Are You Socially Intelligent Enough to Lead?

 

more than likely this woman hates her job. how about you?

more than likely this woman hates her job. how about you?

 

Hate Your Job? Join the Other Millions of Americans…

 

A recent survey conducted by Entrepreneur Magazine suggested that 77% of Americans dislike their jobs.  Most of the people cited that office politics as well as their bosses were part of the reason why they disliked their current occupation. I found it really interesting that it was other people, and not job descriptions, that were given as the main reason for people hating their jobs.

 

Today’s business world is a fickle beast.  It moves at break neck speeds and demands everything from you and your peers.  In corporations there is a constant sense of urgency as you’re held to quarterly results and expected to reach your growth goals.  I have spent a great deal of time researching the culture of corporate America and it’s scary to see the negative progression of our supposed “productive cultures”. There is a growing demand for results and lessening of support. This current culture crisis in America would be enough to make anyone hate their job, yet most of the negativity is directed at our bosses.

 

Believe it or not, there are some vestiges where good corporate culture fosters success and growth. It’s really sad that these businesses are few and far between but they do exist and the reason they succeed is because of their management and social intelligence.

 

Social Intelligence and the Biology of Leadership

 

In September of 2008 Harvard Business Review posted an article that tackled this very subject. It was titled Social Intelligence and the Biology of Leadership and was written by Daniel Goleman, PhD and Richard Boyatzis. If you subscribe to HBR I would highly recommend checking out this article. This article was viewed as ground breaking and cutting edge by the business community.

 

Goleman, who is the leading expert in social intelligence, looked at management from a social neuroscience perspective.  He focused on the importance of empathy and understanding and becoming attuned to others moods. He stressed the importance of developing a genuine (that is the key word here) interest in and talent for fostering positive feelings in the people whose cooperation and support you need.  As it turns out certain people have a biological predisposition that allows them to be more emotionally attuned and aware. However, it’s important to note that these skills can be developed over time.

 

In the past it has been common practice to promote a worker based solely on results. Promoting based only on results seems to make perfect sense, however more often than not this decision to promote based on numbers backfires.  Sales is a prime example. I have seen numerous sales reps promoted to managers, and at the same time I have seen a vast majority of them fail in their new position. The reason being was though they could produce sales results they do not have the social intelligence to enable their staff to produce the same results. Sadly most do no understand the nuances of understanding and communicating so they try to force results and goals on their staff and that’s where rifts start to form. Results are important when selecting a manager, but along with results social interactions should be looked at heavily to ensure you’re getting a person who is skilled in understanding and communicating with others.

 

A Happy Boss is a Great Boss

 

Research suggests that top performing leaders elicited laughter from their subordinates three times as often as mid performing leaders. A reason for this is that being in a good mood helps people take in information effectively and respond nimbly and creatively.  Laughter is paramount to social intelligence. It’s been said that when communicating with another person laughter is the shortest distance between two people.

 

There is a line though when it comes providing a positive environment. There are strict bosses out there and conversely there are bosses that are not strict enough. A good manager and leader will know how to handle that line because they will have understood how to interact with each individual employee to get the most out of them. Leaders have to be demanding but in ways that foster a positive mood.

The carrot on a stick method doesn’t make neural sense.  If you want to succeed in the long run you need to break away from the trite management strategy that would have you threatening your staff and scaring them into results. It might produce some short term results but it comes at a high price in the long run – the loss of trust from your staff. Become a socially intelligent leader; genuinely understand the strengths, weaknesses, goals, and talents of your staff and yourself. Enable your staff for long term success and have fun while doing it. Accomplish this and the results might surprise you. After all, research in the past decade has confirmed that there is a large performance gap between socially intelligent and socially unintelligent leaders.

Actively Communicating Knowledge

classroom

 

No matter your profession knowledge is being passed around each and every day.  The sharing of knowledge is an extremely vital part of growth and development.  From account analysts, to managers to teachers – we all communicate our knowledge in some form or way. I have a close friend who is a mathematics teacher at Eastern Illinois University and upon reading a few of my posts has taken a sincere interest in the role social neuroscience and social intelligence can play in education. Dave, this is for you buddy.

 

Have you ever been bored to death by a class? Have you ever skipped a college class because you anticipated it was going to be a snooze fest? Conversely, have you ever been a class that you really enjoyed? We have all had boring classes and we’ve all had really fun engaging courses. The reason we enjoy certain classes is because of the way knowledge is communicated. Yes, the course work has us initially engaged but the professor is the driving force behind our excitement for the course.

