For many decades it has been valued that a person’s intelligence is found in their IQ score, intelligence has been summarized with numerical capacity, the capacity for abstraction, memorization,… great people have been underestimated in opportunities labor for this and value has been detracted from people who did not meet these standards. However, it has been recognized that all this time we have been making a big mistake, the human being is not a machine for memorizing or solving problems, the human being is complex and is influenced by a fundamental aspect that gives him vitality, the emotions.
Given this, the need was born among multiple authors to define the theory of emotional intelligence (EI), among them Daniel Goleman. If you want to know what emotional intelligence consists of and who was one of its founders, keep reading this article from : Daniel Goleman: biography, theory of emotional intelligence and books.
Daniel Goleman: bibliography
Who is Daniel Goleman? He is an American psychologist and writer. Below is a summary of Daniel Goleman’s biography.
Daniel Goleman was born in California, March 7, 1946in the wave of baby boomers postwar. Her parents were university professors, where her father worked as a humanities professor at the San Joaquín Delta College and her mother, a social worker, taught in the Department of Sociology at the Universidad del Pacífico.
An important fact from the biography of Daniel Goleman is that He graduated and received his PhD from Harvard. and his studies focused on the clinical development of psychology and personality. He studied in India on a scholarship. There he spent time with the spiritual teacher Neem Karoli Baba.
Although he was always a great student, Daniel Goleman acquired his worldwide fame after the publication of his book “Emotional Intelligence” in 1955. Based on the success of the theory on emotional intelligence, he later wrote the second part of the book, on social intelligence.
In addition to these achievements, another important fact in Daniel Goleman’s biography is that he was working at the newspaper “The New York Times”, as editor of the behavioral and brain sciences section and at the same time, editor of the magazine “Psychology Today”, in addition to giving classes and conferences at Harvard University.
Currently, the author works as co-president of the Research Consortium on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations, located at Rutgers University, in the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology, whose university promotes his research to achieve greater effectiveness. in organizations in reference to emotional intelligence.
On the other hand, he was co-founder at Yale University of the “Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL)”, with the aim of introducing emotional literacy courses in different schools, that is, learning to communicate emotions.
Thanks to his achievements, Daniel Goleman has obtained great awards, such as two Pulitzer Prize nominations and has received numerous awards in recognition of her findings in research and dissemination, as well as a career in journalism with the American Psychological Association (APA).
On a personal level, he is married to Tara Bennett-Goleman.
Daniel Goleman and the theory of emotional intelligence
Before the development of EI theory, a person’s intellectual abilities were valued. For example, to occupy a workplace, through the , however, it was estimated that IQ was not a predictor of as much success as could be expected, since a high IQ did not guarantee success in the life. Furthermore, society advanced, giving rise to the contemporary world, characterized by its speed of change in different areas such as economic, technological, social, environmental,… whose changes required certain skills and behaviors that were not necessary decades ago and that a high coefficient intellectual did not represent the improvement of said abilities.
Given this, In 1990, a great interest in emotional intelligence arose.l, because it was considered that something more than a high IQ was necessary to be able to deal with different emotional problems, such as controlling one’s own emotions and those expressed by others. Salovey and Mayer, two North American psychologists, were the first to use the term EI, which led to numerous researchers directing their efforts in defining said construct, among others: Daniel Goleman.
Theory of emotional intelligence
The first approaches to emotional intelligence defined it as the ability to manage emotions and feelings own, as well as learn to discriminate them and use said knowledge to confront one’s own thoughts and actions. However, after several reviews, all authors consider EI as the following skill set:
- Accurately perceive, value and express emotion.
- Access and/or generate feelings when they facilitate thoughts.
- Understanding emotion and emotional knowledge.
- Regulate emotions to promote emotional and intellectual growth.
In addition to the general consideration of the construct of emotional intelligence, we must keep in mind that this construct gives rise to the development of different emotional competencies, about which D. Goleman distinguishes two skill groups:
- Personal intelligence: This classification integrates the competencies that refer to the way we relate to ourselves, where we can find skills on self-control, self-motivation and/or self-knowledge.
