The Many Uses of Emotional Intelligence

Final Call: Meditation

Since my college years I’ve found that a daily meditation practice helped me through the day. I owe many of my best ideas to meditation.??

This coming Saturday my wife and I will share several ways to meditate, as well as lessons learned from meditative arts like Japanese flower arranging.

If you’re in the New York area, come join us at the Aligned Center in Irvington, a half hour train ride from the City.

Register here .

Onwards...

The Hospitality Secret

At a Caribbean resort chain recently I explained why emotional intelligence creates a critical competitive advantage.? It all comes down to what guests experience while there.? If every staff person they encounter – from the leaf sweepers to the person at the front desk—engages them with a friendly manner and a smile, they will remember those interactions.?

Result: repeat business, good word of mouth, and rave reviews on social media like Yelp.

But a single surly employee can undo all that – our brains are wired to magnify upsetting moments.

So what makes employees spontaneously friendly?? Being in a positive state themselves.? That’s the point of my most recent book, Optimal : where I report research at Harvard business school that asked people to journal each day about what happened to them at work and how they felt. The study revealed the profile of a good day, where people performed at their best, felt engaged and satisfied, were happy, and connected well with whomever they encountered.

Emotions are contagious, most energetically from the more powerful person to others, with direct impact on performance .

That’s why emotionally intelligent leaders create that optimal state. The take-home for anyone in the hospitality business, from resorts to cafes: how executives treat their staff ripples down the ranks to how customers feel.

Next Up...

What Helps Students Learn Better

Remember the teacher you loved – and one that you hated?? How a student feels in class makes a huge difference for how well he, she or they learn.? A fundamental reason: Emotional upsets shrink the mind’s ability to take in new information. The more emotional turmoil a student has, the less well their brain works.??

So for students to learn well, best to help them get into that same optimal state, which can be seen as leading to “maximum cognitive efficiency”.

In other words, the mental state where students’ minds operate at full capacity.

A powerful strategy for helping students learn better: curricula that teach the whole range of emotional intelligence, from self-management to empathy and handling relationships. The best (and there are now more than a hundred ) embed these lessons in the standard academic topics or take little time from them, prepare teachers, and engage families.

There’s a direct link between students’ emotional and social wellbeing and their academic success, as a series of research studies reveals.

But I think there’s another dimension to student success, one that’s becoming increasingly relevant: how well they can ignore distractions and concentrate on their school lessons.? Research at Harvard found that people, on average, are distracted between 50 and 90 percent of the time.? That finding, published in the prestigious journal Science, was titled “A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind.”

The soaring rates of anxiety disorders, depression, and suicide among teenagers in the U.S. underscores that principle.?

Too many teenagers are addicted to social media – to ‘likes’, to influencers, to the opinions of their friends. And that fascination all too often distracts them from what they are supposed to be learning.

Bottom line: we would do well to teach our children ways to strengthen their ability to focus, the key skill when it comes to learning.

And now...

Grow Your Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence is a pivotal pathway to personal development, professional success, and the optimal state. Want to sharpen your own — or your team’s — EI competence?

My flagship online courses, anchored in my model of emotional intelligence, are available in English and Spanish (including the 6-week and 12-week Continuing Education options).

Save your seat for the final group this year, starting September 16th.

To close...

Listen to My Interview with the Creative Process and One Planet Podcast

?I recently had the pleasure of being a featured guest on the Creative Process and One Planet podcast hosted by Mia Funk .

We explored the keys to emotional intelligence, human capacity vs AI, self-compassion, emotional and ecological intelligence, creativity, and the importance of making time for renewal activities that nourish us.

Listen to our full conversation here .

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