Welcome to my newsletter, Emotional Intelligence with Daniel Goleman

I’m delighted to share with you matters close to my heart, ideas that I find stimulating, and some practical tips and leads that you might find useful. At the core, of course, you’ll find emotional intelligence. But my interests also go far beyond; you’ll get a taste of that range here. PLUS news you can put to use in your life or work – or in both. Please join me each month.

First, an announcement...

Just one week left before I speak online about what’s new in applying the Essentials of Emotional Intelligence:

• Finding purpose and meaning in your work
• Managing your inner state during multiple crises; keeping goal focus while adapting to multiple challenges
• Empathy for tolerance, diversity, and inclusiveness
• Maintaining strong relationships in our new reality – beyond Zoom to the person-to-person link

To sign up, go here.

Now, let's dive in...

Coaching With the Essentials of Emotional Intelligence

[NOTE: I’ve asked Elizabeth Solomon to share how coaches like her use emotional intelligence tools. ]

When my client, a European physician, got diagnosed with COVID-19, we were almost eight weeks into a 12-week engagement. Within hours of my client’s diagnosis, she was relegated to a 120-square foot room in her own apartment. For the next two weeks, her husband would drop meals at the door, taking care of her basic needs until she was allowed to re-occupy their apartment. Our coaching went from the backdrop of her office to the backdrop of a small room she had used mostly for storage, nothing but a twin bed and some brown shelves with books she had read for medical school. 

This is a client who, until then, had led a mostly out-of-the-house life. Before COVID, her career was marked by public appearances, stacked commitments, and high expectations. Now she was like a locomotive stopped dead in its tracks. Like many of us, she felt trapped, frustrated, and fearful. 

On our first Zoom call from quarantine, my client showed up looking surprisingly well. Not only was her COVID mild, but she immediately began crediting her wellbeing to the impact of our work with emotional intelligence. She told me how she was practicing self-awareness to understand her feelings and identify her triggers. 

She talked at length about the value of the techniques she'd learned and about how she was using a simple breathing practice we had gone over to keep herself from panicking. She shared that she had begun reading books she had always wanted to, connecting with her family over the phone in ways she hadn’t had the time for in her busy life, and listening to daily talks by her pastor. She was using empathy -- a critical EI competency -- to cultivate compassion for her husband, whose schedule she was now dependent on for her meals. She also talked about using empathy to tune in to the experience of those around her and how that helped her to feel less scared and alone. 

As coaches, we are well-positioned to help our clients learn, through direct practice, how to leverage emotional intelligence to bolster their resilience. In my coaching, I use a curriculum based on Daniel Goleman’s work which offers daily doses of EI education—small tidbits of information that can be digested within 10 to 15 minutes. This curriculum has proven invaluable. There is only so much you can do in a short engagement—using this curriculum has provided a robust bank of practices with which to create real and lasting behavior change. 

If you want to learn more about the building blocks of emotional intelligence, including how you might integrate it into your coaching practice, go here. This is a first-time opportunity to learn the Essentials of Emotional Intelligence with Daniel Goleman, plus get a look at the curriculum trained EI Coaches like me are using. 

Elizabeth Solomon

next up...

CAN YOU HELP ME???

I’m looking for organizations that use emotional intelligence in hiring, onboarding, spotting high potentials, promotions, and training/development.  If your outfit does any of this, please reach out to me at contact@ danielgoleman.info with a brief description, and how to reach you.

onward...

Empathy on Zoom

Empathy – sensing how another person feels without their telling us in words (and they rarely, if ever do) – forms the basis of all relationship skills. Without empathy we are clueless, likely to be “off” in what we say and do.  This poses a challenge when we communicate via tech. 

We send other people signals of our emotions constantly – in tone of voice, facial expression, gestures, and countless other ways. The human brain is fine-tuned to pick these up instantly and automatically, and that helps us shape what we say and do next.

But there’s a hierarchy of communications tech when it comes to empathy:

**Face to face, in person is best by far. We get the full emotion signal.  And we can add that reassuring pat on the arm – a touch – that we lose when we are virtual.

**Face to face but at a safe distance—the new Coronavirus norm, is not bad. Forget that reassuring pat. But all other emotion signals can come through (unless you’re too far away).

** Video at a distance is next best – Zoom, Webex and the like.  We can see and hear what the person says, and get fairly good access to their emotion signals.  Here, of course, one glitch can be when our attention is divided, as when something in our room distracts us, or we sneakily check our phone for text messages instead of being fully present. That was a problem brought to me by a well-known company that developed one of the most widely use videoconference tools – their own people were surreptitiously checking their phone while supposedly in a meeting together!

Two other notable emotional losses in a virtual link: 1) we can’t make eye contact – on my Zoom, for example, I can either look at the camera directly, or at a person’s face, but not both at the same time. And 2) it’s tough to pick up all but the most obvious emotional face expressions – and forget those “micro-expressions” that flit across a person’s face revealing their real feeling at the moment.

** Phone. Not terrible. The voice carries a large amount of emotion signal. But if you have the choice on a Zoom-like medium, turn on your video – it’s better than voice-only.

** Text. The worst. Since the beginning days of the Internet, there’s been “flaming”, where someone is upset and bangs out an irritated message, hitting ‘send’ before thinking how the other person will take that message and what the consequences might be.

 Researchers attribute flaming to “cyber-disinhibition,” the reality that text-only online puts the social brain in a situation it was not designed for. In actual face-to-face talking our social circuitry continually picks up emotion signals from the other person and “talks” to other circuits about what to say or do next.  But with text-only that second circuit for skillful communication gets no signal and gives no feedback. Our worst impulses rein. That’s the “disinhibition”.  (My advice: never answer an email when you’re upset, late at night, or when you’ve been drinking).

and now...

AN ANNOUNCEMENT: I Am Launching A Podcast!

From start to finish, a book takes me more than two years to get to readers. Podcasts are much, much quicker. That’s why this Fall I will be launching a podcast, “First Person Plural.” Along with a great team, I’ll explore EI and beyond, looking at how emotional intelligence is being applied in areas ranging from happiness to diversity and inclusion, to the environmental crisis.

Keep your eye out for more information.

lastly...

I recommend:

• “The Science of Well-Being by Yale University,” on Coursera. This free online course by Laurie Santos offers you the basics of her hit class on happiness, the most popular ever given at Yale.
• Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent. An eye-opening look at American society through the lens of the Indian caste system.
• My Octopus Teacher https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s0LTDhqe5A

and of course...

Laughter: The Best Medicine