The second domain of EI is self management. However, I no longer use this terminology when working with professionals. Self management, or control, implies that we should routinely suppress spontaneous emotions in social settings. It was Aristotle who nailed it when he said, “Anybody can become angry – that is easy, but to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose and in the right way – that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.” 2,400 years later becoming emotionally intelligent is still not easy but the returns on time and effort invested make it more than worthwhile.
Emotions such as anger, frustration or helplessness are a biological phenomenon prompting us to take remedial action. They indicate to our body and mind that we are out of balance and something must be done. Simply sweeping these signals under the carpet to remain cool and collected at all times could well drive us to a therapist’s couch later in life. Apart from allowing us to let off internal steam, strong displays of emotion also signal to others that they should pay attention to us. For a small child strong emotions are a survival skill as it allows them to express a need or inner unease – especially if they don’t yet have the words to label what they are feeling.
Chris Voss is a former lead international kidnapping negotiator for the FBI. A man trained to keep a poker face, hide all traces of emotion and separate people from the problem. Except his experiences in the field have taught him that emotions play a key role in successful negotiation outcomes. In writing for Time Magazine1 he asks, “How can you separate people from the problem when their emotions are the problem?” He goes on to explain that, “Emotions are one of the main things that derail communication. Once people get upset at one another, rational thinking goes out the window. That’s why, instead of denying or ignoring emotions, good negotiators identify and influence them.” If we could see emotions as information, try to understand the powerful effect of these emotions on ourself and others and allow this to guide our thinking and behaviour, then we’re set for all sorts of success in life.
Before your children learn to consciously influence the emotions of others, they need to master their own. This is where your coaching conversation remains a powerful tool in their development. If we continue the conversation from the previous section on self awareness and insert anger as the emotion identified, your coaching conversation could continue something like this:
• When you feel angry, what do you think your body is telling you?
• When you feel angry and your body is prepared to face a fight, do you always come up with the best possible responses?
• Now that you’ve recognised what getting angry feels like, when you feel angry can you stop and take a deep breath before you respond? This gives your brain time to catch up with the emotion and think about it a bit. All it needs is a couple of seconds.
• If you took this time to think about your response, would you be able to say something more useful that you won’t regret later? Make a better argument or sound a bit smarter?
• Are there different ways that you can respond when you are angry?
Of course, it helps to talk about a particular situation and ask your child to think about how different responses would have changed the outcome of a conversation or conflict. Get them thinking about the fact that they are able to change what happens next by choosing to respond to their own emotions differently and, importantly, to put the immediate satisfaction of venting frustration on hold in order to create a better long-term outcome.
I coached a wonderful American lady once, let’s call her Anna. She had been brought into a big bank in a senior position in Asia. Her husband had decided to leave his high paying job to stay at home and look after their two young daughters. Unfortunately, he wasn’t coping particularly well with this big change in his life. Anna’s work hours were demanding and she seldom saw her daughters during the week. As her career flourished, her family grew increasingly unhappy in their new home and put pressure on her to request a transfer back to California, which would have ended her current career trajectory and the financial benefits it brought. She was only nine months into her new job and simply didn’t know what to do. The sustained stress from both work and home had started wearing her down emotionally and she could also feel the physical effects of stress – tiredness, headaches, inability to focus. After both her children and husband caught a stomach virus that left them in hospital overnight she began to cry at work. When challenged in the boardroom she responded with tears; when asked to deal with a difficult colleague or project, she cried and so it went on.
Clearly this was not a useful response to challenges at work, even if it was justified by the amount of pressure she was under in a foreign country with no support and no friends. Being self aware she had tried all sorts of things to help her cope but remained overwhelmed by tears exactly when she didn’t need them. “I just can’t help it,” she kept repeating to me. Our first task was to make sure that she took full ownership of her own emotional responses and understood that she was not helpless. No one can make you cry, shout, laugh or display any other emotion without your consent. You may not consciously control the hormonal (emotional) response your amygdala spits out, but you have full control of how you respond to the feeling that these hormones create within you. We discovered that breaking into tears was her body’s way of saying, “I can’t take on anymore.” And it worked: every time she became tearful, she would be excused from the task at hand – aren’t our bodies clever?
