Mindful meditation has been discovered to foster the ability to inhibit those very quick emotional impulses.
If you are doing mindfulness meditation, you are doing it with your ability to attend to the moment.
If your emotional abilities aren't in hand, if you don't have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can't have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.
We're exposed and carry in our bodies multiple chemicals, and we have to understand how they interact. Both how they individually interact and the thousands of effects they can produce when they interact with the receptors that run our bodies.
Western business people often don't get the importance of establishing human relationships.
Motivation aside, if people get better at these life skills, everyone benefits: The brain doesn't distinguish between being a more empathic manager and a more empathic father.
However, I began meditating at about that time and have continued on and off over the years.
But there has also been a notable increase in recent years of these applications by a much wider slice of psychotherapists - far greater interest than ever before.
When I say manage emotions, I only mean the really distressing, incapacitating emotions. Feeling emotions is what makes life rich. You need your passions.
My hope was that organizations would start including this range of skills in their training programs - in other words, offer an adult education in social and emotional intelligence.
I would say that IQ is the strongest predictor of which field you can get into and hold a job in, whether you can be an accountant, lawyer or nurse, for example.
If you do a practice and train your attention to hover in the present, then you will build the internal capacity to do that as needed - at will and voluntarily.
A little girl who finds a puzzle frustrating might ask her busy mother (or teacher) for help. The child gets one message if her mother expresses clear pleasure at the request and quite another if mommy responds with a curt 'Don't bother me - I've got important work to do.'
When I went on to write my next book, Working With Emotional Intelligence, I wanted to make a business case that the best performers were those people strong in these skills.
Teachers need to be comfortable talking about feelings.
Making choices that improve things for all of us on the planet is an act of compassion, a simple act we can do any time we go shopping.
I don't think focus is in itself ever a bad thing. But focus of the wrong kind, or managed poorly, can be.
Scheduling down time as part of your routine is hard but worth it, personally, even professionally.
People tend to become more emotionally intelligent as they age and mature.
The amygdala in the emotional center sees and hears everything that occurs to us instantaneously and is the trigger point for the fight or flight response.
The more socially intelligent you are, the happier and more robust and more enjoyable your relationships will be.
Social distance makes it all the easier to focus on small differences between groups and to put a negative spin on the ways of others and a positive spin on our own.
I think the smartest thing for people to do to manage very distressing emotions is to take a medication if it helps, but don't do only that. You also need to train your mind.
Brain studies of mental workouts in which you sustain a single, chosen focus show that the more you detach from what's distracting you and refocus on what you should be paying attention to, the stronger this brain circuitry becomes.
As a freshman in college, I was having a lot of trouble adjusting. I took a meditation class to handle anxiety. It really helped. Then as a grad student at Harvard, I was awarded a pre-doctoral traveling fellowship to India, where my focus was on the ancient systems of psychology and meditation practices of Asia.
In politics, readily dismissing inconvenient people can easily extend to dismissing inconvenient truths about them.
Emotional 'literacy' implies an expanded responsibility for schools in helping to socialize children. This daunting task requires two major changes: that teachers go beyond their traditional mission and that people in the community become more involved with schools as both active participants in children's learning and as individual mentors.
Buying phosphate-free soap allows you to say, 'My detergent doesn't have the harsh chemicals others do.' The question is, how are you washing with it? The very worst thing for the Earth about detergent is that we heat water to use it.