Review: HBR Guide to Emotional Intelligence

HBR Guide to Emotional Intelligence by Harvard Business Review
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

HBR books are really good for working professionals. I wish that the book included more case studies, like that of 'John Clendenin' from Xerox. Nevertheless there's a lot to learn, particularly if you're at the earlier stages of your career.

A must read. Given below are the major learning points for me, some quotes verbatim from the book, some my own concise remarks that condenses the learning into bullet points.

1. Of all a leader’s competencies, emotional and otherwise, self-awareness is the most important.
2. Self-awareness is not a trait you are born with but a capacity you develop throughout your lifetime. It’s your understanding of your strengths and weaknesses, your purpose in life, your values and motivations, and how and why you respond to situations in a particular way.
3. One of the techniques that is most useful in gaining deeper self-awareness is meditation.
4. Empathy and compassion have to be balanced with honesty.
5. Emotions are interpretations of feelings.
6. When you have negative feelings, slow down and pay some attention to what you are feeling and why you are feeling the way you are.
7. If you keep thinking about things that bother you, you run the risk of solving nothing while getting yourself more upset.
8. It’s been shown that when people don’t acknowledge and address their emotions, they display a lowered sense of well-being and more physical symptoms of stress, like headaches.
9. People who write about emotionally charged episodes experience a marked increase in their physical and mental well-being.
10. The key to mastering civility begins with improving your self-awareness.
11. Your emotions are your natural guidance system—and they are more effective when you don’t try to fight them.
12. Most of the time, when you’re in distress, you’re in the middle of telling yourself a story and you fully believe it. A breath can take you out of the story, making you less gullible.
13. If you acknowledge and recognize unpleasant emotions, they have less power to cause you distress.
14. While writing emails it’s better to simply state your emotions verbally than let others guess it from the overall content of the mail. Just state, “I’m thrilled” or “I’m happy”, instead of making others guess it. Coneys message regardless of the state of the mind of the recipient of the email.
15. Angry negotiators are less accurate than neutral negotiators both in recalling their own interests and in judging other parties’ interests.
16. Faking anger can create authentic feelings of anger.
17. One way to reduce the potential for regret after a negotiation is to ask questions without hesitation during the process.
18. People prefer to tell lies of omission about facts rather than lies of commission about feelings.
19. When we experience negative emotions, blood recedes from the thinking part of the brain, the cerebral cortex, and rushes to its oldest and most involuntary part, the “reptilian” stem, crippling the intake of new information.
20. We accept flattery even when we recognize it as such.
21. Most people are highly motivated to avoid a loss, which complements their desire to gain something. Hence time-bound offers work due to the FOMO.
22. Turn to tried-and-true methods for stress relief: meditation, exercise, enough sleep, and healthful eating.
23. Compassion makes the difference between understanding and caring.
24. When you’re facing criticism don’t jump to offering a reason. Let go of the need to respond. Don’t agree to disagree, just collect the data, first and foremost.
25. When hard times strike, resist any impulse to view yourself as a victim and cry, “Why me?” Rather, devise constructs about your suffering to create meaning for yourself and theirs.
26. When things go wrong in our lives, we tend to become our own worst enemy.
27. Self-compassion is closely associated with emotional resilience, including the ability to soothe ourselves, recognize our mistakes and learn from them, and motivate ourselves to succeed.
28. Self-compassion is also consistently correlated with a wide range of measures of emotional well-being such as optimism, life satisfaction, autonomy, and wisdom, and with reduced anxiety, depression, stress, and feelings of shame.
29. A learning plan is different in that it charts a direct path from the personal vision to what must be learned over time to get there—to actual skill development.


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