What is Emotional Intelligence about?

A groundbreaking book, Emotional Intelligence refutes the outmoded idea that IQ alone determines destiny. It proposes that personal skills like self-awareness and empathy influence your degree of success in life as much as--or more than--IQ. Further, it argues that emotional intelligence can be taught, with wide-reaching benefits to our lives.

Emotional Intelligence offers a broad new framework for viewing and evaluating your personal and interpersonal experiences.

This book will show you just how emotions affect your behavior, your professional and social successes, even your degree of physical well-being.

Emotional Intelligence is the product of the author's years-long reporting on studies of emotions and the brain. Based in scientific research, its message is both optimistic and pragmatic. No matter your age, it asserts, you can learn how to strengthen and deepen your relationship with yourself, and with others.

Dr. Goleman says we each have two minds--the emotional and the rational. Ideally, these two minds work together--our feelings inform the rational mind, and the rational mind refines the input of our emotions. When they team up, both emotional intelligence and intellectual ability are stronger.

In accessible language and convincing detail, the book explains the brain's emotional circuitry. You'll learn what feelings are, how they work when we manage them well, and how emotional illiteracy can lead us astray.

An emotion, says Dr. Goleman, is an impulse to act. Impulses to fight, flee, laugh, cry, celebrate, play, or relax have been "hard-wired" into us by evolution. Sudden bursts of anger or fear may have had high survival value for our early ancestors ...but these emergency responses don't always work in our high-stress modern world. A key challenge of present-day life, then, is to manage our surges of feeling. According to the author, a widespread failure to master emotional literacy is at the root of crime and a host of other social problems.

Emotional Intelligence introduces schools with pilot programs designed to teach students emotional skills such as empathy and impulse control. It also explores recent research suggesting that emotions have powerful effects on health. For instance, a pessimistic attitude has been found to interfere with some patients' recovery--whereas patients with a more optimistic outlook often reap the benefits of their bright expectations.

This book redefines the word "intelligence." Reading it will change the way you will look at your own emotional landscape--indeed, it will alter the way you interpret human behavior overall. Emotional Intelligence will add new layers of meaning to your daily experience, lending insight to your feelings and to your dealings with others--whether your boss, your mate, your friends, or strangers you meet in passing.

Are you Emotionally Intelligent?

Aristotle spoke of the rare ability "to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way." This is just one example of how emotional intelligence manifests in life.

The Ingredients of Emotional Intelligence:

Self-awareness: the cornerstone of emotional intelligence--a capacity to recognize your feelings as they occur

Emotional control: an ability to manage your emotional reactions, control impulse, and to recover from life's upsets

Self-motivation: skill at using your emotions in the service of a goal, staying hopeful despite setbacks

Empathy: emotional sensitivity to others; a talent for tuning into others' feelings, and reading their unspoken messages

Handling relationships: grace in dealing with others--strong social skills are the key to popularity, leadership, and interpersonal effectiveness

How do you measure up?

Science shows that we each have a basic temperament with emotional "setpoints" for each of these capacities ... but that's not the whole story.

The brain is extraordinarily flexible. Your initial strengths and weaknesses may be determined by your brain circuitry, but each of these five skills can be improved.

Through conscious effort and learning, we can increase our emotional intelligence at any age.

Drawing on unparalleled access to business leaders around the world and studies in more than 500 organizations, Goleman documents an astonishing fact: in determining star performance in every field, emotional intelligence matters twice as much as IQ or technical expertise.

Readers also discover how emotional competence can be learned. Goleman analyzes five key sets of skills and vividly shows how they determine who is hired and who is fired in the top corporations in the world. He also provides guidelines for training in the "emotionally intelligent organization," in chapters that no one, from manager to CEO, should miss.

WORKING WITH EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE could prove to be the most important reference for bottom-line businesspeople in the first decades of the 21st century.