Q: Is emotional intelligence possible when basic needs like food, clothing and shelter are not met ? Can I hope to teach SEL skills to people/children who don’t get two square meals to eat in a day, let alone nurture and care…? And how? A: When children don’t have their basic needs met for food,… Read more »
Monthly Archives:: May 2011
On stress
Q: From our research, it appears that both in the business and education sector one of the ways EQ helps improve performance is through mitigating the effects of stress. People with higher EQ seem better able to manage the overload. What is the neurobiological explanation for this EQ advantage? A: When we’re under stress, the… Read more »
The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: An Interview with Daniel Goleman
By Monty McKeever for Tricycle, May 18, 2011. Read the full interview. Tricycle: How does understanding the brain help us manage stress? Daniel Goleman: There are several ways that understanding some brain mechanics and having basic neural tools at hand can help us manage stress. First of all, we have to realize that there’s no… Read more »
Stop that Bully
Skippy was the biggest bully in my grammar school. From a troubled home, Skippy was very unhappy, prone to fits of anger, and very, very mean to kids smaller than him. I thought about Skippy when I read the headlines about the verdicts in the tragic bullying of Phoebe Prince, the 15-year-old from Ireland who… Read more »
Picking the Right Brain State for the Job
The brain is like an instrument we can tune for the job at hand—something like tuning a guitar to the right key for a song. Reading the fine print in a contract, cognitive scientists tell us, takes a very different state than, say, coming up with a clever name for your business. Our emotions are… Read more »
Are Women More Emotionally Intelligent Than Men?
Yes, and Yes and No. Emotional intelligence has four parts: self-awareness, managing our emotions, empathy, and social skill. There are many tests of emotional intelligence, and most seem to show that women tend to have an edge over men when it comes to these basic skills for a happy and successful life. That edge may… Read more »
Resilience for the Rest of Us
There are two ways to become more resilient: one by talking to yourself, the other by retraining your brain. If you’ve suffered a major failure, take the sage advice given by psychologist Martin Seligman in the HBR article “Building Resilience.” Talk to yourself. Give yourself a cognitive intervention and counter defeatist thinking with an optimistic… Read more »