Harvard Emotional Intelligence Class

Chapter 35 Improving emotional intelligence skills (1)
Thoughts and feelings are closely linked and inseparable.It's not just because feelings drive thinking, but also because those feelings reinforce our thought processes.Getting into the right emotional state can lead us to a beneficial mental state, which is one of the important conditions for creative thinking, empathy, and imagination to occur.

(The first section enters the situation: using emotion

The ability to use emotions effectively is in a sense the basis of creative thinking.When people are able to enter or leave a certain emotional state, they see things from different perspectives, and these changes in perspective can often lead to different ways of seeing the world.

What does it mean to be able to use emotion to drive thinking?People with this ability can be described by column A of Table 10-1, and the opposite kind of people are often described by statements in column B.

Table 10-1: Description of the ability to use emotion
Column A: Skilled
Column B: unskilled

creative thinker

Focus on practical, specific affairs
able to inspire others

not motivating others

When feelings are strong, focus on important issues
Tends to forget important things when in a bad mood
Believes feelings can improve thinking
Feelings are relatively single, easy to transfer

Can empathize with other people's feelings

Feelings are completely focused on oneself and will not be affected by other people's feelings
Feelings can inform beliefs and opinions, as well as change them
Feelings cannot change beliefs and opinions

Let's look at both types of people and see which column describes the type better.

★Huansen Li works in the marketing department, but in fact, her focus is more on sales than marketing.With proficient social skills and analytical skills, Li Huansen is intelligent and optimistic; she is also very good at expressing her feelings, and she also shows keen insight.However, she behaved differently when faced with negative feelings.When the conversation involves these negative feelings, she will become anxious and change the subject immediately, and she will try to appear happy and happy.

Another aspect of Li Huansen is also surprising: she does not have creative thinking and new perspectives.She is down-to-earth, focusing on practical and concrete things, and does not pay attention to the role of imagination.In the eyes of those with strong empathy and insight, Li Huansen does not give a lot of understanding to those she considers "complainers" and "complainants".She sees no reason for those people to focus only on the negative aspects of their lives.

Li Huansen's ability to use emotion to promote thinking is weak.She does not want to (and may not be able to) arouse emotions and use them to push her to think, process information, make decisions, or understand other people's situations.This may not be a fatal flaw for Li Huansen and managers like her, but avoiding emotions often reflects the rigidity of a person's thinking mode.

Julia worked as a financial analyst at the company her father founded.Her career is not so much a "choice" as it is a family need.Her father worked tirelessly to train the only daughter, and wanted her to be the heir of the company. Doing financial analysis work was the first step for her to accumulate necessary practical work experience before joining her father's company.

However, Julia felt that her career was not so satisfactory. There seemed to be something missing in her career, and Julia was determined to find out what was missing.She has a wide range of interests and is enthusiastic.Although the company met some of her needs, the scope of work was quite narrow.She needed a bigger canvas on which to draw her career blueprint.

It was fascinating to hear Julia talk about her work, her colleagues and her own thoughts.She is imaginative and compassionate, making it easy to relate to others.She can truly empathize with other people's feelings, and she can relate the emotional experiences of others to her own very well.She incorporated these feelings into her own thinking, and the resulting ideas were highly creative and insightful.

A few months later, she was hired by a fledgling company.This time, instead of working as a financial analyst, Julia worked as an associate manager in marketing and new product development, a position that offered her the opportunity to be creative. ★
Instead of seeing emotions as unexpected guests, we should think of emotions as an important part of thinking and cognition, because emotions can enhance our thinking.

The emotion of happiness can help us sprout new ideas, prompt us to generate new ways of thinking, and explore the possibility of things.Happiness is having dreams and realizing them.

Happiness can help us better use inductive reasoning to solve problems that often arise when we encounter a common problem and need to find a possible solution.

If we are in a happy relationship, creativity in problem solving increases.Happy people tend to hold on to past events as happy memories.Being in a good mood can also make people feel more generous, kind, and kind.When people are in positive emotions, their ability to make decisions improves accordingly.This means that a positive emotional state can help us generate more new perspectives and new choices.

People in positive relationships are more likely to rely on comprehensive knowledge structures.Happy people tend to gather more information than unhappy people, relying more on the big picture than on details.

But there is also a downside to happy relationships.They often lead to more errors when solving problems.Happy feelings are generally a sign that we have done well, or have succeeded.As a result, we tend to think that the job is done and stop trying to solve the problem any deeper.

