It was the dawn of the 1970s, at the height of worldwide student protests against the Vietnam War, and a librarian stationed at a U.S. Information Agency post abroad had received bad news: A student group was threatening to burn down her library.
But the librarian had friends among the group of student activists who made the threat. Her response on first glance might seem either naïve or foolhardy — or both: She invited the group to use the library facilities for some of their meetings.
But she also brought Americans living in the country there to listen to them — and so engineered a dialogue instead of a confrontation.
In doing so, she was capitalizing on her personal relationship with the handful of student leaders she knew well enough to trust — and for them to trust her. The tactic opened new channels of mutual understanding, and it strengthened her friendship with the student leaders. The library was never touched.
(More available at the flash preview widget’s page 21)
— Daniel Goleman, Working With Emotional Intelligence, Competencies of the stars. 1998
In Working with Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman explains several practical methods to improve the social skills of people. Before I bought this book a year or two ago, I read Daniel’s first book Emotional Intelligence. This weekend I finally started reading Working With.
I recommend the section Some Misconceptions. Regretfully ain’t this section available for display in the flash preview widget. Instead of violating copyright laws by typing it down here, I’m recommending to just buy the book.
You can find audiobooks online. The section about misconceptions is at track three. Track five talks about two computer programmers, which is very illustrative for many of my blog’s readers (and possibly myself). I hope you wont illegally download using torrents. Instead, buy the material.
Also very interesting is this lecture by Daniel:
Here you can also find a Authors@Google talk by Daniel Goleman:
What distinguishes Daniel Goleman from old line proponents of positive thinking, however, is his grounding in psychology and neuroscience. Armed with a Ph.D in psychology from Harvard and a first-grade journalism background at the New York Times, Dr. Goleman has authored half a dozen books that explore the physical and chemical workings on the brain and their relationship with what we experience as everyday life.
— Peter Allen, director of Google university, introduction to Daniel Goleman. August 3, 2007
I hope readers of my blog will shun away from pseudo science when it comes to emotional and social intelligence, but instead read and learn from authors like Daniel Goleman. I also (still) recommend the books available at The Moral Brain by for example Dr. Jan Verplaetse.
violating copyright laws? what country are you living in if you cannot QUOTE a couple of words?
@xurfa: Thanks for your response. I’m referring to writing down the entire section about misconceptions, when talking about the copyright violations that I didn’t want to do. An entire section isn’t “just a couple of lines”, it spans multiple pages. The quote that I did put is also available on a website (that I’m linking to) that sells the book. I think you’re right that this quote ain’t a copyright violation, but rather fair use, so I didn’t worry about putting that in my blog article.
Not an answer to your question, but because else it’s as if I don’t want to tell people what the section is about (which isn’t the case): The misconceptions section is very interesting, I think. A lot of pseudo science is making these misconceptions, while more serious research by for example Daniel Goleman (and the guys at The Moral Brain too) clearly show that these misconceptions are just false and only add to misunderstanding human emotions. A misconception is for example that emotional intelligence means “just being nice”. Another misconception is that women are more emotionally intelligent than men. Research shows that men and women, when it comes to all of the important emotional intelligence components combined, aren’t much different in this regard. And research also shows that men and women vary a lot within their own sex: When selecting an individual men it might be that he excels in a certain emotional intellect where usually women excel, and vica versa. A lot of pseudo science also makes it all look simple while the domain is in fact incredibly complex. There are also no quickfixes like being more like women, which is what the worst pseudo science articles seem to suggest. Merely knowing about how we are emotionally wired also wont make you a sudden emotional genius. But the good news is that it’s something people of all ages can continue improving on.
I’m doing the book a disservice by trying to write it down in a blog comment here. Buy the book, read it, or listen to the audiobook. The videos that I refer to in the article don’t talk a lot about the misconceptions, but they do go to the point of what is important. Just watching those will enlighten most people too, I think.
@OldMan: please repost your comment on the right blog item. This is about emotional intelligence, not about utilitarianism.