 

I like to focus on college professors because I believe on the whole most college students are emotionally disengaged in the classroom. So why is this? To understand why college students often show great disinterest in their courses we’ll have to go back to when you six years old. When your first grade teacher asked a question all of the hands in the classroom went up. There was probably even that one kid who was dieing to be called on – the kid who was using his free arm to hold up the arm he had raised and was waving like a battle flag.  Now think about any one of your college courses.  Out of a lecture of 100 people less than 10 hands might go up when the teacher asks a question.  So what the hell happened from the time you were six to now?

 

The reason so few hands go up in college classrooms is because you have been conditioned to fear failure. When you were younger teachers called on you to give opinions and thoughts. You were young, you were care free and you were not scared of being wrong.  But over time your teachers stopped calling on you for your thoughts, feelings, and ideas. They started calling on you for answers, and answers only have two outcomes: right or wrong. With 50/50 odds you don’t want to look like a fool, so you decide to sit this one out. What they don’t tell you is that those feelings, thoughts and ideas you used to have are paramount to retention and learning. Failure is stigmatized in today’s education and students suffer each and every day. So how do we change this? We shake things up.

 

Mental Energy

 

“Mental energy is not a fixed substance. Mental energy rises and falls with our passion and commitment to what we are doing.” – Sir Ken Robinson, PhD.

 

At the root of our mental energy is our emotion.  In a previous post I discussed that to optimally perform our emotion has to be at just the right balanced level – like the heat gauge on your car’s dashboard. This is especially true for learning.  The truth is that most students are not immune to education; they’re immune to how it’s communicated, how it’s taught, and even the classroom they’re in.  College students have been conditioned to resist trite lectures, lesson plans and power points. Nearly every class has the same format in the same type of room. Yeah, the chairs and desks might change but they know what’s coming. To actively communicate knowledge you need to gain the emotional buy-in of your class.  You shouldn’t talk at them. You should genuinely communicate with them.

 

Randy Pausch, PhD., the author of The Last Lecture, used to start one of his college courses at Carnegie Melon by breaking a VCR with a baseball bat. Talk about emotional buy-in. Imagine sitting down for what you think is going to be just another class and then your teacher comes in and beats the hell out of a VCR. Different, right, and maybe now you’re thinking this isn’t a normal class so you pay more attention. That experience has just taken your emotion response level from barely present to right there and ready to learn.

 

Apply Social Intelligence

 

Most teachers focus on dispensing knowledge. Instead of being concerned with what they’re going to say I suggest teachers should be more concerned about how their message is going to be perceived and understood. Maybe then they would realize that every student understands differently and in different contexts. Break away from power points and lectures. Utilize all of the media mediums for communicating knowledge: movies, sound clips, documentaries, role playing, art, music, skits and the list go on and on. Shake things up and present it in new angles. Look at the same old ideas and theories in new ways. Your class might begin to buy-in emotionally because your lesson itself is salient and fresh, and who knows, you might even learn something new yourself. 

 

Teacher, professor or professional, this is game plan we can all use to aid in our growth and development.  As a teacher you’re a leader. You’re a pace car for emotion and contrary to popular belief; you can go down any road you choose. It’s okay to change lanes and explore new exits. It might lead to places you never knew existed.  Don’t just teach, actively communicate.

Habits and Habitats

In my last post we discussed how the human brain unconsciously perceives people that we’re interacting with.  It might amaze you to find out that the brain also unconsciously processes our environment too.  This means that in every situation your brain is running two processes: one that you’re completely aware of, and the other that you’re completely unaware of. With an understanding of peer-to-peer unconscious processing in place I want to focus on the unconscious processing of our habitats. Our environments are often drastically overlooked; however they play a crucial role in our development and growth at every stage in our life.

 

simply amazing

simply amazing

 

This is a CT scan of two three-year-olds’ brains.  The one on the left is “normal” and the one on the right is the brain scan of a child who was severely abused and raised in an extremely turbulent environment.  For example this child was chained to a folding chair when her father didn’t feel like watching her. In a side by side comparison you can clearly see the devastating effects negative relationships have when paired with an equally disastrous environment.  The brain on the right is smaller and underdeveloped. This is visible by the lack of dark grey (cortical) area in the scan. Notice that the brain on the left looks to be fuller and contains less dark grey areas in between light grey. The reason behind this is that along with negative relations and environments, emotions are involved. Think about the emotions of fear and fright. These are powerful emotions. For a child these emotions come at a high price. Emotions are linked hormone levels and when hormones levels spike and remain high they impede the proper development of a child’s brain. This is what a negative environment can do to person.

