12 traits emotionally intelligent people share (And why you can learn them)

You know, in the future, I think emotional intelligence will be one of several abilities

that we need. Another, of course, is cognitive ability, IQ, and maybe AI will take over more and more

of that. However, emotional intelligence is a human ability and will always remain so

IQ predicts how well you'll do in your school years and how much salary you can make over the course of a career

because it says what job you can get into, like being a business executive or a doctor or a lawyer

But once you're in those professions, everybody else is about as smart as you are

That's where emotional intelligence kicks in. People who emerge as outstanding performers or the best leaders have high emotional intelligence

and their IQ is not that relevant at that point. I'm Daniel Goleman

I've written many books, mostly on emotional intelligence. That's really my favorite topic

The book Emotional Intelligence many years ago was an international bestseller. I've written now five books on the topic

My most recent is Optimal, How to Sustain Personal and Organizational Excellence Every Day

emotional intelligence is a set of personal skills that we learn in life

it's a combination of self-awareness managing your emotions well empathy tuning into other people

and putting that all together to have harmonious or effective relationships emotional intelligence has been talked about for centuries philosophers were talking about

know thyself that's self-awareness but when i wrote the emotional intelligence book

in 95. It was the first time that for a popular audience, emotional intelligence had become well

known. I was a science journalist at the New York Times back then, and I'd been covering a decade of

research on the brain and emotion. And in doing so, I came across a very obscure article called

Emotional Intelligence, and I loved the title. It was by Peter Salovey, who's just stepping down as

the president of Yale University, and his then graduate student, John Mayer. And I thought

wow, what a great phrase. It seems like an oxymoron. You don't put emotions together

with intelligence, but actually it's being intelligent about emotions. When I wrote Emotional Intelligence, I was actually thinking of bringing it to schools

It seemed to me that kids should learn from the get-go how to manage themselves, how to

tune into themselves how to tune into other people how to get along how to behave well and so on I was a big advocate of what now called social learning And from early on my view of emotional intelligence hasn really changed much but I

integrated it with findings from research on outstanding performers. And I saw that different

abilities of high performers, like being able to manage your emotions, fit well in the model

And now I talk about four domains of emotional intelligence and then 12 particular competencies of people who are high in emotional intelligence

Self-awareness means you know what you're feeling. You know how it shapes your perceptions and your thoughts and your impulse to act

We find in our research that people low in self-awareness are unable to develop strengths very well in other parts of emotional intelligence

People who are high in self-awareness, however, are able to develop excellence across the board

Self-management means when you're upset, when you're angry, when you're anxious, can you manage your emotions

Can you keep them from disrupting your focus on what you have to do right now

We're having more instances of road rage, of shootings, of people blowing up at other people

There's a growing need for people in general to get better at this ability

The third part is social awareness, which in one sense means practicing empathy

You not only know how the person thinks and how they feel, you care about them

This is what you want in your parents. This is what you want in your spouse. This is what you want in your lover

This is what you want in your friends. And this is what you want in your teachers, doctors, leaders of any kind, people who have influence

The fourth part of emotional intelligence is relationship management. Can you handle conflicts well

Can you keep yourself calm and listen to the other person? Are you being an effective communicator

Full rapport means that you feel close. You feel you can work with this person

and you can trust them. Unlike IQ, which barely budges over the course of our life

emotional intelligence can change. It's learned and learnable. And it's learned and learnable at any point in life

Emotional intelligence is not one thing. It's like going to a doctor for a physical

You get your lipids and your good cholesterol, bad cholesterol. You get 15 data points

Emotional intelligence is a set of abilities, and each of us has strengths and limitations

across that spectrum. So if you want to improve your emotional intelligence

see where you need to improve first One of the common colds of emotional intelligence is poor listening You know we think about what we want to say and we don really listen to the other person

We cut them off, we interrupt. Let's say you wanted to change that

This is a basic of empathy, listening well. So if you want to learn to be better at empathy, you might say my habit

and I've done it thousands of times, is cutting people off and interrupting

I'm going to make the effort to do it differently. I'm going to listen to the person out, say what I think they mean, and then say what I think

That is a different behavioral sequence. And it comes down to the basics of what we call neuroplasticity

how the brain changes with repeated experience. And that's what underlies habit change

It's a little like crossing your arms in a new way. Cross your arms in the old way, please

Now cross them with the other arm on top. That feels uncomfortable

That's what it's like to change a habit. So with listening, you have to first make an intentional effort, might feel uncomfortable

But as you persist, it gets more and more comfortable until finally it's an automatic habit

That will stay with you for years. You know, I've gone around the world talking to different audiences

And one of the things I love to ask is, tell me about a leader you've loved and a leader you hate

And tell me one quality that makes the leader so good or so bad

Basically, the leader you hate is low in emotional intelligence. They don't manage their emotions very well

They blow up at people, don't empathize. They don't tune in. They don't understand how clueless they are

The leader you love is high in it. Having a boss with high emotional intelligence means you feel not only inspired, not only motivated, you feel supported, you feel guided, you feel you have clarity about what's expected from you

You give your best in your best state, in the optimal state, not in a desperate, stressed out state

A research at the Yale School of Management has found that emotions are contagious

and they're most contagious from the leader outward. The leader is most often the sender of strong emotions, either negative or positive

And this very research by Seagal Barsade has shown that if the leader is in a negative mood

very anxious, for example, people on that team will catch that mood and performance goes down

If the leader's in a very positive mood, I feel really good, I feel enthusiastic

then people catch that positive mood and their performance as a team or as a group goes up

So the leader state is actually much more important on the ability of people to do good work than many people realize particularly many leaders actually But if you have a leader that you hate for example and sadly too many people do then

you really don't give your best. In fact, you're more likely to leave as soon as you can, particularly if you're talented

So a leader with low emotional intelligence is actually draining the organization in the

long term. They may get results for the quarter by driving people, by stressing them out, but they're burning them out and they're going to lose good people

So in the short term, they may look good. In the long term, it's a disaster

I once took a bus up Madison Avenue in New York City on a very hot, humid day

People had a kind of bubble around them like, don't touch me, don't talk to me

I had the bubble too. I got on the bus and the bus driver shocked me. He looked at me and very

warmly said, welcome to the bus. How's your day going? And then I realized sitting on the bus that

he was carrying on a conversation with everyone on the bus. You're looking for suits, are you? Well

there's a great sale up here on the right at this department store. Did you see the exhibit in the

museum on the left? On and on and on. Then people would get off that bus and they'd been transformed

from kind of grumpy to pretty upbeat. It was kind of magical

And years later, I saw an article in the New York Times

about that bus driver. His name, it turned out, was Govan Brown

He had fans. People would wait for his bus. He got 3,000 letters saying what a great bus driver he was

not one complaint. And he, it turned out, was the pastor of a church

And he saw the people on his bus as part of his flock

He was tending to his flock. He had a purpose that was far greater than that of the New York Transit Authority

which is something like getting as many people to where they want to go on time as we can

He had a splendid sense of what he was doing. It gave a greater meaning to what he did, and he did it superbly

I've always felt that the more emotional intelligence in society, the better

I think we would have parents who are more effective in raising kids, who are kinder

We'd have more compassion for each other in our interaction with friends and loved ones as well as with strangers

I think we would care more about the environment, which is why I've been happy to be a kind of evangelist for emotional intelligence, if you will

I'm not the originator of the phrase. I think I made it more famous

I just think it would make a better world