I purchased the 10th anniversary edition of this “groundbreaking book that redefines what it means to be smart”. 10 years following the release of his book, Goleman’s development and popularization of emotional intelligence (EQ or EI) has built this new field of study that assists with parenting, teaching, managing people, personal success, and general well-being. Emotional Intelligence is an insightful book in a new field that satisfies any curiosity to understand emotions.

The broad subject of emotional intelligence describes how you manage yourself and other people’s emotions. Emotional skills related to the self include, but not limited to: self-awareness, impulse control, handling stress and anxiety, self-motivation, and coping skills; while emotional skills related to relationships include, but not limited to: reading social and emotional cues, awareness of others’ perspectives, sociability, motivating people, managing conflict, and listening. These skills influence your success and happiness.

Long gone are the days a person’s intelligence quotient (IQ) predicates his or her success. Research shows IQ to contribute only 20% to one’s success with the remaining majority accounted for by emotional and social intelligence. Book after book now emphasizes the importance of managing your emotions and knowing how to work with other people’s emotions. If you lack emotional intelligence, you bear the consequences in bad relationships and communication.

Goleman received his PhD from Harvard and reported on the brain and human behavior at the New York Times for twelve years. His eye-opening book is jammed with hundreds of studies related to emotional skills.

…emotional intelligence describes how you manage yourself and other people’s emotions.

Goleman begins the book with insight into the emotional and rational parts of the brain. He explains the neurology behind emotions, along with their evolutionary use, which lay the foundation for the book. Goleman sends a warning about the technicalities of this section – that it can be skipped because it’s not necessary to comprehend the book. (This section on neurology is fascinating though.)

The next section defines the nature of emotional intelligence. This section has discussions on: when smart is dumb, the development of empathy, depression, anger, happiness, optimism, focus, and much more.

The third section titled “Emotional Intelligence Applied” deals with emotions in marriage, families, trauma, business teams, and the human body. The eleventh chapter, “Mind and Medicine”, will blow you away with the latest findings on how emotions affect different parts of the human body, such as the central nervous system, immune system, and heart.

The last few chapters of Emotional Intelligence advise how parents can teach their children and teachers educate their students on emotional skills. Any principal, teacher, parent, or person involved in a child’s life will find the book’s insights on the emotional intelligence of children shockingly real. From guaranteed ways to predict a child’s future temperament to the development of abusive, unsociable, or delinquent children, you will see the importance of emotional skills in life that schools and parents need to teach children.

I found the research on empathy and emotional development in babies amazing. The stories of babies and toddlers empathizing with young children by sharing blankets or comforting had my nose deep into the book.

Overall, if you’re after a book that explains how you can develop emotional skills, I weakly advise you to read this book. Though there are many skills buried in Goleman’s classic, the book is more about understanding the role emotions play in our personal lives and relationships than it is about developing emotional skills. With around 300 citations of research mostly from academic journals, Emotional Intelligence bridges the impact emotions have in our lives from academic studies to the general public.

I hope people continue to learn about emotional intelligence. It has monumental potential to shape social and worldly issues. You get a lot of powerful information on emotions in this well-written book. It flows smoothly and should have your life doing the same. You can grab your copy of Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence from Amazon today by clicking here.

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Goleman gives an overview of emotional intelligence

Goleman in his groundbreaking book reveals that human minds and bodies communicate with one another. The invisible bridges give us the ability to change people’s moods, emotions, and health – as people can do to us.

Recent discoveries in neuroscience state that humans are wired to connect. This connection of influence instantaneously occurs upon human contact – sometimes without any contact at all. Relationships shape emotional states, general psychological experience, and another person’s physiology. Your interactions with people influence, for example, your immune system, circulation, hormones, and breathing.

Unlike emotional intelligence, social intelligence focuses on the intimate connection between two human minds. Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence focuses on skills and capabilities within the individual – it deals with self-motivation, self-awareness, anxiety, and detecting social cues.

Social Intelligence goes beyond the one-person psychology to a two-person psychology that looks at the connection shared between individuals. Goleman defines social intelligence as: 1) social awareness, which comprises of primal empathy, attunement, empathic accuracy, and social cognition, and 2) social facility, which includes synchrony, self-presentation, influence, and concern.

Social intelligence is beyond the intelligence quotient (I.Q.) and emotional intelligence.

Theories of social intelligence confine it to a cognitive context. Social intelligence tests ask participants what they would do in specific situations – a process that uses the brain’s “high road”, a slow neurological path used when we analyze and think. His model of social intelligence seeks to include the brain’s low-road, the neural circuitry hidden from consciousness that functions at incredible speeds, because an awareness of what people think or feel does not make you socially intelligent. As the book’s titles states: social intelligence is beyond the intelligence quotient (I.Q.) and emotional intelligence.

Social Intelligence draws on hundreds of studies covering altruism, primal empathy, attachment, rapport, and compassion to name a few topics emerging from this new field of study. From the amygdala and prefrontal cortex to spindle cells and mirror neurons, like Emotional Intelligence, Goleman once again digs deep into neuroscience and vast studies. He provides many interesting anecdotes to demonstrate his principles in action, which to me gives the book more power for its application.

A standout for the book is chapter one. It reveals the emotional economy, a term that describes the give-take process of emotions. It discusses how a smile makes you happy and a worried face makes you unsure – the biological process of how emotions transmit through people like a virus.

The fourth chapter looks at human instinct for altruism. While it touches on worldly altruistic behaviors seen through people like Mother Teresa, it focuses on empathy in small-scale relationships. We have instinctive compassion to help people we value like animals who assist a fellow member of its species in trouble. It is attention and empathy that bring forth this innate desire to love.

The last chapter I’ll mention in hope of motivating you to buy the book is chapter fifteen. It looks at the male and female brain and the connection they share. The research in this chapter, like all chapters, is amazing and provides insight into attraction, sexual desire, libido, narcissism, and more intimate – or not so intimate – topics. You’re sure to gain a lot of advice about the opposite sex as well as your own gender.

Without the jargon all too common in a professor’s books within emerging fields of study, Social Intelligence is a free-flowing read in layman’s terms made easy by Goleman’s enjoyable writing style. The emerging field of social intelligence has fascinating dynamics worth learning more about from Goleman. Just like my review of Emotional Intelligence, I recommend you read Social Intelligence if you’re after a book that provides interesting research and insights into human interactions; not if you’re after vast skills to use in your interactions. You can grab your copy of Daniel Goleman’s Social Intelligence from Amazon by clicking here today.

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Goleman discusses his book, the foundations of social intelligence, and a few discoveries social neuroscientists have made that reveal our neural connections with one another.