Connecting Emotional Intelligence and Mindfulness

I’m glad to share with you stimulating ideas, tips and leads you might find useful, all having to do in some way with emotional intelligence – and beyond. Think of this as news to use.

But first...

The waitlist is open for the?next round of my emotional intelligence online course, starting in September. You can join the email list at Key Step Media to be notified when registration opens. Hope to see you there!

Onward...

The Right Kind of Empathy

None other than Mahatma Gandhi pointed to empathy as one key to living a virtuous life.? It’s also good for business (an application that Gandhi had little interest in) and essential for leaders.

Here’s why.

As research strongly suggests, there are three kinds of empathy. The first, cognitive empathy, means you can read how the other person thinks. You see their perspective, can “walk in their shoes.” You understand the language they use to make sense of things.? Cognitive empathy lets you speak to that person in terms they understand. It makes your messaging “bulls-eye.”

Then there’s emotional empathy, sensing how the other person feels. Knowing their feelings lets you be even more on target in your messaging, because you can better gauge the emotional tone of what you do and say to adjust to how the other person is feeling.

These two kinds of empathy matter greatly for leadership and for, say, customer relations. In fact advertising’s impact depends on both cognitive and emotional empathy.

But here’s the problem: these two sorts of empathy can be used solely in the service of self-interest; they are no guarantee that the message you send will be in the person’s (or customer’s) best interests.

That depends on the third kind of empathy, technically called “empathic concern.” This means you not only know how that person thinks and feels, but you care about them.?

Each type of empathy seems to depend on a different set of neural circuitry.

Empathic concern, neuroscientists suspect, deploys much the same circuitry as a parent’s love and concern for their child. But leaders who deploy this kind of empathic caring drive upward the loyalty and engagement of those led. When you feel your boss has your back, you can relax more, and be more loyal in return.

When I’ve asked business groups around the world to describe the traits of a boss they’ve loved and a boss they’ve hated, this caring attitude is one of the universal differentiators.

And data shows that the caring boss not only enhances employee engagement and loyalty, but decreases turnover. People are less likely to quit if they like their boss.

Back to Gandhi. He advocated considering the views and impact on others in making decisions of all kinds, especially when the decision would benefit others in some way. Among the books that unpack this principle: Pratik Surana’s “Gandhi: The Eternal Management Guru,” and Keshavan Nair’s “A Higher Standard of Leadership: Lessons from the life of Gandhi.”?

Ethical integrity is another principle Gandhi strongly advocated. In line with that, I’d like to acknowledge a forthcoming book, Perry Garfinkle’s Becoming Gandhi [to be published in January], where I learned about these business books.

In short, empathy – all three kinds -- is a critical factor for success in a business in general, as in leaders.

Next Up...

What’s Mindfulness, Anyway?

The term ‘mindfulness’ gets bandied about these days, but what does it really mean?

From the viewpoint of emotional intelligence, the term refers to a variety of self-awareness, the foundation of EI competency.

But even here there are differences.?

One definition of mindfulness has it as a keen attention to our surroundings.

That’s the way Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist, sees it in her research, and in her excellent new book, The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way To Chronic Health.? In that book Langer details many research studies that show paying a closer attention to ourselves and to he world around us can pay off in better health.?

But Langer’s way of viewing mindfulness differs in a crucial way from the way mindfulness has been introduced to most of us.

Take, for example, the methods of Jon Kabat-Zinn, who developed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, or MBSR, when he taught at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester.? MBSR has become the best-researched kind of mindfulness, and Jon has been the point person in spreading mindfulness into hospitals, clinics, business and schools.

His definition of mindfulness differs from Langer’s. He sees mindfulness as turning that keen attention inward, on the mind itself.

Mindfulness is a way to monitor our thoughts, emotions, and whatever else arises in our mind without getting swept away by any of it.?

It builds insight into our inner reality.

This kind of mindfulness has been around for centuries, as a meditative path. And much research now shows that it can make us more calm and clear – and that if we pursue this path more deeply, it opens the way to a greater degree of inner freedom.

Both kinds of mindfulness are beneficial. But the research shows Kabat-Zinn’s method can be transformational.

And now...?

SUSTAINABILITY: IT’S A PROCESS

Recently I talked with a European appliance manufacturer whose emphasis is on sustainability. I encouraged them to go beyond just carbon, and look at their products through the lens of “life cycle assessment”, or LCA, which gives you a metric for all the ways a product impacts the eight or so systems that support life on the planet.??

But I wish I had encouraged them to go beyond focus on the finished product, and see it as a process that begins with the extraction of minerals that will be manufactured into metal, and to look at every component in the appliance that way.

And then to track not only the embodied impacts in the appliance due to manufacture, but to also keep assessing impacts all the way to transport to a store, while customers use it, and finally when they throw out the appliance and it very, very slowly degrades.

And, as I’ve argued in my little-read book Ecological Intelligence, make all that data transparent to us consumers, just as is true of price.

I’d like to know a product’s impact as I’m making up my mind whether to buy it, or a competitive product.

Earthster, an LCA-based program that allows all this, is already in use by several companies. My hope: other companies will follow suit.?

To close...

Some Recommended Summer Reading

Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness Meditation for Pain Relief

Ellen Langer, The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health

Mark Williams and Danny Penman, Deeper Mindfulness