Our second task was to help her find a circuit breaker. A thought that would tell her body that crying was not necessary. It needed to be a thought that matched the intensity of her stress response. She loved to cook and saw food as a way of showing affection to her loved ones and so decided to reshuffle her work day to ensure that she could be home to cook for her family twice a week. How did this help with her feeling of helplessness? In the moments when tears welled up in her eyes, she would change the conversation in her head and ask herself, “What am I going to cook for Emi and Angela (her children) this week?”
She didn’t have to have an answer but the mere thought of doing something purposeful and pleasurable was able to reverse her immediate stress response and hold back her tears. When she knew what she was going to cook then, when tears threatened again, she’d ask herself what to put on the shopping list and every near-tear situation would add an item to the list. It wasn’t long till she no longer needed this intervention.
But what if I just can’t help myself? What if my stimulus-response gap is so small that my amygdala lives on high alert at the end of my well-trodden low road to reaction? Or what if it takes a lot for me to get irritated or angry but when I do, I just can’t stop myself – I go for broke to win an argument? Or what if I never show any reaction at all on the surface, I bottle up my emotions as they slowly wear me and my body down? All of these seem like extreme emotional dispositions but you probably know someone who would fit each of these descriptions. Most of us do.
There’s a very simple hack that works well for each of these, and for everyone else in between. I call it a filler phrase and it’s something that allows us to respond semi-automatically in a productive way when we feel our emotions being triggered. This intervention gives our brain a few precious seconds to formulate a more useful response. They’re so user friendly, our children can and should be taught to use them, too.
A filler phrase is just something that we say when we feel emotionally compromised. When our heart races, the tiny hairs at the back of our neck prickle and our faces glow red as blood brings heat to our cheeks. Everyone chooses a filler phrase that resonates with them and then uses it as often as needed until it becomes part of their automatic response. Mine is: “I hear what you are saying.” This allows me to slow down the conversation, without agreeing to what the other person is saying, and gives me time to stop and think before responding. I used to have a boss that would respond to every tricky question or heated discussion with a long, “Mmm” followed by, “I see” and then usually followed by, “Let me think about that.” We knew he was going to say that but, importantly, he did always think about it and get back to us. Some other ideas are: “That’s an interesting perspective”, or, for a child, “I have to think about that”, or even simply, “I don’t know what to say right now.”
My nine-year-old son recently came home all flustered and pink-checked, clearly out of sorts. Feeling his forehead for a fever, I asked him if he was OK,
“I don’t know,” he replied. “A girl came up to me today and told me that she liked me as MORE than just a friend!” I gave him a big hug and asked what he had said to her in response.
“I told her I would think about it!”
Oh how I smiled – that was his filler phrase!
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1 5 Tactics to Win a Negotiation, According to an FBI Agent by Chris Voss. Time Magazine, May 25, 2016
The remaining two domains of EI involve the often inscrutable emotions of other people and so things get a bit trickier. Social awareness is the natural complement to self awareness; once we understand what emotions others elicit in us then we can transition to understanding what emotions we elicit in others. This requires empathy, a trait that develops organically later in life when we’ve amassed enough interactions, experiences, friends and adversaries of our own.
We know that different mental abilities peak and plateau at different ages.1 Visual working memory peaks at around 25 years old but working memory for numbers only peaks ten years later. Cognitive processing speed maxes out between 18 and 19 years old then drops off pretty much straight away. It sounds like thinking is a young person’s game but before you start to feel mentally mouldy let me share with you what benefits middle age bestows. Firstly, our ability to read the emotions of others does not peak until between 40 and 60 whilst vocabulary skills will continue to improve well into our 60s or 70s. Far from being cognitive has-beens, older brains continue to amass essential, non-linear skills.