- Interpersonal intelligence: Interpersonal intelligence integrates competencies in reference to the way we relate to others. In this group we can find empathy.
Components of emotional intelligence
- Self-control: Self-control competence allows us to be aware of the relationship between our emotions, thoughts and behaviors, emotional expression and the underlying ability to control emotions. On the other hand, it allows us to have coping skills for them and the ability to self-manage emotions. In short, they allow us to have the ability to master our emotions and not let ourselves be blindly carried away by them, knowing how to highlight the factors that we can take advantage of and be aware of which are transcendental and which are temporary.
- Self-motivation: people tend to put their motivation in external factors, in rewards or validations, which is why it is very important to know how to motivate ourselves in the face of the challenges and objectives that we set for ourselves, which will prevent us from falling into the common mistake of focusing our attention on the fears or possible failure.
- Self-awareness: this competence refers to the ability to be aware of one’s own emotions, being able to define and classify them, giving them names and observing the degree to which they influence us. The development of this skill allows us to understand how the emotions we feel affect our mood, which influences our behavior.
- Empathy: developing emotional intelligence should not focus solely on understanding one’s own emotions, as it is essential to establish interpersonal relationships and understand the emotions of others, which is achieved through empathy. Recognition of the emotions of others, whether expressed verbally or through gestures or reactions, will help us create more intimate and healthy emotional bonds.
- Social skills: to maintain good performance in social relationships, understanding the emotions that others feel is not a sufficient resource, since it is important to know how to communicate and have a good relationship with others, which is achieved through the development of skills social. To know the level of development of these, you can carry out a .
Importance of emotional intelligence
If we stop to think about our lives, big decisions or our actions are largely mediated by our emotions, which is why Our emotions have great importance in our lives. And therefore, it is essential to have good control over our emotions, since EI is considered to be an essential factor in prevention and both personal and social development, playing a basic competence in our lives. To know the development of EI itself, you can do the .
Daniel Goleman: books
Throughout Daniel Goleman’s professional career we can find great books, some of the most representative of which are the following:
- Emotional Intelligence (nineteen ninety five)
- The practice of emotional intelligence (1998)
- Destructive emotions (2002)
- Social intelligence: the new science of human relationships (2006)
- Focus: develop attention to achieve excellence (2013)
- Leadership: the power of emotional intelligence (2014)
- Emotional intelligence in the company (2018)
- The blind spot (2019)
Daniel Goleman: phrases
On the other hand, Goleman has left us great famous phrases that lead us to reflect on the importance of emotions in our lives. Some of the most relevant phrases by Daniel Goleman are the following:
- Intense negative emotions absorb all of the individual’s attention, hindering any attempt to pay attention to anything else.
- In a very real sense, all of us have two minds, a thinking mind and a feeling mind, and these two fundamental forms of knowing interact to construct our mental life.
- Self-deception operates both at the level of the individual mind and at the collective level.
- Real achievement depends not so much on talent as on the ability to keep going despite failures.
- Emotions affect our attention and our performance.
- Self-mastery requires self-awareness plus self-regulation, key components of emotional intelligence.
- Looking directly into the eyes opens the door to empathy.
- If there are two moral attitudes that our time urgently needs, they are self-control and altruism.
This article is merely informative, at Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.
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Bibliography
- Berrocal, PF, & Pacheco, NE (2005). Emotional Intelligence and the education of emotions from the Mayer and Salovey Model. Interuniversity Journal of Teacher Training, 19(3), 63-93.
- Goleman, D. (2018). Emotional intelligence. Kairos Editorial.
- Howell, T.J. (2014). Daniel Goleman–Emotional Intelligence. Instructor.
- Salovey, P., & Mayer, J. (1990). Emotional intelligence. Imagination, Knowledge and Personality, 9(3), 185-211.
- Trujillo Flores, M….