 

Everyone has heard of the nature/nurture debate and personally, I think it’s a load of crap to boil down human development into two camps. It’s a great injustice to our species to do so.  Humans have an extremely rare and complicated interaction with the environments we create (and destroy).  Our environments affect our development, however we affect our environment, and the cycle continues. This relationship is complex, however to reap the benefits of a positive environment we need not look at one variable but all of them: our intentions, our interactions and our environment.

 

Our brains are always actively unconsciously scanning our environments for familiarity and danger.  Just like with people, our brains are highly efficient and exact with the information it gathers to help us make decisions.  I was recently rereading Blink by Malcolm Gladwell and he discusses an experiment that focuses on our unconscious environmental processing, specifically priming.  Priming refers to an increased sensitivity to certain stimuli due to prior experience. Because priming it believed to occur outside of conscious awareness, it is different from memory that relies on the direct retrieval of information.

 

More simply stated – your surrounding environment unconsciously prepares you to act, think, or feel a certain way.   This has been proven in several different studies performed at numerous different universities around the world.  One study was particularly telling because it focused on age. Students had to enter an office at the end of a long hall and take a test that had them make a sentence from scrambled words. All of the students were able to past the test with ease, however that wasn’t the test. What the researches were interested in was how long it took the students to walk down the hall before and after taking the exam, something that the students were unaware of. As it turns out all of the students walked much slower down the hall after the exam. Reason being is the scrambled word test was primarily based on words that were synonymous with old age.  The words that dealt with old age unconsciously affected the subjects to walk or move slower like their senior counterparts. This test has been done on both ends of the spectrum old and young, patient and impatient, even with race. It just works.

 

Understanding the influence of our environments and habitats is so very complex and this single post does not do the conversation justice. As I update more posts I hope to uncover different aspects of how our environments can unconsciously shape our behaviors and the role they play in our growth, development, and actions. Just be conscious of your unconscious processes.

Unconsciously Perceiving People (Part 1)

One of the amazing things about our brains is that we unconsciously process information from the people whom which we are interacting with, and we do it at amazingly high speeds. Even if we’re in a situation where we aren’t remotely concerned with the other’s appearance our brains are actively and unconsciously scanning and processing information about their mannerisms and gestures to help guide our behavior. What’s more amazing is that the information we receive by way of this processing is extremely relevant to our social interactions because these perceptions shape the course our interactions and the decisions we make.

 

If you’ve ever heard someone say “I don’t know what it was. I just had a bad feeling about (insert name).” They probably said this because unconsciously they were tipped off about a mannerism that suggested something about the other person that was not favorable. This gut instinct for the perception of people is often correct too. As a species and across cultures, humans share a lot of mannerisms. These mannerisms aren’t new.  In fact they’ve been around for thousands of years. Here check this out.

 

this dude is goofy looking. but he still makes you smile. sorry grandpa...

this dude is goofy looking. but he still makes you smile. sorry grandpa...

Here is a picture of an old man who is smiling. Odds are when you looked at this picture you probably smiled yourself and you didn’t’ even know it.  Your brain picks up on these physical cues with amazing dexterity. I ran a Google search for “smiling person” and when I looked over the results all I saw were dozens upon dozens of smiling faces.  As I looked through the pictures I realized that I was smiling myself the entire time and most of all, I couldn’t help it.

 

A study was conducted with adults to see if we truly do unconsciously process information about other people’s mannerisms. In this study the subjects were shown pictures of people’s faces both sad and happy at very high rates. Rates so fast that the subject couldn’t consciously tell what the face was depicting.  However, the results from the fMRI suggested the correct brain activity was present when the sad and happy faces were shown (at speeds as fast as 1/20 sec). What’s more amazing is that this study was conducted with children and adolescents. The results from that study suggested that children were better at distinguishing happy and sad than there adult counterparts. This suggested that children may be more attuned to mannerisms and physical cues than adults.