So we can either wait for EI to be bestowed upon us near retirement age or, like growing a good vocabulary, we can foster it deliberately through thoughtful action. Self awareness without empathy is akin to being a shark with an unreasonable temper that knows she’s a shark with an unreasonable temper and is proud of it. If our shark ever wanted to lead others successfully, she’d have to gain social awareness through cultivating empathy. Empathy is the key to productive social skills as well as the ability to influence others.
My son has a friend who lost his mother unexpectedly. She stepped out of a train into the rain, slipped, hit her head on the pavement and passed away from the trauma. Everyone was shocked and saddened beyond words. Many of us were also surprised when the boy returned to school just one week later. Of course, the family must have been in turmoil but last minute childcare is almost impossible to get in our area. My son came home several times complaining that this little chap was annoying him and provoking him on purpose, being mean and lashing out. “He’s so mean to us and no one does anything about it,” he told me in frustration one afternoon.
As adults we can understand that this boy is suffering tremendous internal turmoil and his behaviour is a reflection of that. My son didn’t join the emotional dots to make the behavioural connections. When you’re nine years old, being sad means tears and this boy wasn’t crying, he was being “mean”. I asked my son to look at the school day through the eyes of his friend and tell me what he saw. He saw that his friend’s mother was no longer there to make him breakfast, help him with his hair or to drop him off in the morning – everything she used to do. “All these things probably remind him of his mother,” he said to me as this very sad fact dawned on him. His friend’s lunch was probably quickly put together by someone else or store bought, his mom hadn’t signed his homework book or helped him with his revision and wasn’t there to pick him up at the end of the day and never would be again. These insights, and the fact that he had come up with them himself, were truly a revelation to my little boy. From then on, instead of retaliating, my son decided to respond differently to his friend, to wait it out, to chat more to him and try to show empathy.
Trying to understand someone else’s situation is not difficult but requires a bit of thought and the willingness to do so. Like an actor trying to understand the motives and drivers of a character they are to play, it involves thinking about what you already know about someone else and then guessing how they would feel in a particular situation. To help your child do this let them play a game of pretend and ask, “If I were Shu-lin or Tayla, how would I feel about that? Why would I feel that way?”
With 316 million members, Badoo is the world’s largest social meet up app. A 2012 survey of their members found that 39% spend more time socialising online than in person. 20% of those surveyed actually prefer communicating online or via text message to face-to-face conversations. That number is growing daily. According to Nielsen, the average time spent on social media per user increased by 58% from 2011 to 2012. In 2015, social media usage,2 averaged amongst all age groups globally, was 106 minutes a day and growing as you read this with average screen time across all devices for teens at a whopping nine hours a day3 and six for tweens. That’s more time spent consuming media than sleeping, learning, interacting with their friends in person or anything else for that matter. How much time is left for thinking, for being bored, for creating and dreaming? You may have gasped at this statistic, as I did, and then wondered: who are these parents that are allowing their children to merely skim the surface of life in an Instagram bubble of perfection?
It would seem that it’s you and I. While we are distracted by all the important stuff on our devices, our children are snap chatting at the bus stop, LOLing on Facebook as they do their homework and using Saturday morning lie-in time to LMAO at puppies in ponchos and other trivial bits of mind-numbing nothingness.
“The implications of this digital transformation are huge for tweens and teens, educators, policymakers and parents. For one, living and communicating via mobile devices gets in the way of empathy,” said James Steyer,4 chief executive officer and founder of Common Sense Media. “Texting is so much less empathetic than having a conversation in person and looking somebody in the eye and having physical, or at least a verbal presence, with them,” he said.
This new way of being in a digital world is having enormous impact on the development of children’s social and emotional skills. Social emotions are the most complicated because they require relationships with other humans – real humans.5 Hence exploring and understanding sympathy, embarrassment, shame, guilt, pride, jealousy, envy, gratitude, admiration, indignation, and contempt involves fostering real, messy and unpredictable relationships – relationships fostered through shared experiences and conversations.
My son’s favourite girl friend (just a friend who is a girl) lives behind us so I often take them both to parties or events. This gives me a wonderful opportunity to listen in on their conversations. The most recent one was this:
She: How many books have you written?
