Search Inside Yourself

Increase Productivity, Creativity and Happiness [ePub edition]

Chade-Meng Tan

• Publisher: Collins
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780007462964
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Self Improvement

Can you imagine what it's like to be able to completely clear your mind and experience a deep sense of calm whenever you want?

Chapter One

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Even an Engineer Can Thrive on Emotional Intelligence

What Emotional Intelligence Is and How to Develop It

What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters to what lies within us.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

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I would like to begin our journey together on a note of optimism, partly because beginning on a note of pessimism does not sell books. More importantly, based on my team’s experience teaching at Google and elsewhere, I am optimistic that emotional intelligence is one of the best predictors of success at work and fulfillment in life, and it is trainable for everyone. With the right training, anybody can become more emotionally intelligent. In the spirit of “if Meng can cook, so can you,” if this training works for a highly introverted and cerebral engineer like me, it will probably work for you.

The best definition of emotional intelligence comes from the two men widely regarded as the fathers of its theoretical framework, Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer. They define emotional intelligence as:

The ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions.¹

The groundbreaking book that popularized the topic is Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, written by Daniel Goleman, our friend and advisor. One of the most important messages in the book is that emotional competencies are not innate talents; they are learned abilities. In other words, emotional competencies are something you can deliberately acquire with practice.

Goleman adds a very useful structure to emotional intelligence by classifying it into five domains. They are:

1. Self-awareness: Knowledge of one’s internal states, preferences, resources, and intuitions

2. Self-regulation: Management of one’s internal states, impulses, and resources

3. Motivation: Emotional tendencies that guide or facilitate reaching goals

4. Empathy: Awareness of others’ feelings, needs, and concerns

5. Social skills: Adeptness at inducing desirable responses in others

Salovey and Mayer are not the only people whose work relates to social and emotional intelligence. Howard Gardner, for example, famously introduced the idea of multiple intelligences. Gardner argued that people can be intelligent in ways not measured by an IQ test. A child, for example, may not be strong in solving math problems, but he may be gifted in language arts or composing music, and therefore we should consider him intelligent. Gardner formulated a list of seven intelligences (later increased to eight). Two of them, intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligences, are especially relevant to emotional intelligence. Gardner called them “personal intelligences.” Goleman’s five domains of emotional intelligence map very nicely into Gardner’s personal intelligences: you can think of the first three domains of emotional intelligence as intrapersonal intelligence and the last two as interpersonal intelligence.

Funny enough, for me, the best illustration of emotional intelligence as a learned ability did not come from a scholarly publication but from the story of Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol.² In the beginning of the story, Scrooge presents an example of low emotional intelligence. His intrapersonal intelligence is so low, he is incapable of creating emotional wellness for himself despite his wealth. In fact, his self-awareness is so bad, it takes three ghosts to help him figure himself out. His interpersonal intelligence is, of course, legendarily bad. Near the end of the story, however, Scrooge presents an example of elevated emotional intelligence. He develops strong self-awareness, he becomes capable of controlling his own emotional destiny, and his empathy and social skills blossom. Scrooge demonstrates that emotional intelligence is something that can be developed (in the version I saw, it happened in the space of a two-hour TV movie with enough time for commercials, but your mileage may vary).

Later in this book, we will examine the development of each domain of emotional intelligence in detail. Thankfully, it will not involve visits by Christmas ghosts.

Benefits of Emotional Intelligence

There is an important question that my friends in the training business call the so-what? question, as in, “Yes, very nice, but what can emotional intelligence do for me?” In the context of the work environment, emotional intelligence enables three important skill sets: stellar work performance, outstanding leadership, and the ability to create the conditions for happiness.

Stellar Work Performance

The first thing emotional intelligence enables is stellar work performance. Studies have shown that emotional competencies are twice as important in contributing to excellence as pure intellect and expertise.³ A study by Martin Seligman, considered the father of modern positive psychology and the creator of the idea of learned optimism, showed that insurance agents who are optimists outsell their pessimist counterparts by 8 percent in their first year and 31 percent in their second year.⁴

This was not surprising to me. After all, there are many jobs such as those in sales and customer service in which emotional competencies obviously make a big difference. We already know that intuitively. What surprised me was the report that this is true even for individual contributors in the tech sector, namely engineers like me whom you might expect to succeed purely on intellectual prowess. According to a study, the top six competencies that distinguish star performers from average performers in the tech sector are (in this order):

1. Strong achievement drive and high achievement standards

2. Ability to influence

3. Conceptual thinking

4. Analytical ability

5. Initiative in taking on challenges

6. Self-confidence⁵

Of the top six, only two (conceptual thinking and analytical ability) are purely intellectual competencies. The other four, including the top two, are emotional competencies.

Being strong in emotional intelligence can help everyone become outstanding at work, even engineers.

Outstanding Leadership

Emotional intelligence makes people better leaders. Most of us understand it intuitively based on our day-to-day experience interacting with those whom we lead and those who lead us. There are also studies that back up our intuition with scientific evidence. For example, Goleman reported an analysis that shows emotional competencies to make up to 80 to 100 percent of the distinguishing competencies of outstanding leaders.⁶ This is illustrated by the story of Gerald Grinstein, a CEO who had to go through the painful process of cutting costs. Grinstein was tough, but being a virtuoso at interpersonal skills, he earned the cooperation of his employees and managed to keep their loyalty and spirits high while turning around their once-ailing company, despite having to make very tough decisions. In fact, Grinstein performed his magic not once but twice, once as CEO of Western Airlines and again as CEO of Delta. When Grinstein took over Delta amid a crisis, he immediately went about restoring lines of communication and trust within the company. He understood the importance of creating a positive work environment and, using extraordinary leadership skills (emotional intelligence), he turned a toxic work environment into a more family-like atmosphere.

