emotional intelligence refers to U how well we handle ourselves and our relationships there are four domains uh self-awareness knowing what we're feeling why we're feeling it which is a basis of for example good intuition good decision- making uh also it's a moral compass uh second part is um self-management which means handling your distressing emotions in an effective way so that they don't you they don't get in the way of what you're doing and yet attuning them to them when you need to so that you learn what you must every emotion has a function also marshalling
positive emotions getting ourselves uh you know uh involved enthused about what we're doing uh aligning our actions with our passions the third is empathy knowing what someone else is feeling and the fourth is putting that all together in skilled relationship so that's what I mean by emotional intelligence there are many definitions out there the part of the brain that turns out that uh supports emotional and social intelligence is actually the last circuitry of the brain to become anatomically mature and because of neuroplasticity uh the brain shapes itself according to repeated experiences so my argument is
hey we should be teaching kids regularly over time in a systematic way self-awareness self-management empathy and social skill in fact uh there are now enough programs and they've been around enough in schools that um they're about to publish a huge meta analysis looking at hundreds of schools and kids that had the program versus those that don't guess what all antisocial Behavior you know disruption in class violence in school goes down 10% pro-social Behavior liking school well behaved up 10% academic achievement score is up 11% so it really pays it executive function which is um mediated
by the prefrontal lobe uh both helps you manage your emotions and helps you pay attention so as kids learn these skills they also learn learning basic learning skills I think that the fact that that was an argument was one thing that caught people's attention then there was a little chapter on U called managing with heart which argued that leaders who were sons of a were actually uh defeating the company's own mission and I think that made a lot of people happy because they work for people like that um I don't know there some people gave
it to other people because they thought they needed help in this domain I'm sure there's a zillion reasons why people like the book I know IQ has been going up for 100 years uh as children uh in encounter a more sophisticated cognitive environment as they grow I don't know that we're becoming more emotionally intelligent I like to hope we would but I think that uh the number of uh Intergroup Wars going on the Intergroup hatred going on uh the um you know levels of familial abuse the in other words indicators of emotions out of control
in dangerous ways don't look that great which is why I I'm a very strong proponent of getting these social emotional learning programs in every school worldwide you have to remember that emotional intelligence is a range of abilities self-awareness emotional self-management empathy social skills women tend to be better than men on average uh at empathy particularly emotional empathy sensing in the moment how the other person is feeling and also at at social skills at keeping things feeling good uh between people and at a group Men on the other hand tend to be better on average at
um self-confidence particularly in groups and at managing distressing emotions but what's very interesting is if you look at at leaders who are in the top 10% there's no difference between the men and the women on any of those variables in other words you have a whole human being so so I would say that on average there probably are differences men and women uh in this domain of ability but as people develop their skills as people become more effective they pick up strengths in areas that they need I think that uh emotional intelligence is a universal
but it looks different in different places you know Japan has a very rigid set of rules of social interaction lots of subtleties Americans typically blunder into the Japanese system don't get what's going on and um you know it's embarrassing but they wouldn't recognize necessarily emotional intelligence in in Japanese setting Brazil is a very different culture it's very outgoing you know kind of like an Italian culture uh and so it would look different there but I think the fundamentals are the same