He: I’ve written one. (It’s true he wrote seven short chapters of his Making of the Grand High Witch over the December holidays as handwriting practice and his teacher had read it out in class that day, hence her question.)
She: That’s nothing, I’ve written six. The first one is about a pony that turns into a princess. The second one happens in Egypt where all the fairies have been captured and thrown in jail. The third one is my best so far ...
She went on for the entire 30-minute car ride home. Confident and clear in her speech, completely oblivious that she was talking to someone who may not share her passion for ponies, princesses or the colour purple. Granted, empathy is still a work in progress at this age but I had to bite my tongue not to jump in and change the conversation while my son sat quietly listening, nodding and uh humming every now and again. Was he really interested in fairies, I wondered? I asked him later why he hadn’t stopped her from going on and on about the six books I’m pretty sure she hadn’t written. His response was precious, “Because you said that people will like me more if I’m interested in them.”
We can be so focused on teaching our children to talk that we forget that conversation is about much more than saying what you want to say or simply filling the air with words. Millenials are more confident and more vocal than any other generation. They make themselves heard and certainly have no problem in putting themselves out there as they interact with social media. You know what it’s like to talk to someone who hogs airtime in a conversation with nothing but their own views or accomplishments. Now it could be that such a person is simply self-centred or, like so many children today, they were not exposed to the social subtleties of conversing meaningfully from a young age.
I’m embarrassed to say that I only learnt the art of conversation when I became interested in the science of influence. And my wise little pumpkin was quite right. The principles of influence teach us that people are more sympathetic towards you and your cause if you ask them questions and listen to what they have to say before you jump in with your ideas. Of course my son was eight going nine then and still trying to find the balance of when he should jump in and perhaps steer away from fairies to topics of mutual interest.
Now you may be thinking, “This is rubbish, I don’t want my daughter to be a wallflower that can’t express herself!” Remember, in order to express yourself you need an audience and a peer group to listen to your views. The ability to foster relationships ultimately rests on the ability to have give and take conversations. Ask, listen, speak. I’m working on the speak bit with my son at the moment.
From when your child can converse in simple sentences, start having real conversations with them. Short conversations where you are able to maintain eye contact throughout. Little ones are surprisingly good at holding your gaze. Older children actually find that harder to do as they grow more distracted. Start off with two-way conversations that you lead initially.
Such as:
Did you see that kitty cat cross the street?
Yes.
Now where have I seen a cat like that before?
Granny’s kitty, Old Smokey.
And what do you think our dog Snuggles would do if we had a kitty like that?
He’d chase it round and round and round.
I think he might eat it.
OH! NO! He would never do that. I won’t let him.
As your toddler gets older, encourage them to start leading your conversations and definitely waiting for their turn to talk but make sure that you do the same. Not everyone turns out to be a good conversationalist, and not everybody cares about it either, but the ability to focus, listen and think about what you are saying are very important concepts in both problem solving and emotional intelligence.
Conversations with our children are the starting point for the development of their theory of mind.6 This is the capacity that we have to construct a map of other people’s intentions and feelings. Theory of mind develops substantially between two and five years old at the same time as language flourishes. It has been found that children who participate in family discussions have increased ability to predict, or imagine, the intentions and feelings of others.7 Talking with adults exposes children to the language of behaviour and beliefs and ultimately the ability to distinguish what someone believes or thinks versus the facts of the matter.
If Johnny says to Ulvi, “I think that the world is flat.” Ulvi can interpret this as either “the world is flat” or that “Johnny believes the world is flat” but it may not be. Understanding that the statements – “Johnny believes the world is flat” and “the world is not flat” – are both true is an enormous leap for a young child to make and one that can only come from engaging in social interactions. In these interactions children learn to distinguish between information and beliefs about information and that leads to an understanding of how beliefs drive intentions.