 

Another study that is telling of mannerisms was conducted when researchers delivered bad news to test subjects, but they did it using positive mannerisms. Mannerisms like smiling and nodding. The also did this with positive news and negative mannerisms like teeth gritting and scowling. The results came back and they suggested that subjects, in both cases, responded to the mannerisms over the actual news. In the case of social intelligence often times it’s the messenger and not the message that wins out. Stand up tall, smile, be happy. People will unconsciously notice.

Beauty and the Boneheads

these are the judges from the show True Beauty

these are the judges from the show True Beauty

 

 

So my mother keeps raving about this show on ABC called True Beauty.  This past weekend without any football on television I accidentally watched an episode. I know, I know. I’m not proud of myself.  However, as I watched it became clear to me that this reality show was all about social intelligence, or a lack there of.  Here’s how the show works: a collection of hot dudes (more than likely douche nozzles) and smoking’ hot chicks (princesses) have been selected to compete in a contest in which they believe is solely about their physical beauty.  However, unbenounced to the contestants the judges, through a series of hidden camera social challenges, are secretly judging them on their inner beauty as well as there outer beauty.

 

So how does social intelligence play into this mess of a prime time show?  You see, social intelligence is all about understanding, being conscious and aware of other people’s emotions, feelings, thoughts, etc. through your daily interactions.  People who are self absorbed and concerned with their own interests often fail at social interactions. Simply stated, self absorption kills social intelligence.  We cannot afford to deny the social nature of our brains.  By making the effort to genuinely understand others you can better bridge the gap in your social interactions. It’s like a great quote I read in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, “Seek first to understand, and then to be understood.”

 

The unique thing about True Beauty is that it to the contestants it is first and foremost a competition. And competition brings about our most primal urges to put ourselves before others.  It’s no coincidence that the primal urge to be top dog is linked back to our old brain – the part of our brain that is primarily concerned with our own survival and well being.  Competition has made the beautiful people on this show respond in overly self absorbent ways in the hidden camera social interactions and group challenges. At the end of each week the two contestants that act in the most self absorbed, rude manner are pitted against each other. The person with the least social intelligence and regard for others is then asked to leave the show.  My guess is that the winner of True Beauty will be the person who will best balance being socially aware and responsive while remaining competitive in the hidden camera social interactions.

 

Let this be a lesson to everyone.  No mater how competitive or heated the situation is, it’s important to remain emotionally attuned with others around you.  It might just win you fame and fortune on a nationally televised reality show.

RATS! RATS! RATS!

rats1-9807

My internship in college was a crash course in social intelligence and emotional management.  Looking back at my time spent as an intern, and knowing what I know now I wouldn’t change a single thing. I was working as an Intern for Maui Jim Sunglasses - great company and even better people. You should buy a pair of their sunglasses (shameless plug). Okay, back to my post. I was an event coordinator for the Special Markets and Professional Sports division where I was coordinating events like the Indy 500, The USGA U.S. Open, PGA Championship and other various affluent organizational events.

 

For an intern I had a lot of responsibility. I was on a plane anywhere between 4-6 times in any given week traveling all over North America – often times from one location right to the other.  Aside from juggling flights I had to set up, execute, and tear down our mobile presentation stations all while managing our product inventories that were being shipped independently of my travel itinerary. In short, a lot of pieces had to fall into place perfectly before I could even begin to perform my job which revolved around interacting with my customers to build a very positive first impression of the Maui Jim brand.

 

Stress was inevitable.  From time to time stress and anxiety would creep up on me as I approached a deadline for an event where expectations were high and my product was nowhere to be found.  Stress affected all of our staff in varying capacities, luckily for me not so much, but often times it was out of control.

 

In times of high stress the head of the division, Brett, would preach “RATS! RATS! RATS!”  Brett was a man in his late thirties yet looked much younger. He was very personable and outgoing all of the time and RATS was his mantra.  He was the perfect guy to lead this division of the company. Okay, by now you’re probably wondering what RATS means? It stands for: Rise Above The Situation.

 

As simple as RATS sounds it’s actually one of the most socially genius things I’ve ever heard. Let me explain. You see our brains are hardwired to perceive and mirror others people’s emotions.  Smile at a stranger and they’ll smile back.  Flick off a random passer-bye while scowling and you’ve just ruined their day if you haven’t just provoked them to attack you.  Due to the social nature of our brains, our emotions are highly contagious.  Knowing the power of our emotions in regards to others and vice versa, you cannot afford to have your relations become strained as a result of a previous unrelated social encounter.

