Host: Dan Harris
Guest: Daniel Goleman, Author, Emotional Intelligence
Category: Health | 🧠 Mental & Brain Health
Podcast’s Essential Bites:
[2:17] “[W]hen I wrote Emotional Intelligence, IQ was […] the big thing and it was really speaking to people's overemphasis on purely cognitive abilities. So, emotional intelligence means being intelligent about your emotions. And the way I look at it, there's four parts to that. There's […] self-awareness […], then managing your emotions, […] then empathy […], [t]hen putting that all together to manage your relationships well […]. That might be the most visible part of emotional intelligence. But interestingly, self-awareness, the least visible part, turns out to be foundational.”
[3:33] “I would say mindfulness is an application of self-awareness […]. You watch your mind very carefully. You don't let yourself get sucked into this thought or that thought. You don't judge it. You see it, you know it. You let it go. […] But you don't have to be a mindfulness practitioner to be self aware. Anybody can do it any time.”
[4:12] “I would say that mindfulness practice is the equivalent of getting cardiovascular fit […] [T]he more you work out, […] the easier it gets. You become more able to exercise for a long time. […] It's a mental workout.”
[16:58] “[T]here are three kinds of empathy. One is cognitive. You know how that person thinks about things. You can get their perspective. […] And this makes you a very good communicator. […] The second kind is emotional empathy in these based on different parts of the brain. […] This is sensing what the other person feels and you pick it up […]. And that is the basis of rapport, of feeling close to someone. […] But neither of those kinds of empathy necessarily make you a caring person. […] You can use it in marketing, you can use it not necessarily in the best interests of the other person. What you want is the third kind of empathy, which is technically called empathic concern. It means you care about the person. You have their well-being or best interests in mind.”
[32:03] “Resilience means how quickly you recover from upset, from anxiety, from fear, from anger, and get back to that kind of calm baseline. And if your physiology is calm, your mind will be more clear. So resilience helps you handle relationships better because you can get over whatever is preoccupying you and tune into the person you're with.”
[33:48] “I think emotional intelligence is a more useful skill than it has been in the past because of COVID, because of the faltering economy, because of the ways in which we no longer can interact naturally with each other. And it's an antidote to each of those parts.”
[35:48] “[It] turns out that in bridging divides, friendships matter and that if you can be the friend of someone who is on another part of a divide […], [like] racial divides, ethnic divides, religious divides. If you grew up with someone who was a childhood friend of yours and that person's family is on the other side of the divide, you don't harbor the stereotypes and negative feelings, keep that gap big or growing. So I think that friendships across divides are in the most intelligence framework.”
[53:22] “I think there [are] enormous blind spot[s] amongst us all on the actual environmental impacts on the global system to sustain life on the planet […]. It would be a great thing if we […] [before] buying something, […] [were thinking], in what ways does this damage the planet or help the planet? Am I contributing to the problem or to the solution by getting this thing, by using this thing? And what about my habits? […] It's a little far afield from emotional intelligence, but maybe it's an application.”
Rating: 🍎🍎🍎🍎
🎙️ Full Episode: Apple | Spotify
🕰️ 1 hr 2 min | 🗓️ 12/10/2020
✅ Time saved: 1 hr
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