A classic example is the Sally-Anne test. Sally and Anne are together in a room. Sally has a basket and Anne has a box. Sally also has a marble that she places in her basket and then covers it with a tea towel. She leaves the room and Anne nicks the marble from the basket and places it in her box. A young child watching this will know that the marble is now in the box. Sally returns to the room to retrieve her marble. Observers are asked where they think Sally will look for the marble – those who do not yet understand intentions will answer “in the box” merely because they know the marble is there but those with a greater theory of mind are able to understand that Sally does not know what they know and will still look for the marble in her basket.
Apart from conversations where we expose our children to the nuances of human drivers and intentions, what else can we do to grow their theory of mind and hence social skill?
Who doesn’t love a good old murder mystery story, one that gets us guessing at the killer’s identity, questioning character’s motives, probing intentions and cooking up clues where there aren’t any? Unbeknown to us, scrutinising tales of twisted logic and fated relationships is also a lesson in social and emotional intelligence. The brain networks used in trying to decode stories overlap with those used to navigate interactions with other people. Particularly interactions where we try to understand the thoughts and feelings of others. Stories offer a unique opportunity to explore the nuances of social skill as we identify with characters’ needs, wants and frustrations, guess at their hidden motives and evaluate their encounters with friends and enemies. Studies8 show that those who frequently read fiction are better able to understand others – this remained true when controlling for the possibility that people with higher social skills might prefer reading novels. They found exactly the same result in preschool children – the more stories that were read to them, the greater their theory of mind and hence, ability to empathise. Yes, watching movies works just as well but before you think that sitting your children down in front of the TV will have the same effect, I’ll have to tell you that this increase in theory of mind was not found to result from watching TV for one very important reason: parents tend to go to the movies with their children and so can discuss the plot and characters afterwards but children usually watch TV without an adult or any discussion of it afterwards.
This is something I love about being a parent – knowing that every interaction with my child is teaching him something even when we’re having fun and I’m not trying to teach him anything at all.
• For more on fear processing and the neuroscience of emotional intelligence read up on the work of Joseph le Doux who is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science at New York University and director of the Emotional Brain Institute in New York.
• The relation between emotional intelligence and job performance: A meta-analysis by Ernest H. O’Boyle Jr et al, published in the Journal of Organisational Behaviour, 2010
• The Business Case for Emotional Intelligence, prepared for the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organisations (www.eiconsortium.org) by Cary Cherniss, Ph.D. is a fascinating compilation of the value that high EI individuals bring to organisations and the value that EI returns to these individuals.
TIPS AND TAKEAWAYS FROM CHAPTER 8
1. Uniquely human skills that computers would find hardest to fulfil will be more in demand in the future than ever – skills such as leadership, motivation, innovation and emotional intelligence are already viewed as essential to a successful career.
2. Every toddler tantrum is a learning experience for you and your child. It helps you understand their emotional triggers and gather data that can be used to shorten their temper cycle.
3. The new way of being in a digital world is having enormous impact on the development of children’s social and emotional skills. Help your children develop greater theory of mind, and hence empathy, through engaging them in conversations about behaviour and motivations, read fiction together and discuss the characters and how they navigate social situations, or watch a movie together and chat about it afterwards.
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1 When Does Cognitive Functioning Peak? The Asynchronous Rise and Fall of Different Cognitive Abilities Across the Life Span by Joshua Hartshorne and Laura Germine, Harvard University & Center for Human Genetic Research, Massachusetts General Hospital
3 Teens spend a ‘mind-boggling’ 9 hours a day using media by Kelly Wallace, CNN, 04/11/2015
4 In an interview with CNN for: Teens spend a ‘mind-boggling’ 9 hours a day using media by Kelly Wallace, CNN, 04/11/2015
5 This may change but, for now, I like to think that social emotions involve fellow human beings in a non-virtual social setting.
6 Theory of mind (often abbreviated ToM) is the ability to attribute mental states--beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc.--to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires, intentions, and perspectives that are different from one’s own. -Wikipedia
7 The relation between children’s & mothers’ mental state language and theory of mind understanding by Ruffman T, Slade L, Crowe E, (2002). Child Development 73
8 The Neural Bases of Social Cognition and Story Comprehension by Raymond Mar, Department of Psychology, York University, Canada, 2011