Some things about Emotional Intelligence

Dealing with emotional life well is not the same project as intellectual intelligence. There’s significant cross — over, but there’s no one and done algorithm for happiness, or square root for boredom.

Reading about emotional intelligence is like reading the guidelines for flying an aircraft. You can learn what all the knobs and switches do, and all the different protocols to follow, but there must always be room to improvise or do something out of sequence because of an unpredictable rainstorm. Things have to be enacted in the context of real-life where the world gives feedback.

Studying it can help tremendously; reading can give us new ideas, inspiration and ways to think. But ultimately what matters is what choices you do or do not make in response to the world around you. Emotional smarts are like a verb; performative. Like an actor who learns their lines by heart but embodies them anew in each show.

In this post, I want to distil down what I think are some basic components of emotional intelligence. I would like to have handed this list to myself about fifteen years ago when I first read Daniel Goleman’s, Emotional Intelligence.

Self-awareness

Also known as metacognition, this is the bedrock of the ‘higher’ cognition of Homo Sapiens; monitoring yourself and…