 

The only thing constant in your daily social interactions is you. To perform at your highest level possible you have to view each of your social interactions as independent from the others. You could be having the worst day of your life. Your dog could have just died, a bird could have just crapped on your shoulder, and you could’ve just gotten mugged. If your job depends on dealing with people you can’t afford to carry those negative emotions with you all day long.  Leave the negative emotions at the door, stand up straight, smile and RATS.

Now I admit RATS isn’t easy. In fact sometimes it’s down right difficult. However, I promise you this: it really does work.  I know this because just last week I had two really important back-to-back meetings with two different healthcare facilities. The first meeting didn’t go as planned. I found out that I wouldn’t be getting the account and needless to say I wasn’t happy, in fact I was furious at the way the meeting played out. However, my day wasn’t done. I still had one more meeting and as I pulled into the parking lot of the hospital of my next I took some deep breaths, whispered “RATS” to myself, and shook of the negative emotions of my last meeting.  Before I knew it I was truly upbeat again, and as the operations director called me into his office I knew this meeting was going to go much better, and it did.

 

Brett, thanks for teaching me to Rise Above The Situation.  So next time things aren’t going your way remember to RATS. It could be the difference as you progress through your day.

The Good, the Bad, and the Monkey: The Good/Evil Debate from Social Neuroscience

only social neuroscience can bring these three together

only social neuroscience can bring these three together

Are human beings inherently good or evil? This question has long be debated and was made most famous by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes.  Both sociologists agreed that all men are created equal; however they greatly disagreed on the inherent nature of man. Hobbes argued that man is, by default, selfish and as a result, harmful to others. Rousseau argued the opposing more optimistic view point that man is by default a good being, but through the persuasion of their state or society has been influenced to perform acts of evil.  It would seem that both men evaluated social interactions as their gauge for the capacity for good or evil in humans.  A look into the science behind these social interactions may help sway this debate.

 

  

What monkeys can teach us about compassion

 Six rhesus monkeys have been trained to pull chains to get food. At one point the seventh monkey, in full view of the others, gets a painful shock whenever one of them pulls for food. On seeing the pain of the shocked monkey, four of the rhesus monkeys start pulling a different chain, one that delivers less food to them but that inflicts no shock to the other monkey. The fifth monkey stops pulling any chain at all for five days, and the sixth monkey for twelve days – that is, both starve themselves to prevent shocking the seventh monkey.

 

Daniel Goleman PhD calls this instinctive compassion. Shockingly, in similar tests conducted with both lab rats and infants, both performed in the same altruistic manner as the monkeys.  So is this proof humans are innately good?

From a neuroscience perspective I would say yes, humans are innately good, but with a twist. Hobbes argued that humans are selfish and that was the root of their evil. This is only partly correct. Remember the old brain, the brain that was concerned primarily with our own safety, the brain that we share with nearly every other mammal? That brain is selfish, and it serves us right to be so, other wise we would have been lost many thousands of years back in our evolution.  What differentiates us from the other mammals is our mid brain (emotion) and our new brain (thought) that compliment our old brain. Since all three of these brains work together they are interconnected and by design allow us to feel what we see in other animals and people. Seeing discomfort makes us feel uncomfortable and because we don’t like feeling uncomfortable we can take steps to alleviate the other animals discomfort causing us to perform a good deed. 

 

Back to the monkeys, you see when the six monkeys saw the seventh monkey being shocked they empathized and mirrored with the visible pain of the seventh monkey in their own brains. The six monkeys then thought about their own action options, and then acted by choosing less food or no food at all to keep the seventh monkey from pain. This is easily proved in a lab but it is not 100% in real time. I’ll explain in my future posts.

 

We’re no different than rhesus monkeys

 

I’ll end on this: A similarity that humans experience from time to time that reminds me of the very experiment with the rhesus monkeys. Have you ever been driving in your car on the expressway you accidentally cut off another drive and didn’t even realize you did so until the second you had actually done it? I’m guessing, yes, you have.