★Different emotions have different functions in promoting thinking

Li Wenqiang was smiling and elated when he came to the unit.As soon as he sat down, the boss came over and asked him to look at the department's budget for the next year.Li Wenqiang happily agreed and promised to do it right away.He went through each figure in the budget sheet page by page, and his work was very efficient.Certain errors did exist in the budget sheet, and he circled them and made corrections in the margins.

The next day, the budget was revised and ready to be presented to the corporate office.The document was so important that the boss decided to have Li Wenqiang read it one last time to make sure that all mistakes had been corrected.Li Wenqiang walked into the office slowly, feeling a little unhappy. "What happened?" the boss asked.Li Wenqiang replied with a slight smile, "It's nothing, I'm fine." He wasn't depressed, but he was indeed in a negative mood, although it wasn't obvious.Li Wenqiang walked into the office and checked the final draft of the budget calmly.After he checked the first revision, he looked at the column section again, and he was surprised to find another error that he hadn't found the previous time.So, he went back to the beginning of the budget and carefully analyzed the budget figures for each line.In the end, he found a total of five errors, two of which were critical. ★
Why did Li Wenqiang do a better job when he checked the budget for the second time?Is it because he is more familiar with the budget this time?That's unlikely, because when you're familiar with something, you tend to pay less attention to detail.The only difference is that Li Wenqiang's mood was more positive on the first day, but slightly negative on the second day.This example tells us that different emotions have different functions in promoting thinking.

People are very careful when they are afraid.When we're scared, our senses are heightened and adrenaline runs through our bodies.We are fully mobilized and ready to act.Fear motivates us to try to escape when we are in danger.

Fear is not a pleasant feeling, but a little fear can be helpful.Fear can lead us into a mindset when everyone and everything is untrustworthy.Appropriately harnessed, fear can also make us rethink past assumptions and discover new things in the old.

Grief can help us solve deductive reasoning problems.We encounter deductive reasoning problems when we need to focus on details or to find errors in a series of facts.

Life experience will tell us that we learn more from failure than from success, because failure can make us disappointed or sad to a certain extent, we can see our shortcomings and find problems that we did not pay attention to before.At the same time, only when the sadness brought about by failure is used rationally can failure become a beneficial thing.

Anger narrows our vision and worldview, focusing our attention and energy on what we perceive to be dangerous.Anger can also sometimes energize us when necessary, giving us the courage to right wrongs and react to the injustices around us.

Darwin said it well: "When unexpected or unknown things happen, surprises will arise. When we are surprised, we will naturally want to find out the cause of things as soon as possible; therefore, we will open our eyes and our vision will be widened. Just follow the expansion, and the eyeball will easily move in any direction."

When something unexpected happens, the emotion of surprise redirects our attention.Our complacency is watered down, so we pay full attention to listening or observing new developments in things.

Because thinking and feeling are so closely linked, people who are good at using their feelings to drive their thinking are better at motivating others.These are people who intuitively know what inspires, motivates, and moves.This is the essence of management and leadership, and the above skills are an important emotional component of management and leadership.As stated in the definition of leadership: "Leadership is concerned with the role of emotion in the functioning of an organization, bringing life and meaning to management and keeping it alive."

Physicians are often regarded as the most rational people.Their years of medical training have been scientifically and academically rigorous.Of course, they are the least susceptible group of people to be affected by momentary emotions.However, psychologist Alice Eisen of Cornell University has found that this is not quite the case.In experiments where she gave medical students and doctors a small gift each, they made diagnoses faster and more accurately.At the same time, what makes people feel interesting is that these doctors who are in a "good mood" often make suggestions that are beneficial to the treatment of patients and provide more consultations.

How, then, is the cognitive decision-making process influenced by a seemingly irrational cause?Experts believe that no matter how light a gift is given, it will evoke happy, positive feelings.When people's feelings are relatively positive, they are more likely to be generous and helpful.At the same time, positive feelings also favor more creative problem-solving, which may be why doctors make more accurate medical diagnoses.

Our memories are also closely linked with our emotions.For example, does it matter how you feel while taking the test?In fact, it is important that the feelings you feel when taking the test match the feelings you feel when you study the material on the test.When we remember information, it tends to be remembered better if we are in the same mood as when we first acquired it.This phenomenon is called mood-consistent memory.In fact, the relationship is pretty straightforward: if you're in a positive mood when you acquire new information, it helps to be in that positive mood when you need to use that information.

