On Emotional Intelligence
The Newest Issue of Psychology Today Tells Us What EI is & How to Cultivate It
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The April issue of Psychology Today landed in my mailbox this week. It’s devoted to emotional intelligence, and includes several articles by experts on the topic, including Peter Salovey, Ph.D., who authored the original paper on EI, and is now the president of Yale University. It also features a short quiz you can take to roughly determine how emotionally intelligent you are.
In the first PT article, on the history of emotional intelligence, the authors point out that, even though information like this has been available for 30 years now, the overall mental health of the U.S. population has nonetheless deteriorated in that span of time. The authors, Marc Brackett and Robin Stern, both from the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, offer their thoughts.
“Becoming emotionally healthy and emotionally intelligent is hard work,” they write. “That’s a hard sell in a culture that, over the past 30 years, has promoted the idea that you can gain mental health by taking a pill.”
They go further. “As we see it, the number-one problem is implementation. People give lip service to wanting EI but don’t necessarily devote effort to gaining the skills. You can’t hold a one-hour workshop or put kids in a circle to talk about their feelings and call it EI.
“Emotional Intelligence consists of a set of skills that advance developmentally, as people do, and their teaching has to be aligned with social and cognitive development. Just being aware of emotions is not enough. And you can’t teach EI to children unless you teach adults first; parents have to live it at home, teachers have to model it at school.”
The book Emotional Intelligence, by Daniel Goleman, was originally published in 1995. And, although I’ve learned and talked about the concepts it entails since I began my healing journey in 1996, I didn’t crack the book itself until I read these articles in Psychology Today.
Last I checked, they were not yet available online. I’ll post links in the comments when I have them. In the meantime, look for the issue on newsstands.
On another note, this is an episode of That Path to Authenticity of which I am particularly proud. It features a conversation with author and empath David Sauvage. Please check it out.