 

Here’s how the experience probably ended after you accidentally cut off the other driver. You either heard the irate honking of the other driver or you looked in your mirror and the car finally came out of your blind spot. Startled, you stop playing with whatever was distracting you, sit up straight, and as the other driver begins to pull up next to your car you make a dedicated effort keep looking ahead even though you can already feel that the person in the other car is staring at you with hatred and disgust. Like the rhesus monkeys you can’t stand seeing the pain or anger of another human because it triggers something in your own brain (mirror neurons) that causes a similar emotion, and especially because your action was the root of their anger. So your best option given the circumstances is to become the best driver you can be at that very moment while avoiding all visual contact to prevent the transmission of the other driver’s negative emotions.

 

So please drive safely people :)

 

 

Monkeys, Ice Cream Cones, and Mirror Neurons: The Three-Way That Gave Way to Social Neuroscience

work those mirror neurons baby monkey. work it!

work those mirror neurons baby monkey. work it!

A Macaque monkey sat in his cage in the corner of a neuroscience lab in Italy during a hot summer in the mid 1990’s. The monkey looked a bit goofy wearing a helmet type device that was rigged with electrodes that were supposed to detect a neuron that fired when the monkey raised its arm. As one of the Italian researchers entered the room the monkey sat with its arm at its side. The Italian researcher, like most people during a hot summer’s day, was enjoying an ice cream cone.  He turned and inspected the monkey’s cage and noticed that nothing was going on. The monkey was just chilling with its electric rigged hockey helmet and its arms still at its sides.  What happened next was amazing. The researcher raised his ice cream cone to his mouth and the electrodes starting registering that the monkey’s neuron was firing. However, there was one problem: the monkey didn’t raise its arm.  As the researcher raised the ice cream to his mouth again the neuron fired once more. Something was up…

 

 

 

Like most great discoveries this was a complete accident. What the researcher and his monkey counterpart stumbled upon was called a “mirror neuron”. A mirror neuron is a neuron which fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another animal. Thus, the neuron “mirrors” the behavior of another animal, as though the observer were itself acting. Though the monkey didn’t actually move it’s arm the neuron still fired because it mirrored or made a connection with the researcher when he raised his arm.  Currently science has only found mirror neurons in humans, primates and some birds.

 

This very discovery was the seed that would eventually grow into Social Neuroscience. Social Neuroscience functions on the principle that we are wired to connect. Mirror neurons amongst many emerging discoveries are proof our brain’s very design is to be socialable. This means that every person we encounter has an affect on our brain, and that in turn, affects our bodies. Dan Goleman, author of Social Intelligence has this to offer:

 

“To a surprising extent, then, our relationships mold not just our experience but our biology. The brain-to-brain link allows our strongest relationships to shape us on matters as benign as whether we laugh at the same jokes or as profound as which genes are (or are not) activated in T-cells, the immune system’s foot soldiers in the constant battle against invading bacteria and viruses.  That link is a double-edged sword: nourishing relationships have a beneficial impact on our health, while toxic ones can act like slow poison in our bodies.”

 

Think about it this way: Can you ever recall a time when either you or a friend was in a particularly bad relationship with a significant other? At the end of the relationship did the constant fighting and ill tempered interactions affect your biological state, as in you felt sick, tired, or even nauseated from having to deal with that person. That’s Social Neuroscience at its worst, however, it gives a stark introcuction into how social relationships and interactions can truly affect you both in the short term and the long term.

 

Social Intelligence is an advanced companion to emotional intelligence. Now that I have somewhat introduced both I can begin to give some more examples of situations and people you might encounter or have encountered and how to get the most out of those people and situations.

The Importance of Balance, and Why We “Black Out”

 The human brain is the pinnacle of efficiency. That 3lbs piece of white and grey matter has enough energy flowing through it to power a 10 watt light bulb. That’s enough energy to make Uncle Fester jealous. Now to begin to understand the brain we need to understand how it uses its energy. For the brain to remain highly efficient and functioning properly it relies on being in a balanced state. That means the brain needs both positive and negative processes working at the same time to create a balance.  If your brain falls out of balance some weird stuff can go down. To best illustrate this let’s look at a favorite college past time, “blacking out.”  Keep in mind this is going to be a very rudimentary explanation.

Why We Black Out

As I mentioned before the brain has both positive and negative processes. The fuel or energy for these processes is called Glutamate and GABA. Glutamate is the neurotransmitter that fuels your brain’s positive processes.  GABA is the neurotransmitter that fuels your brain’s negative processes. The plus/minus processes of Glutamate and GABA create the balance your brain needs.