This effect seems to be more pronounced for emotional memories.In general, these emotionally rich memories tend to be easier to recall, and this is no exception in the case of long intervals, and less emotional things are not so easy to recall.

Emotions not only contain important information and data, but also can focus our attention on more important things in the surrounding environment.When we feel scared, we look for possible dangers in our surroundings.When we are happy, our energy and focus are released, so we can boldly explore the world around us and make new discoveries.

Say you're commuting to work and you feel a little worried and a little nervous, but you're not sure why you're feeling uneasy.You start thinking about the budget spreadsheet that you keep in your briefcase, which you hand over to Internal Audit when you arrive at the office.You absent-mindedly remove the laptop from your briefcase, revisit the data sheet, and see an obvious error on the second page.At this time, although you feel tense, you are full of energy.You will focus all your attention on this one thing, carefully checking every number on every line.You re-enter the arithmetic process, calculating whether each number is wrong.Along the way, you discovered and corrected a smaller mistake.Suddenly, you realize that the car has stopped and you have reached your stop.You grabbed your bag in one hand and rushed out of the car door in time with your coat in the other...

Although tension and worry can be painful, these feelings can be used effectively.It focuses your mind on extremely important tasks, helps you pay attention to details, and can help you find errors.

People with high emotional intelligence can accurately judge feelings, understand the laws between feelings and thinking, and can match feelings with occasions.What if the feeling and the occasion don't match up?

Relax first.Relaxation allows you to become free and flexible.Freedom is the key to changing your emotions, which allows you to change your behavior and style of doing things in order to enter a certain state and state of mind.

Second, improve your imagination.As you become more receptive to things, you can use imagination or other similar techniques to generate a variety of emotions and feelings.Maybe it's funny, but the point of this is to generate different emotions in order to be able to generate different ways of thinking.Then, we can generate creative ideas, feel the feelings of others (such as empathy) or switch perspectives, etc.

There is one more step to developing the imagination: incorporating the appropriate bodily sensations into the imagination—the feeling that the emotion you are trying to have should feel.

First of all, you need to know what different feelings are like.An emotion is also a physical sensation, such as warmth, heartbeat, and breathing.Associating feelings with feelings allows us to find a simpler and more accurate way of generating feelings.Try to feel the sensations associated with some basic emotions (see Table 10-2).

Table 10-2: Feelings and Sensations
感情
Breathe
Heartbeat
muscle
temperature
位置
Scared

accelerate
accelerate
tension
cold

abdomen
angry
shallow and short
accelerate
tense mouth
热

whole body
sad
低沉
Slow down
Relax
cold

chest
happy
Slow down
微增
Relax
Warm

chest
This is the starting point for training your senses.You can start by paying attention to and raising emotional awareness, and then you can judge the feelings that accompany the emotion.

How can we cultivate emotional imagination?The following exercises will help you learn this important skill.

1.Choose an emotion you wish to have, and then think about a situation in which you have experienced that emotion.If you can't think of a specific thing, maybe the following questions will help.

Grief: You lost something of great value.

Angry: You have been treated unfairly.

Fear: You worry that something bad is going to happen.

Surprise: Something unexpected just happened.

Happy: You got what you wanted so badly.

2.Recall the situation at that time.Consider what the situation was like at the time?Who are the people involved?Picture the scene in your mind.If you can't remember, think of other scenarios.Preferably something recent and easy to recall.

3.Be aware of the sensations at the time, especially the physical sensations that accompany the emotion.

Sadness - it's cold, you feel your heart is heavy, and your steps are difficult, as if there are weights wrapped around your feet.You curl up slightly.Everything around you looks dark.You're trying to distinguish shapes, as if in a fog.Your breathing is slow and deep.As you exhale, you let out a low moan.You hang your head down, your mouth slightly open.

Afraid - there is silence around you, the air seems to have stagnated.Something is going to happen, but you're not sure what's going to happen.All your muscles tense up and you stand still.Your heart is pounding, your face is gradually pale, and your mouth is dry.

Love - a warm current flows through your body.You can't help but laugh.You seem to radiate a ray of light, and you are sure that everyone who sees you knows that you are filled with joy, passion, and hope.Your heart beats a little faster, and the whole world is colorful.

(End of this chapter)