Once again, I did not find any of this surprising, because we already intuitively understand the importance of emotional intelligence in leadership. What I found surprising was this is true even in the U.S. Navy. Another study by leadership expert Wallace Bachman showed that the most effective U.S. Navy commanders are “more positive and outgoing, more emotionally expressive and dramatic, warmer and more sociable (including smiling more), friendlier and more democratic, more cooperative, more likable and ‘fun to be with,’ more appreciative and trustful, and even gentler than those who were merely average.”⁷

When I think of military leadership, I think of tough-as-nails people barking orders and expecting to be obeyed, so it is fascinating to me that even in a military environment, what distinguishes the best leaders from the merely average ones is emotional intelligence. The best military commanders are basically nice people who are fun to be with. Funny enough, the title of the Bachman study was “Nice Guys Finish First.”

The Ability to Create the Conditions for Happiness

Perhaps most importantly, emotional intelligence enables the skills that help us create conditions for our own sustainable happiness. Matthieu Ricard defines happiness as “a deep sense of flourishing that arises from an exceptionally healthy mind . . . not a mere pleasurable feeling, a fleeting emotion, or a mood, but an optimal state of being.”⁸ And that optimal state of being is “a profound emotional balance struck by a subtle understanding of how the mind functions.”

In Matthieu’s experience, happiness is a skill that can be trained. That training begins with deep insight into mind, emotion, and our experience of phenomena, which then facilitates practices that maximize our inner well-being at a deep level, ultimately creating sustainable happiness and compassion.

My own experience is similar to Matthieu’s. When I was young, I was naturally very unhappy. If nothing good happened, then by default, I was unhappy. Right now, it is the reverse: if nothing bad happens, then by default, I am happy. I have become so naturally jolly that it even became part of my job title at Google: jolly good fellow. We all have a set point of happiness that we return to whenever the euphoria of a pleasant experience or the sting of an unpleasant experience fades out. Many of us assume this set point to be static, but my personal experience and that of many others like Matthieu suggest this set point to be movable with deliberate training.

Happily, the skills that help us cultivate emotional intelligence also help us identify and develop the inner factors that contribute to our deep sense of well-being. The same things that build emotional intelligence will also help us create conditions for our own happiness. Therefore, happiness may be an unavoidable side effect of cultivating emotional intelligence. Other side effects may include resilience, optimism, and kindness.

Truth be told, of the three good things enabled by emotional intelligence, happiness is the one I really care about. (Hush hush, but just between you and me and the million other people reading this book, the other points about stellar work performance and outstanding leadership, while useful and true and supported by scientific evidence, are used by me mostly to get a stamp of approval from upper management.) What I really care about is happiness for my co-workers. That is why emotional intelligence excites me. It doesn’t just create the conditions for stellar success at work; it also creates the conditions for personal happiness for everyone. And I like happiness.

Optimize Thyself

If there is a one-word summary of everything I just said (hint: there is), that word is optimize. The aim of developing emotional intelligence is to help you optimize yourself and function at an even higher level than what you are already capable of. Even if you are already outstanding at what you do (which everybody in our class at Google is), sharpening and deepening your emotional competencies can give you an extra edge. We hope the training in these pages can help you go from good to great.

Cultivating Emotional Intelligence

When people come to a course such as ours that advertises itself as an “emotional intelligence course,” most people expect it to be a purely behavioral course. They expect to be told how to play nice, share candy, and not bite their co-workers.

We decided on an entirely different approach, focusing primarily on expanding the range and depth of people’s emotional abilities. We begin with the insight that emotional intelligence is a collection of emotional skills and, like all skills, emotional skills are trainable. We created a course to train those skills. We feel that if we develop skills, behavioral issues automatically go away. For example, if a person acquires the ability to skillfully manage his own anger, then all his behavioral issues involving anger are “automagically” solved. Emotional skillfulness frees us from emotional compulsion. We create problems when we are compelled by emotions to act one way or another, but if we become so skillful with our emotions that we are no longer compelled, we can act in rational ways that are best for ourselves and everybody else.

Emotional intelligence is trainable, even in adults. This claim is based on a fairly new branch of science known as “neuroplasticity.” The idea is that what we think, do, and pay attention to changes the structure and function of our brains. A very interesting example of this comes from drivers of traditional black cabs in London. To get a license to drive that cab, you need to navigate the twenty-five thousand streets of London and all its points of interest in your head. This is a difficult test that can take two to four years of intense training to prepare for. Research has shown that the part of the brain associated with memory and spatial navigation, the hippocampus, is bigger and more active in London cabbies than in the average person. More interestingly, the longer someone has been driving a cab in London, the larger and more active her hippocampus.⁹

One very important implication of neuroplasticity is that we can intentionally change our brains with training. For example, research by my friend and fellow Search Inside Yourself teacher Philippe Goldin shows that after just sixteen sessions of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), people with social anxiety disorder are able to increase activity in the parts of their brains associated with self-regulation, linguistic processing, and attention when working with their own negative self-beliefs.¹⁰ Think about it, if we can train our brains to overcome even serious emotional disorders, just imagine the possibility of using it to greatly improve the quality of our emotional lives. That is the promise of the science and practices described in these pages.

A fascinating example of the application of neuroplas...