WORKING WITH
EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
Daniel Goleman
Extracted by: E. Avalle 3/1999
Source: different CEO'S and persons involved in
the FORTUNE 500 entetrprises.Best phrases to remember:
· "Emotional intelligence" refers to the capacity for recognizing our own feelings and those of others, for motivating ourselves, and for managing emotions well in ourselves and in our relationships.
· The most convicing, powerful arguments speak to the heart as well as the head.
· The more complex the work, the more emotional intelligence matters.
· Out-of-control emotions can make smart people stupid.
· A leader's strenghts or weaknesses in emotional competence can be measured in the gain or loss to the organization of the fullest talents of those they manage.
· People can sense intuitively in the first thirty seconds of an encounter what basic impression they will have of the other person after fifteen minutes - or half an year.
· Emotions have their own agenda and timetable, but our rushed lives give them no space, no air-time -and so they go underground.
· A paradox of work life is that a situation can be seen by one person as desvastating threat but by another as an invigorating challenge.
· Mistakes are a treasure - a chance to improve.
· People these days need to have sense they are getting increasingly competent as they go on-or else they won't stay.
· The purpose of business is not to make a sale, but to make and keep a customer.
· Emotions are contagious.This emotional exchange constitutes an invisible interpersonal economy, part of every human interaction, but it is usually too subtle to notice.
· The emotional tone set by any leader ripples downward with remarkable precision.
· Sometimes it comes down to simply using the power of one's position to get people to act.
· None of us are as smart as all of us.
· The power of a subordinate to make a boss look good to his own boss is, potentially, tremendous.
· To a large extent, maturity itself describes the proces of becoming more intelligent about our emotions and relationships. The good news about emotional intelligence is then that unlike IQ, it can improve throughout life.
· As neural connections that are unusued become weakned or even lost, those we use over and over grow increasingly strong. Sooner or later they will become the brain's default option and we start to act automatically and spontaneusly as the response to that choice. Beware (my note).
· So, at the neurological level, cultivating a competence means extinguishing the old habit as the brain's automatic response and replacing it with the new one.
· In learning a new behavior, having access to someone that can demonstrate such a competence is at it's best inmensely helpful: they create a living classroom for us.
· Many people who are book smart but lack emotional intelligence end up working for people who have lower IQs than they but who excel in emotional intelligence skills.