emotional intelligence

A leading indicator of personal growth is how curious you are able to be with all your emotions - especially the ones you weren't allowed to feel as a kid.

What you are trying to do in learning emotional literacy is to begin to understand this mapping of physical sensations in your body to predispositions towards particular classes of behaviour.

One of the things that happens as boys are growing up is they learn about a very restrictive version of masculinity, a list of things that you’re not allowed to do or say. Particularly around emotions: You’re allowed to be angry, and you might be able to cry if something’s really bad — like a sports team you’re on loses a really important game, or... See more

You’re allowed to figure out what emotions you’re feeling in broadly the same way you would with anyone else, which is by paying attention to what you’re actually doing. If you’re behaving in an angry way, maybe you’re actually angry.

Schools are good at teaching and measuring intelligence, so that’s what people tend to value and aspire to. But in almost any field, smarts is what gets rewarded long term.

You cannot measure empathy like you can SAT scores, so it’s not surprising that one is given more weight on resumes. But who is more likely to succeed in life – a person whose... See more