But it’s Friday, and you’re thirsty. So you strap on your toga and you hit the town. Next thing you know you’re throwing back shots, cranking out keg stands that will whip a party into a frenzy and what the hell, you even shotgun a beer or eight. You see the funny thing about alcohol is that it potentiates GABA. So with a little added help from booze GABA becomes more abundant in your brain, and that offsets the balance your brain needs to function properly.

The area of your brain that is associated with short-term memory is called the hippocampus, and is normally fueled by the positive neurotransmitter Glutamate… but not tonight. Since GABA is in excess it overrides some of the functions of your hippocampus, affecting your ability to process memory. So when you wake up on a futon, naked, with a bunch of strangers you can blame it on your brain for not being balanced. No worries though, by the time you wake up and shake off your moral hangover your brain’s activity should have balanced itself back out.

 

 If you’re confused just remember your dashboard.

 

 That’s right, think of your dashboard and dials, specifically your temperature gauge. Think aboBalance is good! Don't over heat and don't get cold.ut it, you always want your temperature to be right in the middle of that gauge. If the pin moves too far towards The H (Heat) your car would over heat and not work. If the pin moves too far towards The C (Cold) your engine isn’t going to work properly either. You want that pin right in the middle, balanced.  So how does this relate back to social intelligence?

 

 

This idea of balance is important because it can be applied to your desired emotional state. It’s proven that the higher your emotions run, the more difficult it is to perform basic functions. Similarly if you don’t have enough emotional stimulation you can’t perform a task optimally either.  You want your emotions to be like the heat gauge on your car, in the middle range – not too hot and not too cold.  People who are emotionally and socially intelligent can control the flow of their emotions by thinking and priming their emotional state for what has happened and what might happen. Thw higher your emotions run the more difficult it is to control your impulses and that could lead to you doing something you might regret.  So next time you begin to feel your emotions starting to get the best of you take time to think and find your emotional balance. The lesson of balance is essential to the success and development of your emotional and social intelligence.

The History and Possibilities of Social Intelligence.

Emotional Intelligence is a phrase coined by Daniel Goleman, a Harvard University professor who specializes in the emerging field of Social Neuroscience. He has been at the forefront of emotional intelligence for many years now having published three groundbreaking books on the topic.  Here is a brief excerpt from an insightful book he wrote, it’s called Working with Emotional Intelligence.

 

“The rules for work are changing. We’re being judged by a new yard stick: not just by how smart we are, or by our training or experience, but also by how well we handle ourselves and each other.”

 

Let’s look at business for example. Today’s market place is continually evolving.  As competition grows and the intelligence of the customer continues to expand, the end result is that people, not products, will be the deciding factor in successful business. At this point in the game every company out there has a product that is similar if not “better” than the others.  However, people are what differentiate a product in the market. People are what make the connection between companies and organizations. People help bridge the organizational gap and drive business.

 

 

EQ – The New Kid on the Block

 

Since the IQ test became common practice it has generally defined the intelligence of a person, but as it turns out, only in part. The funny thing about IQ is that it’s a static form of intelligence. That’s right, static. It remains the same over time.  In fact your IQ will more than likely remain the same well after your teen years.

 

I would like to introduce EQ – IQ’s emotional counterpart. It’s your emotional intelligence, and it is dynamic. You got it, dynamic. Your emotional intelligence is ever changing and always developing through out your life time.  It’s completely up to you how much you’re willing to develop your EQ.  There is no correlation between IQ and EQ.

 We've all seen the iceberg analogy.

Some of you might be wondering if there is a difference between men and women in EQ as women tend to be viewed as more “in touch” emotionally. Actually women and men are equal in terms of EQ because the strengths and weaknesses balance out: Women are more emotionally aware and men are more resilient to stress. Emotional Intelligence is how you handle yourself. Social Intelligence is how you handle yourself and others in social situations.

We’ve all seen the iceberg analogy.

 

 

 

Forecasting: our nation’s youth continue to get smarter and smarter; however their social skills are rapidly declining. One researcher commented that “Kids today just can’t take criticism.”  In our society we attribute a high IQ to automatic success. That is false. Not all geniuses succeed in life. It has been proven over and over again that the main determining factor in success is EQ, not IQ (though it should be noted that one must possess an adequate IQ). Emotional Intelligence is what can make the difference between an average performer and a superstar.  

My vision is that by making people cognizant to way they perceive and act they will gain a better understanding of themselves and in turn also gain a better understanding of the people they interact with.