emotional intelligence

When we feel stressed, anxious, irritated, or angry, one of the things that happens to the mind is that it shrinks down and zooms in on the challenge at hand—the stressful moment, the emotion we don’t want to feel. There’s a researcher, Andrew Huberman at Stanford, who calls this “the soda straw view” of the mind. This is the view of stress. When

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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.

When I train leaders in empathy, one of the first hurdles I need to get over is this stereotype that empathy is too soft and squishy for the work environment. It’s easy to debunk that. There are decades of evidence showing that empathy is a workplace superpower.

Employees who believe their organizations, and especially their managers, are empathic... See more

Just get good at paying attention to bodily sensations. It might help to actually try saying things out loud, or writing them down, just going through a list of everything you notice about how your body feels right now. What you will tend to notice over time is that there are certain characteristic familiar patterns of how you are feeling.

The most competent people I know are pretty good at basically anything they put their minds to, because they just design a process and run it. I think this is largely mental and emotional—the hardest part isn’t figuring out the steps, it’s enduring the psychological discomfort of doing them and then adapting.

Let’s say someone has both a high-functioning theory of mind and an overflowing well of compassion. What then? Well, this is what Hoffman calls “empathic over-arousal.” A person will feel so worn down by the intensity of other people’s emotions that it wears them down — it turns their distress into my actual distress. This might not seem like a bad... See more