Category Archives: Emotional Intelligence

Teachers Learn A New Trick by RedRover

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How do we go about making sure that our kids learn empathy in addition to reading, writing, and arithmetic in school? Sadly, if you talk to today’s teachers, it often gets lost in the shuffle of getting the “real” instruction done. Teachers have so much time to get the nitty-gritty done the time for learning the soft skills fall by the wayside. Yet empathy, the ability to walk in someone else’s place and truly feel what they experience, gives children a way to understand the world differently. That’s where RedRover comes in. This organization has invested in building a program that teaches empathy to third and fourth graders. Empathy Goes to The Dogs… and Cats Let’s suppose we’re part of a class. The teacher tells us that we are trying The RedRover Reading Program today. Everybody becomes involved and you… …

The Marshmallow Test

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Beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Walter Mischel pioneered work illuminating the ability to delay gratification and to exert self-control in the face of strong situational pressures and emotionally “hot” temptations. His studies with preschoolers in the late 1960s, often referred to as “the marshmallow experiment“, examined the processes and mental mechanisms that enable a young child to forego immediate gratification and to wait instead for a larger desired but delayed reward. Continuing research with these original participants has examined how preschool delay of gratification ability links to development over the life course, and may predict a variety of important outcomes (e.g., SAT scores, social and cognitive competence, educational attainment, and drug use), and can have significant protective effects against a variety of potential vulnerabilities.[4] This work also opened a route to research on temporal discounting in decision-making, and most importantly… …

Increase Your Leadership Skills by Becoming More Emotionally and Socially Literate

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GUEST BLOG: By Drs. Todd B. Kashdan and Robert Biswas-Diener In January 2010, we phoned each other after watching a PBS documentary called This Emotional Life. There was one scene where a middle-aged husband was recently fired from his job and on top of this, could barely sleep and rarely connected with his wife because of their difficulties parenting a newborn child. What does psychology have to offer to help a person dealing with so many stressors at one time? In this PBS special, a positive psychology coach taught him to keep a journal so that he could record three bits of daily appreciation. Telling someone who is experiencing hardship to be grateful may or may not be the wisest approach. There is certainly research evidence suggesting that daily gratitude can boost happiness but reframing misfortune as opportunity can also come across as invalidating and Pollyanna-ish. Isn’t there more research that could potentially have informed this particular case? We… …

Cognitive Bias: Bandwidth Bias

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Part 6 in our “Cognitive Bias and Leadership” On our January 16, 2013 blog, I gave an overview of cognitive bias (our tendency to filter information through our own past experiences, likes, and dislikes) and surmised that it can lead to judgments that are faulty.  We have been exploring how these biases affect the ability to lead and make good decisions. In the 6th in our series, I wanted to talk about Bandwidth Bias.  This is the tendency to go with the crowd.  It can also be called “groupthink” and when it turns negative, it can be a “mob mentality.”   And this can happen in groups large and small.  It can happen in your family, in your department or team at work, or across an entire culture. Why does this happen? We like to conform.  We like to fit in.  Consider the famous experiments by Solomon Asch, psychologist from the 1950s, who conducted experiments where participants were part of vision exercise where they had… …

Illusion of Control Bias and Related Leadership Snafus

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Part 5 in our “Cognitive Bias and Leadership” On our January 16, 2013 blog, I gave an overview of cognitive bias (our tendency to filter information through our own past experiences, likes, and dislikes) and surmised that it can lead to judgments that are faulty.  We have been exploring how these biases affect the ability to lead and make good decisions. In the fifth in our series, I am expanding on the Illusion of Control Bias – the tendency to overestimate your degree of influence over external events. The classic example is gambling…think someone who is convinced they have a system for choosing the right random Keno or lottery numbers. This cognitive bias is a particularly interesting bias to me because unlike other biases, this one has an interesting upside.   It can encourage people to take responsibility or to act on something they otherwise wouldn’t. Consider entrepreneurship, which requires real risk taking – the chances of… …

14 Things to Make You Happier and More Productive in 2014

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We wanted to give you something that would help make your life a little better next year.   Keep these things in mind when you are crafting your New Year’s Resolutions.   Give something away.  It makes you happier than buying something for yourself.  College students were given money to either give away or spend on themselves.  Guess which group was happier.  When we buy stuff, we always think it will make us happier, for a longer period of time, than it actually does.  Think – what did you give for the holidays versus what did you get? Give an experience.  If you are going to give something away, research shows that giving someone an experience versus a thing you can hold, makes people happier.  It also makes people happier to be with others (even if you are an introvert).  For example I gave… …

How To Stop Stewing in Your Own Juices

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Biochemically speaking, emotions have a shelf life of 90 seconds. They’re designed to be transitory. And yet, somehow when our feelings fall on the negative side (i.e. anger) we seem to get stuck in a loop that can be hard to escape. All too often, we blame these feelings on someone else, when in fact, the answer to breaking the cycle lies within. After 90 seconds, the initial flood of chemicals has completely dissipated. Dwelling on the situation that caused your feelings in the first place keeps powerful, chemicals flowing and you literally stew in your own juices. It takes a little practice, but rather than stewing, you can hit the ‘reset’ button. A Relentless Loop Road Rage offers a prime example of getting stuck in an angry loop. Remember the last person who cut you off? What ran through… …

Mindfulness Increases Your Chance of Promotion

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It appears as if social science and neuroscience are coming to the same conclusions about human behavior… at least in some instances. In a Ted Talk entitled Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are, Amy Cuddy speaks about how adjusting your posture for two minutes will change hormone levels, which will either make you more powerful or less powerful. It’s interesting, because the postures Cuddy highlights are clearly instinctive power or submissive moves. The hormones involved? Testosterone (the dominance hormone) and cortisol (the stress hormone). As people interact with one another, those hormone levels translate to body language. This has serious consequences personally and professionally. As a leader, one of the most important skills I taught my direct reports was how to interpret body language during interviews. Of course, the skill applied to all interpersonal interactions, but it was really… …

How Empathy Stacks Up As A Critical Success Factor

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With Capital Connection 2013 just around the corner, I’ve been searching for a way to report the action at MAVA‘s premier event from a perspective different from every other journalist. The big ‘aha’ moment came during the drive home today. I’ll try to assess founders’ critical success factor ratio on a single, frequently under-appreciated leadership quality: Empathy. In addition to other things, I’ll spend my time trying to intuit long-term prospects based on the level of empathy each founder appears to express during their interactions with other people—both on and off stage. Please don’t label me a crackpot just yet. The science shows that people in leadership positions who demonstrate high degrees of empathy have a greater propensity to lead rather than manage. In the startup environment, leading with empathy qualifies as a critical success factor that influences the level… …