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Book Review Pro | Karen Pool
Book Review Pro | Karen Pool
Author : Daniel Goleman
Genre : Nonfiction, Self-Help
When I worked with university and high school students, instead of asking them, “How smart are you?” I would ask, “How are you smart?”
In this book, Goleman argues that our view of human intelligence is far too marrow, ignoring a vast range of abilities that matter immensely in terms of how we do in life. Drawing on groundbreaking brain and behavioral research, he shows the factors at work when people of high IQ flounder and those of modest IQ do surprisingly well. These factors which include self-awareness and emotional control, self-discipline and impulse control, the ability to understand other people, and empathy, add up to a different way of being smart.
“To the degree that our emotions get in the way of or enhance our ability to think and plan, to pursue a distant goal, to solve problems, they define the limits of our capacity to use our innate mental abilities, and so determine how we do in life. And to the degree to which we are motivated by feelings of enthusiasm and pleasure in what we do, they propel us to accomplishment. It is in this sense that emotional intelligence is a master aptitude, a capacity that profoundly affects all other abilities, either facilitating or interfering with them.”
“Fearfulness—or any other temperament—may be part of the biological givens of our emotional lives, but we are not necessarily limited to a specific emotional menu by our inherited traits. There is a range of possibility even within genetic constraints. As behavioral geneticists observe, genes alone do not determine behavior, our environment especially what we experience and learn as we grow, shapes how we express ourselves as life unfolds. Our emotional capacities are not a given, with the right learning, they can be improved. The reasons for this lie in how the human brain matures.”
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